Sunil Lohar
Ph.D. Scholar and Lecturer at Centre For Exact Humanities, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India. Email: sunil.lohar@research.iiit.ac.in, sunil.iiith@gmail.com. ORCID id: 0000-0003-3972-7728
Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.40
Abstract
Is painting space fundamentally perspectival? In the European Renaissance (14th to the 17th century), the painting space was thought of as having an interior of perspective where one could place an object. It took many years after the Renaissance for European art to come out of this optical or geometrical perspective and realise that the space of painting is fundamentally non-perspectival. Historically in Europe, impressionists (1860) painters are the ones who tried to break away from this optical or single-point perspective and create paintings according to ‘lived perspective’. Optical perspective is one of the visual dogmas which are believed till today; thus, it is tough to appreciate non-perspectival paintings. This paper aims to give technical reasons why painting space is fundamentally not perspectival; the first section of the paper will deal with the question ‘what kind of space is painting space?’, and in the second section, we will compare method of photograph and drawing to find the differences between mechanism of camera and human perception . In the last section of the paper we will use Indian folk paintings, to demonstrate how cognitive or alternative/multiple perspectives open new possibilities in painting space.
Keywords: Perspective, Optical, Cognitive, Space, Imagination, folk, Shape and Stroke.