Essay

In search of light: an investigative trail

For the past eighteen months I have been working with tracing paper and its interaction with light sources.  For the past thirty years I have been meditating regularly, exploring the nature of mind and its experience.  It didn’t take me long to notice that certain words – ‘translucent’ and ‘luminous’ – are, in particular circumstances, used to describe both this very ordinary paper and the meditating mind.  Tracing paper, when exposed to light, appears to hold and radiate it.  The mind, when deep in meditation and unimpeded by the usual clutter of thoughts, grows clear and what it experiences is less solid than usual, more like light.  I wanted to discover if this was a chance connection or whether there might be something interesting in it.

My investigation began with finding out how tracing paper works, what is going on when we see it as translucent.  This led me into an exploration of how we perceive colour and objects generally, the implications of which began to seem colossal and to point me back towards meditative experience.  Along the way I looked at artists working with light, including Robert Irwin, who challenges viewers to think about seeing and what is seen.

Tracing paper is made of cellulose which during the manufacturing process is compressed, trapping bubbles of air which slow down and diffuse the passage of light.  Light striking a sheet of tracing paper refracts and scatters many times within it until it emerges at some surface location – either passing right through (though less than would through a transparent sheet) or reflected back.¹  The effect is to spread the light through the sheet so that it appears glowing with light – luminous – and has a quality of softness, blurring objects perceived through it.  We are able to perceive that the sheet is translucent rather than opaque because of its partial transparency, this blur, and a quality of highlighting on its surface.²

This is a very particular instance of visual perception – the emission of light from a source, its handling in a certain way by the receiving object, a kind of experience in the viewer.  But it kindled my curiosity to find out more about visual perception in general, to gain a clearer comprehension that might inform my art practice.  What follows is a summary of my current understanding of a process that begins with the radiation of light from the sun (or other light source) and ends with my seeing an image.

The sun emits electro-magnetic radiation in the form of photons travelling along differing wavelengths.  As they travel through the earth’s atmosphere they interact with atoms and molecules of gas which can absorb and re-emit them, sending them off in fresh directions. There is a wide spectrum of wavelengths, running from from the decreasingly longer and lower in energy (radio waves, microwaves and infra red) through the - to us - coloured spectrum and then to the increasingly shorter and higher in energy (ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays).  When they eventually arrive on earth and strike an object, the properties of that object’s surface will determine whether they are bounced off it or absorbed.  For example, a certain kind of surface will reflect back all the waves in the perceptible spectrum and will be seen as white by a human being; another will absorb the part of the spectrum that would be seen as blue and yellow and only reflect waves eventually seen as red.³

In this way an object’s qualities narrow down the range of photons received by a human eye, which in itself is sensitive to only some of them.  What then follows is a complex cascade of chemical reactions which successively filter the incoming data.  The retina is lined with about 120 million rod cells and five million cone cells which have light receptors on their surface. Inside the cells are proteins that change shape as they absorb photons, triggering the production of neurotransmitters.  But as there are only about a million axon fibres leading to the brain, the data must be reduced in complexity by a factor of about 100 e.g. by ‘bunching together’ variations in light reflected from the object in a way that makes it possible to be seen as one colour.  The neural network on receiving this screened information sorts and distributes it to different areas of the brain.  In these areas a hierarchical arrangement of receptors continues to process the data, drawing on already stored information, until a visual form emerges which the mind can apprehend.⁴

A number of significant conclusions can be drawn from examining the perceptual process:

1.  We never see a thing ‘as it is’, only as reflected light, and therefore much of the world is visually imperceptible to us. 

2.  Objects are not intrinsically coloured.  Colour is an interaction between reflected photons, the retina and the brain.

3.  What we see is distilled out of a mass of data into something that our mind can make sense of.  William James at the end of the nineteenth century suggested organisms ‘sculpt’ their world out of all the sensations they receive, and species sculpt differently: a hummingbird, a horse and a human inhabit visually different worlds.⁵  

4.  Most of the perceptual process occurs at a pre-conscious level, and the conscious mind is just a recipient of the outcome of this.  Merleau-Ponty, reflecting on this in his influential ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, concluded that vision is always shadowed by this invisible process:

‘There is. . . another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. . . Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than thought.’⁶

5.  The pre-conscious perceptive process is a creative one.  Some writers and artists go so far as to suggest that we are all therefore artists and that the world we perceive is a work of art⁷   If this is accepted, the nature of conscious creativity needs to be re-thought.

6.  The sequence of events from light source to perceived image is such a complex and mutually affecting one that it is hard to see experience any longer as made up of discrete objects and beings.  It seems more accurate to think of them as part of an interconnected network or energy flow.

These conclusions have the power to shatter our habitual way of thinking about the world and our place in it.  Out of the shards of a world made up of conscious subjects directly seeing separate objects exactly as they are emerges one that is contingent and fluid – and we are included in that contingency and fluidity. 

How can artists create if they have this kind of understanding of their experience?  I want to look briefly now at aspects of the work of Robert Irwin.

In his mid-twenties in the early 1950s Irwin spent eight months on solitary retreat on Ibiza, absorbing Zen teachings and experiencing the emptying out of his mind and ego.  On his return he evolved over a number of years a minimalist way of painting to try to communicate this meditative state.  He seemed particularly sensitized to effects of light and experimented with conveying something of these, for example in canvasses covered with subtle dots that seemed to glow, and later curved translucent discs in controlled lighting conditions.  The more carefully he observed, the more he realized that it was light that gave environments their particular qualities.  He began to make light itself his medium, creating apparently simple large-scale structures in which white and coloured lighting played with translucent and opaque materials, and whose purpose was to make viewers become more aware of the actual experience of seeing light, its effect on them and how it shaped their environment.   

‘What I’m really trying to do is draw their attention to, my attention to looking at and seeing all of those things that have been going on all along but which previously have been too incidental or meaningless to really seriously enter into our visual structure, our picture of the world.’⁸

Despite its Zen origins with all their connotations of bareness and austerity, this heightened awareness of light has an enriching effect:

‘We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to “see” the infinite richness (beauty?) in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.’⁹

Artists creating with light – and I could have included others here such as James Turrell, Bill Viola and Dan Flavin - are dissolving the apparent solidity of the world we inhabit and exploring the true nature of our experience.  It seems no coincidence that some of them have a background in Buddhist meditation, which shares the same goal.  It is through this meditation practice that a luminous state of mind can be accessed, as these Tibetan teachers write:

'By letting the mind be uncontrived, in its natural state, the gross concepts will cease.  The experience of luminous emptiness will arise.'  (Gotsangpa)¹⁰

'The consciousness is transparent, radiating and clear, without drowsiness and dullness, and one thinks one understands all phenomena.'  (Karmapa Wangchug Dorje)¹¹

So it can be argued that we have a more accurate communication of reality  and a deeper experience of that reality, converging in light and hence attracting similar descriptions such as ‘luminous’ and ‘translucent’.

This essay opens up avenues for further exploration, both through research and in my art practice. I am interested in investigating further the links between pre-conscious and conscious creativity; whether it is valid to say that we are all artists, and how artists can draw on pre-conscious material.  In my art practice I want to further manipulate translucent papers and lighting to point more clearly to the nature of our visual perception of the world.

1.      Richard Yot, Light for Visual Artists: Understanding & Using Light in Art and Design (Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2011)

2.      Roland W Fleming and Heinrich H Bulthoff, Low-Level Cues in the Perception of Translucent Materials (ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 2005)

3.      Yot, Light for Visual Artists

4.      Mark C Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual (Columbia University Press, 2012)

5.      William James in Principles in Psychology, quoted by Mark Taylor

6.      Quoted by Mark Taylor

7.      E.g. Kay Larson and Bill Viola in ed. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2011)

8.      Quoted in Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art (University of California Press, 2005)

9.      Ibid.

10.   Quoted by Karmapa Wangchug Dorje in Mahamudra: The Ocean of True Meaning (Edition Octopus 2009)

11.   Ibid.