Making an aesthetic impression on someone is not as easy as making just any impression on him with an image. Advertizers turn a figure upside down or flatten it or show it out of context, and so on. That will make you look. If the ad is a good one it will make you associate a product with the funny picture.
But the artist isn�t trying to sell any product. He only wants you to look and then, not buy but contemplate, reflect on his picture. (He may want you to buy his picture too, of course, but he is really selling what�s in the picture, which you get when you buy the canvas.)
Like advertizement, a picture must be novel to draw attention. Nowadays more than ever a picture has to be loud-mouthed to make us look.
In order to achieve that novelty with the image of anything you have to get to know it well. Of the general public nothing more is asked than that they have a nodding acquaintance with the way things look in this world. But the artist, in order to copy and transform those images, must really know them. If he uses only the conventional abbreviations for them he won�t be able to express more than their conventional meaning. He will never be able to say anything either original or complex.
So he needs to go deeper into that image. How does he get to know it well? By drawing it, by trying to copy it. From front, from back, from top, from bottom he looks at it for the first time, and his drawing is a record of what he saw. There is no substitute for drawing it. A photograph is not a record of what he saw, nor of what anyone saw�or rather, it is not a record of what anyone learned, it is not proof that he knows. Only a drawing�the record of your effort to render what you see�certifies that you saw.
In general, what you can�t remember didn�t make much of an impression on you. And what you can�t render, put into your own terms, you did not learn. Someone knows about a happening what he can tell you about it; and he knows about the image of anything what he can draw of it for you. From memory.
Drawing is itself a convention and many men know their object well who aren�t familiar with the trick of pencil on paper. Many an observant farmer knows his animals and knows their shape. No one says the artist is the only one who knows the objects or their image. But the artist is the one whose means is exclusively the image and who with that image alone wants to make a point.
So the artist has to know the image so intimately that he can draw it accurately from memory. He has observed closely and he has become expert at rendering what he has observed. The question was: why should he copy the image of anything? The answer: to get to know it. To get away from the stereotypes and conventions about it, which are dead coin.
Actually, this is all the other way round: the artist is struck by something beautiful in the image and tries to get that beautiful something on paper. The difference between the man who knows simply and the writer, painter, sculptor is that these artists want to tell what they know and they want that telling to go down on record; to be recorded to last.
Life-likeness
This does not mean that you merely imitate what you see, even if you consider what you see�a face, a sunset�beautiful. That is not enough. You must make sure that the other person sees the beauty you see. To do that, you have to change reality: exaggerate here, simplify there, add something for balance, eliminate what is meaningless or superfluous in your picture.
If you were to reproduce your subject exactly, the person looking at your picture might admire your skill�your �realism��but he would not know what you mean; your picture would really be a failure because you were not able to make the other man perceive�feel�what you did, even though you showed him the same sight.
No artist has ever considered that his duty was to merely imitate. That is the job of the wax-museum craftsman. No; the artist�s aim is to suggest life, to make life suggestive. He uses a picture the same way you use words: to get a message, an idea, into another man�s head or another man�s heart.
Showing life, for instance depicting vitality, will not yet do the trick. A picture of a horse running does not make much of an impression, for some reason. Or rather, seeing all the strain and flexing muscles, you are more apt to recall fatigue and breathlessness than vigor. The same goes for most figures in motion. You see them using up their energy. That is the way life is; nature is like that; but your message was something else. So you failed.
Even if to some artist life were vitality, power, it would not be power being exerted.
The secret of art is in the moment it catches, which is not the moment of the action itself but the one before or after the action. It is life in potentia. This is how it draws the imagination of the spectator into the picture.
Your bad artist will show the executioner in the act of stabbing the Saint. The better artist would paint him about to draw his sword or rolling up his sleeves at the block. This is only logical, after all. It was not the artist�s aim to show the cutting off of a head, but the courage and dignity of the Saint. The action itself�the deed itself�is not the subject of a picture anymore than it is the subject of a play. You have to think hard to remember just how Hamlet did finally kill his step-father. The subject of a picture might well be what men did�a battle, a wedding�but the aim of the picture will always be to show how they did it.
It should strike anyone that the central figure of any great statue or sculptural group is rarely doing anything. There may be accessory �action� figures, though even they are surely caught at a moment of rest�between hammer-strokes or with the laundry already wrung in their hands. The artist does not mean to show the action itself but does want to suggest movement. In order to remind you of life he must make you imagine that his figure can move�that it just did or will.
How Is the Illusion Achieved?
The artist has to be an expert on the articulation of an object: its joints, its axes. He observes how this swivels, how that bends and folds. His figure may actually be rather stiff but everywhere it will give the impression that it can move. The folds of drapery may coil at a joint like a spring; one arm may lift while the other seems to be about to fall; the head may be turned right while the eyes look left, as if about to pull the head after.
There are traditional poses which the ancients found suggestive: an imbalance in the shoulders and hips reminding one of a scales temporarily loaded on one side. Another way is to prepare the way in front of an object or limb that might move�lay out the track by clearing away folds, for instance. Let the eye imagine how it would move or fall, how easy it would be to do so.
In a portrait one hand of the sitter might clutch the arm of his chair while the other relaxes. Since our eye, which seeks to balance, naturally compares the two hands, each of them can be imagined doing or just about to do what the other is doing.
There are shapes that suggest movement. A circle and a ball seem to roll, especially if there is a course in front of them and some room to move. There are shapes that look unstable, ready to change, to collapse, to topple. This look of tension in things is the heart of life-likeness. All great figures since the Greeks are conceived in this way, to make the onlooker imagine more than there is.
In any figure this movement is important but in sculpture it is�more so. I was going to say that it is the sine qua non, but then I remembered the great statues of Egyptian art, which have little articulation or none, no movement. In early sculpture, where figures are really idols, the aim was to portray timelessness, majesty. Movement is the stuff of life, not of eternity; nor is tension compatible with dignity.
In fact those early sculptures may have been what we would now call symbols. They were not intended to portray life but to stand for something that is above and beyond life or prior to it. Maybe some works of modern man are conceived with the idea of creating the signet of an idea, not of appealing to our imagination.