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the Picture Plane

Railing Against It

September 19, 2011
Pictorial Space, Railing Against It, the Picture Plane
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Eric Ravilious: 'Train Landscape', 1939. Watercolour on Paper

“That idea you came up with was a meerkat holding a table, but I can’t draw meerkats, so I thought about a pig wearing a hat…or, maybe a turkey”

An earlier train than usual. I am greeted as I board, by a beaming businessman, in a very fine suit with two quarter bottles of white wine on the table in front of him. He has drunk one and is starting on the other; the world looks good.

Trapped in my narrow 2 seat bay, I realise that everything this side of the picture plane is shiny, the seat backs, from this position all seat coverings are more or less hidden the ceiling, the window glazing, light fittings etc. Apart from my fellow passengers in their dark suiting and white shirts, the interior is reflective and reflected in the picture plane/ window. Texture and colour is banished behind the glass, we are in a world of restricted palette, greys, off whites, usually a purple upholstery (depending on the rolling stock), a cold fluorescent lighting and dark clothing, these commuters for the City are not even given to brightly coloured ties.

There are two aspects about the picture plane to consider here.

1. The internal picture plane within a work, Ravilious is evidently aware of this, framing the view as a ‘landscape’

2. The picture plane seen from an angle, rather than the perpendicular. Notice that both Eric and Tirzah appear to actually locate their internal landscape as parallel to the picture plane, despite the angle of the presumed viewer. Incidentally, a painting by Hopper: ‘Compartment C, Car 193’ from 1938, locates the both viewer and the landscape at the same acute angle.

Edward Hopper: 'compartment C, Car, 193'. 1938 oil on canvas

One of the platforms we stop at is full of young men in sportswear, thin bony men with short hair. Nothing unusual in that, except that they are all appear to be  Eastern European and with bundles of fishing rods.

The horizontal blur in the foreground effectively flattens pictorial space and makes the picture plane (the grubby, greasy double glazed window) more evident. But there is a tension, the reflections, mostly obvious in darker passages, create a foreground depth. An angular, octagonal space, bounded by the reflection of the reflective, greasy grubby glass on the far side of the carriage. This all makes for a contested foreground.

Beyond that, a mid ground whose tonal contrasts are simplified by the glass. A mid ground that, in this often rural area of Kent and at this time of year, tends to feature ploughed fields and full apple orchards. Those agricultural features run at right angles to the tracks, in the early evening light the shadows lay out the ground plane, accentuating the plough lines and structuring the quasi fictive landscape in a series of horizontals and verticals. Poussin/ Claude, calm and gridded; mannered. The succeeding hedges in neat patterns on flat lands running up to the Downs and a blue stained horizon. It is the landscape around Het Steen.

Rome: Pictorial Space and the Albertian window

August 12, 2011
Alberti, Churches in Rome, Pictorial Space, the Picture Plane
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Thinking about the Albertian notion of the picture plane as a window frame, I have been looking from my window here. I am staying on the 5th floor (100 steps and no lift) of a block in the Centro Storico. It is difficult to tell the age of the building. I would think the façade is probably 18th, might be 17th, Century. But the maze of intersecting buildings it covers could be much, much older.

The point is, that these arrangements, still on a mediaeval street pattern, hold a familiar form and what do I see from my window? I see stories, many other windows randomly arranged with different lives, all autonomous, all operating in their own complex spaces, all with their own ‘agency’.

There is for example, as there always is in these built up ancient centres where people live as they have done for centuries, a child screaming; there is always a child screaming somewhere. In this case, I can see him in a window across a little piazza to my right, about 2 storeys down. I can see bunk beds and a tiny head just reaching up to the window ledge. The screaming has stopped, he, (and it has to be a he) raises his arm above his head so it can clear the open  window frame and throws a toy out into the world- through his own picture plane to land in an unknown, inaccessible world below.

To my left is a church that proclaims strong missionary connections on a board outside the doors. One of the transepts has an altana (roof terrace) I have seen young priests hanging out their washing sometimes. This evening a man in a white T shirt is jogging on a running machine. The machine faces the wall, not the view of the Roman sky line and a striking, setting sun.

There is shouting opposite, the errant boy disappears suddenly and an enormous woman wearing vast black underwear fills the entire open window, her bra bulges ominously as she leans out of the window to look down. She does not pierce her picture plane so much as grow through it, the giant cupolas of her undergarments jostling for space with a small fleshy head. More rapid shouting, down in the piazza old women, sitting on the inevitable white plastic chairs, give helpful advice. This is almost exactly the scene you can see in Canaletto’s ‘The Stonemasons’ Yard’

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/canaletto-the-stonemasons-yard

On the first floor of a building, left hand side of that painting, you can see an identical, though slightly thinner, woman leaning out a window to shout at children below.

Narratives in windows, seen through an open window frame written on Windows 2010.

If I leave the window and step out onto my altana, (a rather grand term for a scrubby bit of roof with 32 pots of dying shrubs and geraniums) from this rather small and sad space I can see the dome of San Andrea della Valle; the church where Puccinni set the first act of Tosca. Turning the other way, I can just see the top of San Pietro in Montorio, on top of the Janiculum Hill. To see either, you have to look through a thicket of TV aerials and satellite dishes and inventive arrangements of cables to connect them and stop the things blowing down. I suppose they provide our current open windows on the world.