I am Getting Smaller
When you look at the photograph of the stack of pipes do you believe what you see? The pipes look like tubes with one end much larger than the other. This is the perspective phenomenon. You do not believe what you see, a stack of tapered pipes. You believe, as I do, that the pipes are the SAME SIZE from one end to the other. They are consistent and their sizes are constant, despite how they appear.
A former student of mine at Purchase College, wrote in an email to me after reading my article “Hit with a brick: The teachings of Hoyt L. Sherman” that appeared in Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013. Unfortunately, I lost the student’s name and date of the exchange, due to my old computer’s death and a consequential loss of files. (If the student per chance reads this postscript and contacts me, then I will gladly correct the record).
Here is what the student wrote:
“Your article reminded me of an exchange we had at Purchase. I was a senior, and I was helping to hang some of your Drawing students' work in the hall. You headed down to the front office for a meeting, and when you were about 50 feet away, you yelled back ‘notice how I'm getting smaller!’ In the context of hanging a wall full of freshman Drawing assignments, I just thought of this as a little refresher on the diminution of objects via perspective. In the years since school, I've held on to that exchange as an elegant little reminder to actively see, and to not allow preconceptions to cloud actual perceptual information. Your article really helped me to correct a lot of issues I’ve been having in the studio, so thanks!”
The remarks reminded me of size constancy. The size-constancy principle is at work when the viewer assumes the constancy of the size (in this case the actual size of the author at 6’) and projects “distance” to account for the size change they see. In other words, when you see your friend down the hall, you assume your friend has remained the same size since your last meeting, and then reason because your friend now looks smaller is because your friend is farther away. All humans learn size-constancy.
Babies delight in the hide-and-seek, peek-a-boo game because they have not learned that what they are seeing is constant, and things do not disappear and reappear at random. We all learn that people, places, and things tend to remain constant even though the world does not look that way.
When beginning student try to draw and paint, the size-constancy experience raise its head and wants the student to make things the size they KNOW, not the size they SEE. Size constancy always gets in the way, until students learn to use it by kinesthetically controlling the size of the shapes they make. Size constancy is a basic principle governing linear perspective drawing: Similar size-shaped forms, like railroad tracks, telephone poles, or stacks of pipes for example, appear SMALLER as they go FARTHER AWAY from viewers.
NOTES:
For more about constancy and the visual cues see STUDIO SEEING, Chapter 3.
I considered this topic and other perceptual ideas in my article, “Michael Torlen on John Torreano,” painters_on_paintings, August 24, 2018, https://paintersonpaintings.com/michael-torlen-john-torreano/