I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.
Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, “immature” for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?
Hi. I’m an artist, and my answer comes from my personal experience and not from academic research on your topic.
Turns out painting and sculpture pose different challenges to artists. If your goal is realism, you first need to understand your subject, and then you need to translate it to the medium.
One key aspect in the process is finding good reference material to work from. Turns out human faces and bodies occupy three dimensional space, and they are somewhat readily accessible to artists. A talented sculptor can study a model and replicate it as a sculpture; it’s not easy, but there isn’t much else to be done.
Now let’s look at painting. Often people think painting and drawing is easier than sculpting because it’s more accessible, but that’s not necessarily the case especially if you aim for realism. The artist needs to use the brain and translate a lot, and I mean an awful lot, of the information seen in the model (3d space) into 2d. They need to remove one dimension from it, without breaking the illusion. This is why it’s ten times more difficult to sketch from life than it is to sketch from photographic reference; photos already did half the job for you. And back in the day photography wasn’t a thing.
This is very hard already, but on top of that comes color. Most people can see color well enough, the difficult part is understanding how to translate that to a flat, uniform surface that doesn’t emit light. From the get go this means you will have to crunch down and remove color information, ie you can’t paint the sun and expect it to shine like the real thing, instead you will have to either make everything else too dark or not paint the sun just to keep the lighting relationships making sense. Your brain has evolved to see color shades, to take into account lighting conditions and contrast and a lot of other things. And yet, you hardly realize you are seeing all these things because what matters to you is what color things are meant to be, not what color things really are in a myriad of lighting conditions. In other words, you don’t have a color picker tool ability that lets you easily replicate any color you see. This takes years of training.
Then as if this alone wasn’t difficult enough, you now have to deal with pigment chemistry and colors that dry different shades, incompatible or unstable pigment combinations, hard to find pigments, etc. These issues still have to be taken into consideration today, but in the past even more so since people had a lot less options available for a variety of reasons.
I hope by now you’re getting the idea that you have far far more opportunities to botch a painting than a sculpture. Take any civilization and with a few generations of skilled sculptors passing on the tricks of the trade you can reach realistic results. But it took centuries and a lot of thinking and writing and studying to start achieving realistic painting standards. I’m not surprised at all.
Most people think they see color, light, and shadow well enough. But they don’t. They know what color a thing should be, or what they perceive the color to be, and so they can’t see the way that the color really is. I think that part of the genius of a painter like Lucien Freud was that he was showing you the colors are they really are (…kinda of…), rather than the way people think they are. Highlights on a face aren’t just going to be lighter; they’re going to have different hues, depending on your light source. Flattening colors out to black and white seems easier, until you realize that you can have two wildly different colors that have almost identical values, and so you have to introduce some unnatural contrast in order to make a distinction between objects. Hell, B&W in general requires increasing contrast and fucking around with your virtual white and black points, or else your drawing looks flat and lifeless.
Photography–particularly film photography, where you don’t have software interpreting the image–can be a useful tool in seeing this. Without any filters, you can examine detail areas of an image and see how reflected light, and how shadows, are changing the hue of what you’re seeing. Your brain automatically makes adjustments, unless you’re really looking. And training yourself to really see what’s actually there, versus what you expect, is a very challenging process.
Yes, that’s my point. By “most people can see color well enough” I mean most people aren’t color blind and can tell apart basic color differences. That’s all.
I’m always astonished when I see people add lighting to a figure/scene by piling on lighter and lighter colors. It’s mind-blowing to me how artists can figure out how to fake light with colors!
Nice write up!
Also, lots of colors were not available back then, nor were the “thinks” that make them a paint color and not just colired dust. That’s why paintings from 1300 and before are brown-yellowish from the egg and lack of many colors.
Another fun example, in the late 1800 you could suddenly buy oil paint in … Tubes! There were also a railway network in some countries, and tada people could paint in the countryside!
Close one eye or put an eyepatch on. I’d expect this makes 3D -> 2D transformations easier after a while.
It does, however it doesn’t remove human error and it doesn’t help at all with situations or angles where you don’t have clearly defined contours, such as when representing facial features for example. People tend to draw what they understand, not what they see, even when using the one eye trick.
That is one of the techniques I was taught in a sketching class.