At an art fair I saw a painting of salmon - spawners, swimming upstream, beautifully rendered through the ripple and distortion of the water. But ever so slightly odd: they were all sockeye, and every one of them male. It's subtle, I guess: the males and females both turn red-and-green, but the males turn bright cherry-red while the females remain more muted (they use that same pigment, accumulated from a lifetime of eating krill, for their eggs). And the males more dramatically change shape, becoming hook-mouthed and hump-backed, iconically so.
If you look at a photo of a crowd of sockeye coming up the river, you could gloss over this variation. Your eye might pick out the most striking, quintessential characters of the fish, the most iconic form, and transpose it onto each and every fish you render in your painting.
There's a certain distance, a certain reference error - the way a camera sees the fish, versus the way a fisherman sees them, or a spawning site surveyor, walking up and down the bank cutting open carcasses to see if they laid their eggs before they died.
It's not a bad way of seeing, but it misses certain things. Theres a gap, a lack of the continuity of knowing, at odds with the effective and impressionistic rendering of the water curving over the backs of the fish - something the camera never captures right, something that tells me the painter really has been there, watching the fish in shallow water.
If I hazard an assumption, I can triangulate the painter's relationship to the fish: near enough to have seen them, watched them, to feel a familiarity - with the fish, with the celebration of their return. The way people crowd onto bridges when they arrive. But far enough to have reached for reference, for photographs - uncertain enough for the references to have pulled them a bit off center from the things they've seen.
Another booth at the same fair: ceramics coiling with sculptural octopodes, swirls of tentacles and suckers. Octopus are tricky - people get caught up in the magnificent gesture of the tentacles, and overlook how much webbing connects the arms, how the shape of the mantle is quite particular and not just round. The eyes are oval too, and the pupils irregular, and often people put them in just - not quite the right place. These ones are good, they look like octopus and not just the pastiche of octopus - but they each have two siphons. One sticking out on either side of the head.
Again, it's a conclusion you might easily make from a photograph. You see the siphon sticking off to one side, you assume on a bilateral organism there must be a matching set. (The siphon is along the midline of the body, singular the way your nose is. But it's quite mobile, they swing it around to poke out in all sorts of places.)
And I'm trying to think why in my experience of octopus I know that. I've seen them in person, in the wild - not often but always memorable. You don't often see the siphon at all. I've watched the octopus in the aquarium, and maybe I saw it then, pulling the siphon around. But I might just know it from analogy to the squid we dissected in high school biology.
There's ways you can know a dead thing, specifically, in detail. Biology often relies on this - any number of keys for identifying species assume you have a dead specimen in front of you, which you can bother at your leisure for traits like the shape of the second inner claw. All information recorded on the life of the creature, how it eats and breathes and reproduces, is locked behind this gate, keyed with a breadcrumb trail of traits of the dead.
Even bird guides used to be like this - this was the dramatic sea change of the Audubon guides, to depict the birds in color images, with references to markings you could actually see on a still-living animal at an achievable distance. Audubon still painted them from dead specimens, of course. How else could it be done?
And now I'm thinking of bad taxidermy, skins transported around the globe and stuffed up by people only guessing at how the animal lived. Which casts into clarity the colonial underpinning of this whole concept: the knowing of something as extractable, exportable. Containable by a museum, by a book of records, by a photograph - by any means other than your own long observation. (It's still true, in biology, that you can learn more about an organism from an hour with someone who truly knows it than from all the books you can call up in a college library - there's frameworks of knowing that still haven't been condensed into the record, possibly that simply can't be.)
How long an observation does it take, to have that knowing? How many brief encounters, held-breath moments when a dragonfly pauses, before you could draw it and know you got it right?
Some things more readily than others. And not just because of what stays still, although it's partly that. Certain things impress themselves in memory, often without noticing. Once I did a drawing of a city skyline, stylized, and didn't realize til a year later that it was the skyline of my hometown seen from the sweep of the approaching highway. Another time, for a class, I drew a detailed forest understory. On a whim, I put a tiny mushroom poking out of a doug fir cone. When I was adding annotations, I thought to look up the fir cone mushrooms, and discovered that what I'd drawn was a single particular species, which grows only on the cones of douglas fir and nowhere else. I'd just thought it looked right for it to be there.
So there is a sense that drawing, or sculpting if you like, can pull up the things we know and show them to us. That the act of fleshing out the details of something can reach for knowledge beyond surface recall. At times you can feel it happening - or more often, when you know to look for it, you can feel its absense. Trying to draw something can lay out your uncertainties and questions, the gaps you don't know how to fill, the proportions you stumble over.
But it's strange, because we live in a world where a detailed representation comes much easier to hand than a knowing one. You can find photographs of anything. You can copy detail to fill in every gap, without any grounding in whether it's the right detail, the right gap.
I always come back to Durer's rhinoceros. It's remarkable how much it captures, being drawn by someone who never saw a live rhinoceros, or even a dead one - only a sketch that someone else had made. That sketch has not survived. What that artist saw or knew of the rhinoceros we don't know, except for what of it was percieved by Durer, and conveyed in his woodcut which was printed so many times. Regardless, Durer's depiction of the rhinoceros is obviously wrong in many regards - from the rendering of the folded skin as plates of armor, to the accompanying text from Pliny, to frankly everything going on with the feet. I can look at it and say that this is all obviously wrong, because I've seen photos of a rhinoceros - and videos, plush toys, molded plastic models - but I've never seen a live rhinoceros either. Or a dead one.
And my relationship to the rhinoceros is not really less colonial than Durer's, either. The rhinoceros he drew - the one he recieved a drawing of - was an individual far from home, in captivity, being paraded for spectacle and proffered to kings. Durer had no part in that directly, except by his involvement in the propagation of its image - which for several centuries was considered the most accurate depiction of a rhino across Europe. But the production and reproduction of the image of a rhinoceros is still very much commodified, and still bought and sold along intensely colonial lines. The specific, detailed accuracy with which I could draw a rhinoceros on the surface obscures how little I know it, but ultimately illuminates how removed I am from anything but its depiction.
Which returns to what compels me about the painting of the salmon. There are also, at this art fair, depictions of local animals so flatly caricatured they strike me as clip-art. The artist might have seen the animals in question, perhaps even alive an in person, but no trace of that encounter is conveyed. But the salmon are almost right. There is a knowing, a relationship, in what the painting conveys. But also a falling short. And a falling back, onto other people's depictions and interpretations, that looses touch.
I feel this tension often in my own art. What do I know? What do I think I know? What slips through unseen - both truths and misconceptions? Where am I patching over with secondhand impressions? What details am I forging?
What questions is the process of depiction leading me to ask? And what is it obscuring from me?
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