The blind spot

What you are describing is what I have nailed as a type of “suicide,” or “homicide!” When I blank out, reject, refuse to deal with, all of which is a sort of “letting it die,” it is a red flag to my conscience. If this is such a terrible matter that I take pains to avoid it, either I should bury it forever (killing) or quit doing what I am doing (suicide.) I have several paintings sitting within eyesight right now which I have allowed to be sick for a long time, maybe hoping they will self-destruct and save me some angst. One of them is a commission half done. Yikes. It’s already someone else’s, and they are waiting. I can’t kill this. Money down is money down. I long ago decided not to go the suicide route (I am way too curious to miss tomorrow), and so I shall have to just confront the hard part. What drives me nuts is that it’s the eyes…and eyes are usually good for me. What is it about this painting that is not-eye-like? I’m glad you hit the nail on the head, Richard. Moves me off square one. Curious to know what your “jerk” was thinking at that gathering. Was he avoiding you? :)

Ah yes, the blind spot. Very familiar with it. I find an easy solution is to always strive to work all over the canvas in unison. Bringing up the painting with equal concentration to form, color and value encourages a healthy objective approach. It helps to avoid developing one area only to find other areas in the painting are underdeveloped and when you finally get around to working on these other areas the relationship to the first area of concentration is affected and must be changed. When too much time and work is invested into one area, one is probably reluctant to make changes and the whole painting looks disjointed. This is a self defeating way of painting and very rarely produces good results. The “blind spot” prevents us from “seeing” the problem because we don’t really want to see it and the entire painting suffers.

Blind spot? Not at all … those places on my canvas glare at me with demanding insistence. We normally are not blind to trouble spots – we simply would rather paint the easier places. Some elements of a painting are more fun to do and others we labor over. The harder areas may be held at bay for awhile but eventually you have to confront the bugger and fix the painting or abandon it … and sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

I am occasionally so oblivious to the blind spot that I never see it until it is pointed out to me and when it does, it hits me like being trapped in an avalanche of awareness. And the weight of that blind spot becomes so overwhelming that I cannot live with myself or ‘it’, until I paint it out.

I agree that we view or works through a personal filter. I have struggled with this and even wrote you earlier this year about the same situation. The term I used to describe this was “Maker’s Blinders”. I have run into this in both painting and photography. I’m a member of a photo club where judging is conducted frequently. Many times a judge will key in on some detracting aspects of an image that the maker had subconciously filtered out of their view. Current digital photography can have many creative similarities to painting considering the ability of an image to be modified through digital processing techniques. In my attempts to overcome the blind spots, there are a few things that can be done. Set the work aside for a period then revisit it with fresh eyes. Try to look at the whole piece not just the portion you get the most pleasure from. Try to imagine what others might key in on. Try to look at it with a critical eye. If you have a friend that can provide objective feedback they can often alert you to something you are not sensitive to. Some people say looking at a piece in a mirror can reveal things you have come to ignore. In the case of a photo image sometimes looking at in a reduced size allows it to be seen differently. This same thing can be done if you take a photo of a painting. Look at the image on a computer screen in different sizes. I believe the ‘blind spot’ phenomenon is a human weakness. It cannot be overcome without firstly realizing how our emotions create a selective visual filter then secondly taking concious actions to counteract it.

Have another Scotch, and eventually the blind spots go away.

Why is it so easy to spot others mistakes but not our own????

Yes, we need to deal constantly with our “personal filter”, as Robert Bourke points out. A neutral, detached objective view of what’s going on in our work is key. Looking at the piece in a mirror, in different lighting (inside, outside, in another room) works for me. Then, when I discover the “blind spot”, I feel a “Duh” moment, as it suddenly becomes obvious.

I agree with Jeanean Martin above, we should get into the habit of painting all of the painting, all of the time. This is what I preach when I teach. If one area of you canvas is becoming more developed than the rest or if one area is underdeveloped you know you are heading into a blind spot. Instead work your paint brush through all the quadrants of the canvas this practice also solves the unification problem as well.

Dear Robert, I got invited to my high school reunion a few years ago. I responded by telling them I was “deceased”. I told my friends about it and they all encouraged me to go to this reunion. Imagine if you will, 1980, in Calgary, being gay with the last name FERRIE! I didn’t have a chance back then and I didn’t care to relive it today. I was teased and beaten, tormented and picked on. The word FAGGOT was spray painted on my locker and it remained there for three months. Bullies and mean girls grow up to be bullies and mean girls. People don’t change! As my art career has had some notoriety and I have done TV and radio interviews, I suppose people might remember me from those harrowing days. They don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call me. “See any of the old gang?” they say…I’m like, “what gang?” I hung out with the janitor who drank Kahlua out of his thermos. When it comes to painting, we all have our blind spots. They are usually the area of the painting we are looking forward to the least. And usually, this is the last area we want to paint. As a painting moves forward, we see or don’t see this area. When it finally comes to this part where we don’t have a clue what to do, it stirs something in our creative juices. Painting beyond what we know is a sign of true creativity. In my case, this is where something magic happens and I paint something that turns out really cool. What was the part I was dreading the most, is the part I enjoy the most when it is all said and done. BTW, I don’t tolerate bullies for one second in my adult life. Blind sided or not… John Ferrie

The post from John Ferrie made me laugh-out-loud! But he’s right. Don’t tolerate bullies or anyone who points out “blind spots”. Most of the time it’s just not obvious to anyone but the artist. And we meant to put it there, right?

A great teacher told me time and again…”work the entire picture equally with each pass”. When I work this way, I avoid the elephants. They get swept up in the process of revealing the painting.

Your last letter “The Blind Spot” made me laugh so hard, it put me into a good mood for the rest of the day! now I know why you have such a large following! I also love your paintings [ without the blind spots of course].

Your closing lines here made me laugh out loud as I have had blind spots in my paintings over the years. Some paintings just don’t work out and when I first started to paint I always tried to fix them and use them as a learning process. The older I get the more I just want to paint for fun as well as to make works of art. After all what fun is working on the same bad painting day after day and ending up with a muddy mess. I should mention that I work in WC rather than oil or acrylic which would be easier to correct. How freeing it is to look at a pile of those looser paintings and say goodbye…and go on to something new. I always think of the song “You got to know hold em, know when to fold them, know when to walk away when the day is done…” Some can be fixed and some just take time away from moving on to making a wonderful new painting.

The majority of my paintings are done plein air in one sitting. So those blind spots don’t always get noticed when I am racing the sun and changing shadows. One trick that works for me in spotting them is to sit my paintings right in the busiest part of my home. This happens to be right next to my large roll-top desk that holds my computer. I find that as I am doing other things, such as talking on the phone or waiting for photos to upload on my computer, I often will be subconsciously making evaluations of the paintings sitting beside my desk. I have learned to pay attention to those little inklings because they normally turn out to be spot on, as to what I need to do to bring the painting up to a higher level. Sometimes I can’t even put my figure on what exactly bothers me about an area, but I know I need to deal with it before the painting is released to the public. In reverse, sometimes I fall more in love with a painting as it sits there and those pieces turn out to be some of my strongest pieces.

I have been receiving your letters for more than a year and enjoy them more today than when they began. I can only hope you get half as much as you give. Invariably your art messages become metaphors that are incorporated into my life.

I find that when I cease to be able to see the problems in a painting, viewing its image reversed in a mirror helps me to see it as if for the first time. Of course, sometimes the dynamics are different because of habitual left-to-right patterns of eye movement, but reversing it breaks the habits I had established during the process of painting it, and surprises me out of my acceptance of its faults. It also helps to photograph it and view it on my computer, as that somehow gives me some ‘distance’.

You are so right about blind spots although to me they are spots that look wrong and I haven’t got a clue how to fix them. And, having another artist look helps, but having a really honest and truthful friend or relative look. They can often spot the problem…………not solve it but point it out. The other trick for me, as you mentioned, is to wait three days and keep the work hidden and then early morning put it up and back away to look and sometimes it pops out. One other solution I’ve found if background or foreground is the problem, and I know many others have as well, is to leave parts of the canvas blank, feathering off the main or important image to nothing. However it is hard to do that in the middle of the work. A complaint I have about some of my work is “just making do” usually for a time constraint. Is that giving up? Thank you for your descriptive and often humorous writing that I look forward to twice a week.

Sometimes, the whole thing just isn’t recoverable. Sometimes, you just have to take your biggest brush and slather fresh paint all over the old stuff, and start anew. Surprisingly, there’s an odd feeling associated with knowing that underneath a spectacular, successful painting, is a whole other painting which was the pits! It’s very satisfying somehow. You should try it. At least you should try it before changing careers!

Isn’t it amazing how effective a shot of “Scotch” or in my case a glass of wine; will bring you back to reality and your get your eye sight back of what you were doing wrong on your painting. We all are plagued with selective seeing and hearing.

For me, it’s not so much blind spots as avoidance of what I find daunting (usually the foreground or anything involving detail). An astute teacher noticed this tendency, and gave me a directive for the remainder of the workshop: “start with what you fear most.” My training is to work the whole painting but you do have to start somewhere.

We all have blind spots don’t we. My husband is a politician and a great guy…he has always enjoyed helping people and his creative side is writing poetry. If he wasn’t good at what he did he would probably become an artist! “My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.” Jack Layton

I always have had an area that I found more difficult to paint and this letter put a name on it. Keep up the good work.

It’s those blurry elephants in the middle of the room that get me stumped sometimes. I often see the wood but have difficulty with the trees. Can you please send Joe Blodgett to me for a short holiday?

I am an ex pat American who lives and paints on Waiheke Island off the coast of Auckland, New Zealand. The twice weekly letters help me stay connected and ponder some pretty interesting essays.

Thanks for this. I find I, too, easily develop blind spots about my paintings. To combat this, I’ll turn the painting sideways or upside down and work on it for awhile. It also helps me to put my painting on a wall and step far away from it. (I’m typically painting on 9×12 watercolour blocks, so it’s never anything big.) There’s sort of a built-in factor in watercolour that you have to sometimes let something dry and go work on something else for awhile. Taking a break always seems to help.

“There’s times when you just have to stop thinking about it and just paint…for the fun of it!”

I’m a body painter; so my blind spot can literally turn around on me. Some body paintings are meant to be seen and photographed from one POV only; others are meant to move with the body in a wraparound fashion. I’m grateful for this article because it helped me put a finger on a problem I had with my last painting. I’m still so new at this, I’m more interested in the learning process than the outcome, but I do want to develop a portfolio of different approaches to body painting. Something I learned from a wonderful teacher, Sabina Yates of Benicia, CA: Look at your art in a mirror, or upside down. Errors in composition or rendering will be starkly apparent when expectations are out of the way. I’ve been known to bend over from the hips and look upside down at a piece of art from between my knees. I don’t know if it actually improved my art but it changed my perspective and gave me a good spinal stretch…! ;-)

I have experienced on a regular basis the `blind spot`syndrome`. I also have the other one which is `falling in love with an area` that keeps me from advancing in the painting. I have been painting and exhibiting for many years and this is still happening. Nevertheless knowing it is part of the solution.

Maybe some of those blind spots need to be left as empty spots to create those mysteries and paucity you mentioned in your excellent recent letters. Thanks for the insights. Always brilliant and very useful.

Right now, I feel like I belong in the category of “one gigantic blind spot.” I do believe we all already have our own answers but need each other to bring it out as we open our minds to the splendor within and without. I will accept and be as patient as I can, knowing that this too shall pass. Have you ever thought of having a place on the Painter’s Keys website where artists could post images and be critiqued by others? Maybe it is too labor intensive. I think it would be great. It would be nice to have an outside opinion.

The confident painter knows when to leave well enough alone–for a while.

Funny–U should mention -how the eye follows certain spots as one paints——with me it is the lips that move sort of in a– licking-way—– fashion as I paint– but do not realize it!!! Perhaps it goes back to the old days when I painted in oils–used 2 like the smell of them –& sometimes the painting turned out so well- I could almost taste it!!! Excellent letters—but– what exactly do U mean –are the blind spots??? I work all over the canvas–go 2 whatever area I see needs doing! When I find a painting misses something– it’s usually the –mystery –of it–or it needs another subject added. thanks mars.

But don’t allow the trees to obscure the forest…let the magic happen and the joy flow.