Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. And this week, I’m thinking about texture.
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As a kid, I had a small collection of "lucky" items I would rotate through my pockets. There was a green rabbit's foot, a white bit of polished stone, a 1$ chip from the Circus Circus Casino in Las Vegas, an arrowhead scavenged from the floor of the desert, and a plastic ten sided dice I'd gotten as part of the first dice collection I ever bought among other oddities. What each of these had in common was their connection to my fingers and its unique feel to them. Texture.
I've got a folder on my hard drive called "Cool Shit off the Internet." I labelled it that twenty years ago and it's stuck through several computers and hard drives. Guess what I put in it? Yeah, cool shit I found on the internet. And, after twenty years, it's gotten pretty big. There is some organization to it, but not much. The only thing all the files have in common is that they're imaged. And while it's true that some of those images have text on them, they're still images.
The kind of image generally found in my “C.S.o.t.I.” folder. (Also, I have no idea whose photograph this is - if you do, let me know so I can give proper credit.)
I've said often enough that if I had rich-person money, I would be an art collector. I would have spaces set aside in my mansion just for large paintings and sculptures that, in the humble real world, I can neither afford nor adequately display. So, I collect the images and into the archive they go. When I've got a lot on my plate, I like to riffle through it. It's simultaneously meditative and occupational in that I get a lot of ideas from seeing how the random flow of images and stories comes together.
Over the years, unsurprisingly, the average file size has increased dramatically. Photos are bigger, images have more nuance and detail. Grain and blur are less due to compression instead of artistic choice. As they have done so, the measure of what we're missing by having only a flat image composed of pixels has become increasingly clear: texture.
Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune, 1942, by Piet Mondrian
Take as example this Mondrian - seeing it just on a screen, especially, perhaps, a smaller phone screen, and it looks like something that can be easily replicated in a computer. It's just straight lines and blocks of color, after all. But, of course, that was the genius of Mondrian, to take representational art and distill it down to basic, geometric patterns. But, see it up close and you see the fine ridges where the black paint rests against the white and the brush lines that create a subtle, almost contrasting pattern to the bold one at the surface. Of course, that's not saying anything new. Museums have been telling us that for years. And they know, too, that if they do not keep the more fragile pieces behind ropes and glass, we, the eager public will destroy what we love by touching it. Not on purpose, not maliciously, but because we want to feel the weight and realness of it.
I've found a new painter to obsess over recently. And, by new, I mean new-to-me (as always, the danger of being primarily self-educated is that you never know what you don't know. And there's always something new to see.) Charles Scheeler "is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism, developing a 'quasi-photographic' style of painting known as Precisionism and becoming one of the master photographers of the 20th century." (Wikipedia) As it turns out, once I began looking into his works, I was already familiar with many, but not had struck me quite the way this one has:
“Pertaining to Yachts and Yachting,” 1922, by Charles Sheeler (link)
I love the colors, I love the lines, but mainly, I wonder what it feels like. Is it smooth, with all the colors blended into one another in a seamless wash, or is it rough in places, one layer of paint placed over another, the pigments building up to show the angles of the ships and sails in more subtle detail? I have no idea. I probably will never know, at least not until technology enables more perfect replicas.
I saw a documentary once, decades ago, and I've forgotten most of the salient details, but a restoration company had developed a technique for making a perfect cast of a painting that did not damage the original, letting them capture the texture and feel of the original. (It did nothing to capture the colors, but that's another story.) I watch a lot of YouTube videos now of laser cutters and precision computer-driven milling machines making immaculate, delicate landscapes out of wood and resin and I think it's only a matter of time before we begin scanning and replicating art works such that it will feel like having an actual Picasso or Van Gogh on the wall, rather than just a 2D print.
As adults, I think we forget, on a visceral level, just how important our sense of touch can be, but every once in a while I find myself reaching into my pocket for a long-discarded treasure, only to be disappointed when I find myself once again empty handed.
That's all for this week. More next week.
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Until then, stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel