Ethos of Tom Bass
On Seeing
We need to be aware of the difference between seeing and looking.
Seeing is an exalted or informed perception of total reality. Looking is the use of the eyes to perform a function unconsciously – like crossing a road, eating a meal or performing some other mundane task without the whole mind and perceptions being engaged.
When we consider the distinction between actually seeing and mere looking, what determines what we really see is KNOWING. That explains why a person can walk past a particular thing many times without seeing it. But after they have seen it on television they will see it. After seeing it on television, the thing is known.
Any professional person is expected to see what is related to their profession, whether it is a doctor, a dentist, an engineer or a scientist. A scientist will see an obscure scientific phenomenon that would be totally invisible for a layman.
When we name someone as a seer, we speak of one who sees beyond seeing. A great work of art is the outcome of an extraordinary feat of seeing. Such an artist sees more, and more intensely, a reality that is so complex and vivid. Such an artist enters into a reality that is not accessible to most people.
It may be asked – how is such a capacity possible? The answer is that such a person may have to some extent a natural gift for such seeing. But beyond that it has to be learned, just as a musician must learn through long hard practice how to make their fingers perform feats that seem to be almost impossible, and for the ears to become sensitive to subtle variations to tone, pitch and rhythm. So the artist must learn to coordinate the eye, mind and hand.
Because the artist can see what is known, it is possible to see and identify beyond what is known. This is an extraordinary degree of seeing. At that point the artist becomes a seer. So much is seen and realised that the artist is confronted with a painful dilemma – how to portray or express what is seen.
Stories are told of the anguish that the artist feels at such times. Cezanne was known to attack his canvas with a palette knife in a fury of frustration when he felt that he was unable to do justice to the vision of what he saw. After innumerable sittings for his portrait of Dr Gachet and the intense frustration he suffered when he was asked what he thought of the painting, he said grudgingly that the shirt front was fairly well realised. With the high waistcoat of the period the shirtfront was the size of a postage stamp.
When the gap between what is seen and the artist’s capacity to portray it is so great, it is virtually impossible for the artist to literally portray it. In desperation the artist must find an analogy in the medium used for what is seen.
When I was visiting the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam I was looking at the painting of the bedroom at Aries. As I looked at the painting of the rough old board along the side of the bed, I realised that I was not only looking at the painting of the board, I was seeing the actual board as Vincent had seen it – the extraordinary vision he had seen. What would ordinarily be seen as a mere plank of wood, he saw as a thing of extraordinary wonder, beauty and complexity. What I was seeing in the painting was surely the divinity of the board – a revelation of the miraculous cellular structure of that rustic timber. I felt myself becoming the board – being taken into the nature of it in its totality. I could feel the minute texture and grain of it and the worn use of it. Now when I look at Vincent’s painting I know what his seeing was like. When we see in that way we are taken into the ecstatic experience of the artist that is somehow embedded in the work.
At another time I went to see a late work of Giacommetti. It was an exhibition sent out to Australia as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. It was a very mixed exhibition, badly mounted in a department store. It looked as though it was part of the shop. When I finally found the Giacommetti, it had been pushed into an alcove so that it was not possible to walk around it to see it properly. I was feeling profoundly irritated and, as I was maneuvering to see it as best I could, suddenly I found myself having the experience that Giacommetti had at the moment he had found the analogy of his ecstatic experience. I left the exhibition in an exalted state and I still felt the same way hours later.
Recently I went to Bathurst and Rockley for my friend, David Wilson’s posthumous retrospective exhibition. As I sat in the garden of his house at Rockley having breakfast, surrounded by the landscape he painted and later looking at his paintings in the galley in Bathurst, I had the experience of his ecstatic seeing and how he had found the analogy in paint for his experience.
In my work as a teacher I realise that I am teaching people how to see. It is a gradual process. The faculty of really seeing develops slowly. In sculpture, form and light are of the essence – to realise that light is a tool, that form can only be fully understood when the light is maneuvered in many ways until it is fully known.
Learning to see like that is the way into that other seeing and which is so miraculous.
Excerpt from Tom Bass Totem Maker by Tom Bass & Harris Smart.
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