The Treachery of Images: Why is Reversal So Difficult in Printmaking?
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| Poor Planning for this Printed Pump |
Working with a mirror of your intended image can be difficult for anyone, beginner or master. In her book, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Jennifer L. Roberts reveals that one of the most well-recognized painters from the Dutch Golden Age got into trouble with reversal when etching a copper plate for a print.
In Rembrandt's Print The Raising of Lazarus, the biblical character of Jesus can be seen lifting his left hand instead of right to raise the character Lazarus from the dead. He'd gotten it right in the etching, but hadn't remembered the reversal that happens in printing. This meant trouble for Rembrandt, because to Christian people at that time the left hand was considered "sinister" - not a hand meant for performing miracles.(1)
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| Rembrandt Van Rijn, The Raising of Lazarus, Etching on Paper, 1642 (William H. Schab Gallery, NY), Photo: Public Domain. |
So why is it so easy to accidentally produce a sinister print?
See You on the Flip Side...
When you see something out in the world, the image is received upside-down on your retina. Your brain receives it as a nondirectional packet of data, which it then interprets using internal sensory cues to judge how your view should be oriented.(2)
But when viewing images, your brain can't rely on internal sensory cues. It has to use primitive visual processing and learned social programming to judge object and text orientation. The first way uses something like evolutionary memory, and the other way allows for recognizing abstract ideas.(3)
The trouble in printmaking comes when one of these programs overrides the other when you don't need it to, when one of these programs just doesn't care enough to be accurate, and when your perception of reality is biased toward what you'd like to see.
That's the Same Cat...
In an introduction to printmaking class a few years ago, I watched a fellow classmate's face crumple into misery as he discovered that he'd carved the letters on his block print in the wrong direction for printing them correctly - that is, he'd carved them the right direction but they would print backwards. I frowned with him in sympathy; I'd done the same thing in the past when carving a rubber stamp.
My classmate had worked on his carving for several days, seemingly careful to make design choices that would orient correctly when printed, but no alarms went off in his head while carving the letters. I hadn't noticed it either, and we'd been working elbow to elbow for weeks.
It seems easier for adults to draw objects in reverse or upside down rather than to write backwards. But it seems like young humans are different in this regard; they tend to make the "mistake" of writing some letters backwards while learning to write. Why do kids have trouble with the direction of letters - or more importantly, why is it easier for them to write backwards?
As an adult, we tend to recognize lowercase b, d, p, and q as different letters, but young kids have trouble with this because they haven't yet been trained in the abstract thinking required to use a written language. Their brains are still running on the original evolutionary programming - let's call it the "Archaic Intellect."
Our prehistory ancestors evolved a default visual system that ignores differences in orientation. This allows us to recognize that an object is the same object even if it's seen from a different angle.(4)
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| These are all the same cat. |
Your Archaic Intellect recognizes that all of the cats in the above image are the same cat. For recognition of letters however, new social programming is needed to override the evolutionary programming of the Archaic Intellect.
Kids who are new to writing haven't fully downloaded that programming yet, so the abstract symbol "b" is seen as an object, and they know that an object is still the same object if you rotate or mirror it.
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| Image on left by Crsan, Mirror Cat #2, altered photo (online), License: CC BY 2.0. |
As you develop the abstract thinking that allows a rotated object to represent separate symbols, the reflection of the letter is no longer the same letter. Your mind eventually starts autocorrecting your perception to not allow for mistakes in reading or writing. Your social conditioning overrides your evolutionary programming.
This unnatural to the Archaic Intellect, and is woefully unhelpful for printmaking.
For an adult human, a "b" is only a "b" if it's pointed in a certain direction. When you carve it forwards, no alarm bells go off in your head because the social autocorrect is working. When you carve it backwards, your brain habitually recognizes it as a lowercase "D," and thinks "that's not right, that wasn't what we wanted to write." To carve your letters in the reverse takes conscious effort, it takes unlearning a lifetime of social programming.(5)
You must temporarily forget the abstract meaning of the letter or word; it must become an object again:
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| These are all the same cat. No, really! |
When I and my fellow classmate carved our images of objects in reverse into the block, no internal alarms went off, because Archaic Intellect knows that an object is the same object even if it's mirrored.
Unfortunately, when we carved our letters forwards into the block, still no internal alarms went off. We had failed to shut down the autocorrect of our social mind so that we could use our Archaic Intellect to make art.
But what can happen when Archaic Intellect is successful at shutting down the social programming?
You can find yourself enmeshed in lazy visual processing and biased perception.
Eh, Good Enough...
To judge depth, shape, and object orientation in an image, our brain relies on personal knowledge gained from past experience.(6) From the time you were born, you have been gathering experience about how shadows fall, about atmospheric perspective, and (in the Western world) about what hand a wedding ring goes on.
Unfortunately for an artist, all of this accumulated knowledge isn't very important to evolutionary fitness. If a perception mistake didn't stop your ancestors from reproducing, it wasn't a problem then and now your mind doesn't waste time worrying about it.(7)
The human brain is truly a faulty walnut.
Remember Rembrandt from the introduction up there? The Raising of Lazarus wasn't the only perception mistake he made in his art career.
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| Rembrandt Van Rijn, Self Portrait with Two Circles, Photo by Chericbaker of Oil Painting (online), License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. |
You would think that a master painter wouldn't make this mistake, but when Archaic Intellect is in charge it knows that an object is the same object from any angle - even reversed in a mirror. It doesn't need to waste calories figuring out if the object is logically oriented.
Consciously spotting reversal is just as difficult when recalling an image from memory.
In a cross-college study by the American Psychological Association in 1987, researchers found that the mental process used to recognize previously seen pictures doesn't care much if they are oriented right. You are more sensitive to an image being upside down, but your brain doesn't tend to notice if the image has been reversed horizontally. Participants in the APA study were shown images they'd previously seen - but this time reversed, and a notable number of the participants claimed that the image was the same.(9)
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| They're the Same Picture, Altered Meme, 2017 (Reddit), Property of NBC Universal. |
This might be because while perceiving an image your brain can project an overall recognition of picture elements, instead of staying alert for specific errors. This means your brain has created an element-shorthand for recognizing things like 'what is a face,' and it will think everything is fine as long as it sees two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Everything else about the image can be wrong after you notice the key features, and your brain won't care.(10)
The photo in the meme above has three large banks of windows, a barren parking lot, and a single lamppost. If a participant in the APA study were shown this image twice - but the second time in reverse, they might mistakenly think they were the same photo because their brain had formed an element-shorthand for the image the first time they saw it: windows + parking lot + lamppost = same.
Along with lazy recognition of reversed images leading to mis-orientation of features or whole scenes, the printer can run afoul of their own motivated perception.
In psychology, the condition of motivated perception means that your brain has a preconception of how the world should be, based on the outcome you want to happen. This means your perception of images is skewed by what you want to see.(11) This can make a printmaker's job harder, because their predicted outcome can stop them from seeing the mistakes in their carving or etching.Proofing a Lie...
Why is it so easy to to accidentally produce a sinister print? It's because we are all operating with a faulty walnut. All of us are prone to mistakes, even our most respected artists.
This is why we test print. This is why we "proof."
In creating a reversed image on purpose, you are forcing your brain to lie. Test print every so often to check that the lie reversed becomes the truth. Your brain is biased and can't always be counted on to perform an internal correction of a reversed image, so you must constantly proof your matrix instead of assuming it'll come out fine.
Much like saying your ABC's backward, or maintaining an verbal lie over time, it takes conscious effort to draw an image backward. Your brain is evolutionarily wired to perceive the truth of what its seeing (for the most part), and socially wired to autocorrect abstract mistakes - even when we intend to make the mistakes!
Along with constant proofing, there are many techniques to help you create a reverse image with minimal corrections afterward. But no matter what you do, When you sit down to carve your art into a printing block it's going to be hard to not make mistakes. As the cynical printmaker George Bodmer said, "Printmaking is fun because it takes a perfectly simple process like drawing and makes it as complicated and error prone as possible."
He's not wrong...
PS: If you'd like to further your frustration with image reversal, I recommend that you look into the Familiarity Principle. It's about how our brains start to like the mistakes we make and will choose to ignore them. This ties in with the idea of motivated perception.
Sources:
1. Jennifer L. Roberts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024), 41.
2. Diane Rogers-Ramachandran and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, "Right Side Up: Studies of Perception Show the Importance of Being Upright," Scientific American (2008) <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/right-side-up-2008-05/#:~:text=Although%20people%20often%20believe%20that,that%20idea%20is%20a%20fallacy.> (Accessed November 28, 2024).
3. Mariono Sigman, "The Fascinating Reason that Children Write Letters Backwards," Ideas.TED.Com (2017) <https://ideas.ted.com/the-fascinating-reason-that-children-write-letters-backwards/> (Accessed November 28, 2024).
4. Sigman, "The Fascinating Reason."
5. Sigman, "The Fascinating Reason."
6. Ramachandran, "Right Side Up."
7. Ramachandran, "Right Side Up."
8. Julius Bryant, Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest, (London: Yale University Press, 2003), 70, <https://books.google.com/books?id=DAjHamKGor0C&dq=%22Kenwood,+Paintings+in+the+Iveagh+Bequest%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s>(Accessed November 28, 2024).
9. James C. Bartlett, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, and Robert E. Till, "Remembering Left-right Orientation of Pictures," National Library of Medicine (1987), <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301428/> (Accessed November 28, 2024).
10. Ramachandran, "Right Side Up."
11. Marianna Pogosyan, "Why We See What We Want To See," Psychology Today (2019), <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/201907/why-we-see-what-we-want-see> (Accessed November 28, 2024).
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