Wendy Coutau

ICM, Prof Nancy Lewis

11/07/05

Clustering a picture

I was born cross-eyed. My parents couldn’t bear me having this handicap for the rest of my new life. I was operated on twice, at the age of three and four. Along with the surgeries, a few side effects came such as the receptors in my eyes deciding to omit parts of the horizon, wearing eye-patches, glasses, dyslexia, and more. It took me about ten years to get on par with my supposed reading skills, though I still can’t skim read, and, another seven years to actually enjoy reading. But the major problem that resulted from this is a phobia I developed. I am afraid of loosing my sight. Just the thought of not being able to see things or people, my environment frightens me beyond belief. I think that is partly why I can’t wear baseball caps and hats that block a large part of my field of vision – because I can’t see what I’m supposed to and want I want. It has also generated in me a passion for visuals: pictures, photos, a painting, a collage, a sculpture, anything that can be visually appreciated. This is where my cluster begins: a picture.

First, a subject must be found. Beauty is subjective. Anything can be beautiful or worth immortalizing. A subject can range from a landscape to a close-up of nature, animals, or any inanimate object. We all draw our inspiration from what we know and what we are comfortable with: our past and our surroundings. A picture or an image is a personal representation of the chosen subject. Artists like Degas and Dali represented the world as they saw it. The relation between the subject and its surroundings becomes the narrative. This is where the picture or image is born. A narrative is part of the backbone of the image and neither can do without the other. We constantly analyze objects and people with their environment or situation to learn and understand our own environment through observation- an observation done in the mind on the image of what we see. A visual feed enters our mind daily.

Once we have a subject and a narrative, we piece together the composition, the layout of the representation. This is also key because the composition reveals information about our interpretation, the artist’s relationship to the subject. Composition is entirely subjective as well. The notion of distance and spread is based on egocentrism, I believe. I mean that if the center of the image is the center of our being, the eye is attracted to the center of the image and then goes to scan the rest, therefore the most important object or subject will go to, or as close to the center of the picture. The next step is the physical labor, starting with the selection of appropriate tools and the medium such as a pencil, charcoal, paper, ink, digital workspace, etc… The medium is very important in order to be the best support for the representation.

My last strong point is chaos and rebirth. I find that the process through which the image goes through in the artist’s mind is tremendously important. The visual picture goes into the mind nad gets deconstructed, decomposed gently. The artist creates chaos in the image to only give it a new life in his or her mind, rebirthing it into a representation.