Chapter Four

Chapter four deals with realism and perspective. Realism in the visual arts is when the realist image depicts something as it would be seen by the eye. Realism refers to a style of art that is understood to accurately represent nature or the real. The goal of realist art is to reproduce reality as it is. With that being said, the artist is always going to depict what they see differently from how another person sees that image. For instance, the artist could be focusing on a portion of a landscape in the background, but a different artist could be focusing on a different portion of that same landscape but it could be in the foreground. Therefore, these two pictures would come out completely different even though they are still of the same image. One may have more detail and the other may be just a general image. Therefore, since different depictions are made by different people when looking at an image, is there ever really realism?

Perspective, on the other hand, refers to a set of systems or mechanisms used to produce representations of objects in space as if seen by an observer through a window or frame. When using perspective, there is a vanishing point that all lines must go to. This creates the illusion of objects going back into space or coming forward. Here is an example of a perspective drawing that I drew:

The image is actually drawn in two-point perspective. This is when there are two vanishing points that the lines are drawn towards. In this particular image, the two points are not even on the picture, they go off onto either side past the paper.

Another topic the chapter talks about is the camera obscura. This is a simple device that is based on the phenomenon that light rays bouncing off a well-lit object or scene, when passed into a darkened chamber (a box or room) through a tiny hole, create an inverted projection, which can be seen on a surface inside the chamber. These devices were also found in artists' studios, where they were used, much like the perspectival grid, as a drawing instrument. This technique was used by the artist Vermeer. It is described in the novel Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chavalier. In the novel, Vermeer uses the camera obscura to help him realize what is missing from his paintings in order to make them perfect. He will seem finished with a painting, then he will look through the camera obscura. After looking through it, he would either subtract something from his painting, or add something that originally was not there but needed to be there to make the painting perfect to his standards.