David R. Godine, Publisher (2022)
I have long suspected that artists’ eyes simply don’t work like other people’s eyes do. As an old art history major, I’ve spent a lot of years as (in Perry’s words) a “museum junkie,” looking and looking and thinking and savoring or hating a lot of art, but I don’t have much of a hands-on, working-artist’s sense of what do they SEE and how they think about it. Lincoln Perry sets out to explain it, and what a delightful, interesting trip it is. It didn’t hurt that he starts out as an irreligious soul transfixed by a wondrous Bellini painting of St Francis, and that I am an anti-religious soul a little in love with St Francis, and his town, and his basilica, and his hermitage in the forest. Perry explores his own epiphanies with multiple works of art as a young man traversing Europe in an old VW bus, scouring museums, churches, cathedrals, monasteries and monuments for art to look at, all kinds of it, and a glorious moment on edge of an Umbrian bluff, deciding HE needed to make art himself.
He shows us paintings and sculptures. He points out how pictures are constructed, of planes and distances and illusions. How colors bring and enhance meanings and significance. How shapes and forms and lines create rhythms and lead your eye inescapably to what the artist wants you to see. He and a friend are delighted to find that a modern abstract painting, a smashed piƱata of colors and lines, has a fabulous kinship with a 16th century German battle scene, and he shares their conversation with the reader.
The wry and funny Sex and Subtext chapter will open your eyes to (ahem) “holes and poles,” and yeah, now that you mention it, they’re everywhere! In sculpture, he discusses the dichotomy between a “subtractive” approach (think Michelangelo cutting away marble to reveal the form within the block) and an “additive” approach – layering clay upon a framework – and the differing results. This is not a “how-to” manual by any stretch, but Perry shows us how an artist might consider whether to use a color to model a form from it, or to keep it flat, or how a dark color suggests a hole and a bright color pops out at you. He studies all this, to learn – and teach us – how the planes of a landscape can suggest space, or entrapment, or instability, or an in-your-face shout.
I often complain about art books that have no, or too few, or poor quality, illustrations. It’s frustrating (okay, annoying…) to try to understand a piece of visual art if you can’t actually look at it. Perry has a neat solution: the illustrations in this book are mostly his own black-and-white sketches – sometimes with notes – of the works he is talking about. It works nicely to demonstrate the elements that caught his attention, and how they’re used to accomplish the artist’s aims. He also, kindly, has posted on his website color images of the original works of art to accompany the text, saving us from having to google them up ourselves. He has not, unfortunately, included an index in the book, so you’ll need to read or skim attentively to see if he talks about a favorite artwork of yours.
The art he shows us runs the gamut from classical Italian Renaissance paintings, Rodin sculptures, ancient Greek marbles, the marvelously theatrical wooden dioramas mounted in obscure churches in northern Italy, to modern sculptures, and some of his own riotous and saturated industrial-strength murals. Some are famous, some are not, some – like the Lamentation by Pontormo posted above – knocked me right out with eerie splendor, and others are dissected and shown to me in a way that made me see them in a new light altogether. What a grand tour. I thank Lincoln Perry for taking me along.