Object-Directed vs. Ground-Directed

Roy Lichtenstein talked about ground-directed seeing in his first interview, in an ART News article titled, “What is Pop Art,” in 1963. The interviewer, G.R. Swenson, was more interested in the artist’s Pop Art than he was in exploring the question of what Lichtenstein meant by “ground-directed” seeing.

Although I wasn’t there, and I never had the opportunity to ask Lichtenstein what he meant, I do know that Lichtenstein credited Hoyt Sherman with the man who taught him how to see. In the article, Lichtenstein said “The ideas of Prof. Hoyt Sherman [at Ohio State University] on perception were my earliest important influence and still affect my ideas of visual unity.”

I also studied at OSU with Sherman and have spent my career continuing to articulate and make clear what I understand about visual perception and the creative process. I wrote about what I heard Sherman say, and what he wrote in his three journals, in my article “Hit with a brick: The teachings of Hoyt L. Sherman,” published in Intellect Book’s journal, Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 2013.

Object-directed seeing is our everyday, functional seeing. Ground-directed seeing shifts attention from parts to wholes and from figure to ground. Sherman named these two modes of seeing “customary perception” and “aesthetic perception.”

Read more about these two modes of seeing in STUDIO SEEING.

NOTES:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263340526_Hit_with_a_brick_The_teachings_of_Hoyt_L_Sherman

https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/top-ten-artnews-stories-the-first-word-on-pop-183/