Icons

An essay by Leanne Goebel, AIC – USA

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 William Stoehr’s paintings of women’s faces are Amazonian. The canvases on view in ICONS at Space Gallery are seven feet tall. It’s as if the women are staring into your soul with their large, basketball-sized eyes positioned at eye-level for the average human viewer. Laine, Destiny and Priscila all come to life in metallic acrylic paint, charcoal and varnish tapping into the way our brains perceive line, shape, form, color and shadow. 

 

Stoehr’s method of application, adding thin layer atop thin layer by pouring the paint and moving it around—aided by gravity, a sponge or paper towels—is similar to the way traditional oil painters create with layers of thin glaze painted on with a brush, building up the color and surface of the paint. Stoehr uses concepts similar to those used by Rembrandt, yet with a contemporary application utilizing a childlike intuition, his only art training what he received in high school in the 1960s. What is at once evident in these works is his veneration of strong women—warrior queens of unknown ethnicity, their expressions multifaceted and packed with emotion, mysterious, ambiguous.

 

Stoehr’s ability to create works with open-ended meaning and the techniques he utilizes to do so have intrigued Neuroesthetic researchers who are attempting to map the brain activity that produces perception, emotion and creativity. The eyes are intentionally prominent in a Stoehr painting—they actually follow the viewer. The eyes seem realistic, yet they are created with scribbles and splashes of paint.

 

The brain is able to process the visual cues and then complete the artist’s suggestion as something realistic from recorded remembrance—the brain completes the picture from a stockpile of images stored in memory. Because of this, each painting then is unique based upon the individual mental recall of the viewer. 

 

Not long ago a Harvard researcher, Margaret Livingston approached the artist. In the broader field of neuroesthetics, Livingstone is focused on the physiological processing of visual information. She wanted to know if he was intentionally using equal value complementary colors and placing them together. If he understood that it was the same technique Claude Monet used to create movement. If it was not a conscious, rational decision, then she wanted to know how he stumbled upon it. His answer? Stoehr said he experimented and it looked good, he liked it, so he kept doing it. 

 

“Vision is information processing. Artists make use of the ways the brain extracts information,” Livingstone said in her Penny W. Stamps distinguished visitors series lecture at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design.

 

Semir Zeki, a professor of Neuroesthetics at the University College of London, theorizes that artists unconsciously use techniques to create visual art to explore how the brain works.

 

"...The artist is in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach,” Zeki said in Statement on Neuroesthetics.

 

Stoehr does make use of how the brain extracts information and processes it in his art making, but often this derives from a childlike sense of experimentation and intuition. He is intrigued by ambiguity, defined by Neuroscience as the way our brain tries to instill meaning into our world. It is not that things are indecipherable, but instead that there are several meanings of equal validity providing an alternate certainty. When we see something we may see it as ambiguous and our brain assigns emotion and meaning to it. Influenced by research, Stoehr began exploring how to create something ambiguous in his art. 

 

“When something is ambiguous, it looks one-way in one moment and different in another moment. When you project one emotion one day and another emotion the next day the painting is more interesting and maybe more real to us,” Stoehr said. 

 

Artists achieve ambiguity in art in many different ways. One of the most famous and ambiguous paintings is Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa. Livingstone has a theory about The Mona Lisa that Da Vinci harnessed how we visually perceive to drive viewers into seeing the woman as an enigma, perplexed by her expression. If the viewer focuses on the eyes of the The Mona Lisa her mouth is seen only through peripheral vision and in peripheral vision the brain focuses on the shadows by her cheekbones, which cause her lips to appear curved or smiling, but if the viewer focuses on the mouth, the brain ignores the shadows on the cheeks, focuses on the line of the mouth and she appears rather expressionless. 

 

 “The brain processes the shading in a different area than it processes color and line,” Stoehr explained. “Shading is more in our peripheral vision. In the eye, Cones are more perceptive to color and line and Rods more perceptive to shading.” Experimenting with this led him to explore other ways to convey ambiguous and ephemeral expressions. For instance, he frequently gives each side of the face a slightly different expression—painting one expression in the eyes and another on the mouth, one expression on the left side of the face and a different expression on the right side. He also use iridescent paints that change depending upon the intensity of lighting and the viewer’s point of view causing shifting patterns of light and slight changes in expression. Stoehr thinks, “Witnessing these small changes might make these images appear more real to us—more like we actually perceive.”

 

But it is a higher level of ambiguity that Stoehr is reaching for. He considers Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring to be an almost perfect work. Vermeer used small scale and local contrast to attract the eye, keep it moving around the canvas, expanding what it takes in. “But there’s something more in that face,” Stoehr said. “There is the formal technique that draws your eyes to the face. I see it, but it’s very ambiguous and it’s something else. I haven’t put my finger on it yet, but he’s done it, and when I look at it I flip with different meanings all the time. He’s created alternate scenarios that seem very real and that’s the ambiguity that appeals to me.”

 

After a trip to Florence, Italy he began adding metallic paints, outlining the women in gold inspired by Byzantine iconography. Later he began working the gold into the face, merging foreground and background.  For a while he took all color out and now he is adding it back in—a bluish green and purple here and there.

 

Stoehr has also been exploring concepts originally espoused by Cubism, but his focus is on what the artists said they were trying to do rather than the flattening distortion of form with lines and geometric shapes. The Cubist’s were asking how do we really see? How do we visualize someone over time, knowing that our brain doesn’t treat that person as a snapshot? How does an artist capture the theater in the mind and portray the unconscious version of the person? 

 

At its core, Stoehr hypothesizes that Cubism was about a way of seeing, rather than a way of creating an abstract style. It was about creating the essential reality. A reality in which the mind believes that what it is seeing is more real than a photograph because it captures the quintessence of the subject and how we perceive and experience a person over time.

 

 “If their stated goal was essential reality, they didn’t hit it,” Stoehr said. However, sparked by their desire to create essential reality, he began experiment with merging a more naturalistic style with cubist-like multiple views, letting the viewer reprocess and complete the image. In some works the face is created looking direct and in profile in an attempt to capture the reality of how we experience a person over time, on good days and bad, when they are happy or sad, tired or rested. By subtly combining different views of a face in one painting the brain sees the subject portrayed, as it would experience a person over split seconds to weeks or months or years.

 

Another concept evident in Stoehr’s work is Global versus Local Vision where what is seen up close and what is seen from a distance is different. The most well known artist utilizing this technique is Chuck Close who creates portraits from series’ of baseball cards or small symbols created on a grid. In Close’s later works, the symbols in the small boxes processed by local vision are sometimes painted using equal value complementary colors. In Stoehr’s paintings, the local is not created on a grid, but in the area of a portrait’s forehead one will find an abstract painting created from line and pigment.

 

As the viewer moves through this exhibition at Space Gallery, they will realize that some portraits are hanging on walls while others are located on the floor, mounted on moveable trolleys. Stoehr wants to change the relationship between the viewer and the art and enliven the experience. The viewer is now able to alter the exhibit by moving the paintings around. Through this action, he or she can consider how reorganizing the order and location of the portraits affect each other and how they affect the viewer’s emotional reaction. 

   

As stated earlier, in spite of all of this scientific research, Stoehr happened upon his technique intuitively and through continual exploration. Growing up in Burlington, Wisconsin at 17 Stoehr thought he would be an artist, but instead his education took him from a state school in northern Wisconsin to four years of post-graduate education. He ended up as President of the Worldwide Mapping Operation for National Geographic Society. Then one day, eight years ago, he quit and decided to make art recalling his high school art classes and the artists that inspired him in 1965—Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. 

 

When he picked up a brush he began making what he called “really crappy stuff,” before getting a sense of who he was as an artist. Those initial paintings were bright and colorful and within months he had two galleries selling the works—one in the Virgin Islands and one in Denver. Then three years ago another Denver dealer, Michael Burnett, suggested the he could draw and paint faces really well. Stoehr then began focusing on the face. His paintings begin with live models and he prefers working with the handful of women seen in these portraits. 

 

Stoehr continually challenges himself to dig deeper believing he is only at the surface of where this subject might take him. How would Franz Kline paint a portrait? What if I stop using brushes? How would de Kooning paint this part of the forehead? No more red paint for a year. And he’s constantly going back and adding to the works, never afraid of wrecking or ruining a work. He challenges himself to paint the same women over and over again in different ways. 

 

“When I’m in front of an easel with a brush or charcoal, I can tell you that this is what I am meant to do,” Stoehr said. 

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invisible museum

William Stoehr at Space Gallery

Marina Graves September 11, 2012 5:42 pm

 

Sept, 2012, Denver — William Stoehr’s most recent exhibition at Space gallery in Denver was comprised of 14 portraits, none less than 4-foot x 3-foot, nor more than 5-foot x 4-foot 2-inches.  Enormous portraits, all of them as I remember of African American women shown frontally from the shoulders up.  At this scale, these portraits are obviously reminiscent of those by Chuck Close.  They also share with Mr. Close the fact that both are based on an accumulation of details.  In Chuck Close’s case, these are often just a few small discrete uniformly sized shapes arranged in matrixes or gridlines. Mr. Stoehr’s work relies on accumulation of details as well, but the details being accumulated seem far more random, even careless, rather than purposeful – often not bearing any direct relationship, seemingly, to the perception of the whole. Instead each one of them is a study in disguise, depth, and visual opacity masquerading as, or rather simultaneously occurring within minute linear specificity. This makes it possible for the details to overwhelm the whole painting at the same time that the whole painting emerges out of multilayered contexts of details, rather as if a number of ‘see-through’ land maps had been layered one on top of the other to create the final vision/version.

 

And in fact that is just how these pictures were made.  Mr. Stoehr first draws an outline of the basic portrait in charcoal and then he adds, layer after layer of paint in various mediums, using various kinds of implements scrapers, sponges, etc. creating many paintings within the same large painting and many ways of interpreting the lines and the spaces of various hues.

 

Up close, say within 12 inches we see points of bright green associated with delicate purple lines, but as we retreat the small details seem to vanish completely.  Then as we increase our distance from the imagery an often grimacing, certainly restive face emerges from 1001 details and the imagery isn’t all inundated by details, details so powerful, they form completely separate paintings in themselves.  The whole presence of these paintings is a succession of stages as we walked backwards from the painting until a final focal point is reached at, say, 10 feet and this is all accomplished with adroit, even virtuoso craftsmanship!

 

Mr. Stoehr is an assiduous student of recent developments in modern neurobiology, especially in regard to our visual processes, and is taking us along into the barely charted waters of these processes and their unconscious neural hierarchies that largely determine the correlated what and how of that which we see and know. Thus Mr. Stoehr is playing artfully with optical neuroscience. And, of course, artists have always done just that, only lacking in the explanatory scientific knowledge. And the scientific key to this is that the brain’s neurons process shades and hues in different centers of neural activity from where it processes dots and lines and horizons, yet almost instantaneously reintegrating them, which thereupon becomes the vision we see with.

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William Stoehr's art tickles the brain.       

Where science meets art

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By Aimee Heckel   Boulder Daily Camera – November 14, 2010

 

William Stoehr is running a science experiment. But his lab doesn't have a microscope, petri dish or test tube.  His equipment is a fist-sized hunk of charcoal, a fat paintbrush, a bucket of red paint, a dish scrub and sandpaper. Stoehr is an artist. You might not know it from peeking into his Boulder studio, but Stoehr is also fiddling with neuroscience – delving deep into the subconscious chambers of the brain, and building bridges between visual perception and emotional response.

 

He points to one of his oversized charcoal face portraits. A little yellow in the eye here, paired with some purple over there, and suddenly the eyes look realistic. They seem to move. Two men recently said they felt judged by those eyes. People regularly burst into tears when they see Stoehr's paintings, although they don't -- or can't -- say why.  Creating art that evokes emotion is all about experiments and happy accidents.  Just like science, Stoehr says.  In fact, despite their seeming opposite sides of the spectrum a growing field called "neuro-aesthetics" believes that science and art are different sides of the same coin, and inspecting both sides can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the human brain.

 

Artists like Stoehr have begun studying neuroscience as a map to enhance their artwork. And scientists have begun more seriously considering visual art, music and architecture to glimpse inside the head of not just the artists, but also the people who interact with the work.  It's the science of aesthetics and beauty. In other words, how the brain processes, responds to and creates art. This collaboration could lead to an improvement in education and medicine down the road, according to advocates, such as the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute. For example, if you knew how to design a room in a way that triggered the brain to heal, it would change the way we design hospitals.

 

The institute recently sponsored a conference called "The Science of the Arts." Among the speakers: neuroscientists, researchers and a molecular biologist and Stoehr, the Boulder painter.

 

Artists have foretold-- on some intuitive level -- what neuroscientists are just now discovering, the symposium suggested.  Historically, artists have sought out to paint pictures of curvy women. Later, neurologists discovered the brain has more receptors for curves, making humans pre-programmed to prefer curves to straight lines. The brain is also set up to prefer line drawings of faces to realistic portrayals, and the eyes are drawn to the area of the greatest contrast between the brightest bright and the darkest dark.

 

Stoehr didn't know any of this when he began painting six years ago, although these traits are fundamental of his artwork and could explain his quick pathway to popularity. (Stoehr's artwork now hangs in a temporary exhibit at the Denver International Airport and soon will be in the State Capitol.)

 

"Scientists wanted to know how I knew to do it," Stoehr says. How did he use lines and luminance to trigger emotions?  That would be the topic of his Johns Hopkins presentation. The only catch? He didn't exactly know how.

 

Stoehr has never taken an art class. One day, he says he just decided to quit his job as the president of National Geographic's mapping group to pursue a different path.  His only artistic strategy: To make a lot of accidents.

 

Through trial and error, he says he discovered concepts that art schools teach, stuff like "equal luminance," and how to use "discordant color" to bring a portrait to life. But Stoehr doesn't worry about the jargon, and he says he never paints to try to evoke a certain response. "I don't even think about it while I'm painting. I just draw what I see," he says. "That's, in some way, the key: Disengaging the brain."  It's kind of ironic from a neuro-aesthetics perspective: turning off the brain to open up understanding of the brain.

 

Even the trademark of Stoehr's art -- splashes of red or orange paint across the charcoal faces -- is random. Sometimes he asks the subject to throw it. (All of the women he paints are Boulderites, like a woman working at a coffee shop on Pearl Street.)

 

It's those red splotches that Jeremy Nathans says provokes an especially interesting neurological response. Nathan is no art critic. He's the professor of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins' School of Medicine. His interest in art centers on how the images are processed in the retina and brain, and how we alter these images.

 

What comes in at every stage is altered," Nathans says. "It's not like we get a perfect movie of the outside world projected on a little screen inside our brain."  Our brains filter, distort and suppress different aspects of what we see. Think about eyewitness testimony in court. Witnesses will swear on their mother's grave that that man was the perpetrator. But these accounts are highly unreliable, despite the certainty in their memory.  "Many times, we think we have an accurate perception of the world when, in fact, we have colored it, both literally and figuratively, with our expectations and experiences," Nathans says.  

 

Understanding how a normal brain works can provide insight into how to rehabilitate brains after a stroke or with debilitating diseases, Nathans says.

 

Here's where art comes in.  "Visual art taps into the brain circuits by, at some level, bypassing the analysis that we're doing when we look at a general scene," he says. 

 

Think about how a painting or a song can stir up buried emotions that you suppress in your day-to-day life. A man looks at Stoehr's painting and says he feels judged. Art can reach around the brain's filters and set off thoughts before you see them coming. A woman breaks into tears when she looks into the portrait's eyes. She doesn't know why. But her brain is firing away in a way that fascinates scientists like Nathans.

 

Nathans says Stoehr's paintings tap into the mind on two different levels. Consciously, you see the portrait. Subconsciously, the red sprays of paint create a mood. The painting stimulates two different parts of the sensory system, he says. Plus, the haphazard red splotches catch your attention because they are unexpected, Nathans says. A part of you feels like he has defaced his own painting, and this creates tension.  It's fascinating, Nathans says, from a purely scientific point of view.  "I think a lot of art is that way," he says. "You get inputs into your system, and you can't put your finger on why you like it, but you do. Understanding art can help us understand the subconscious part of the brain and the real way that we perceive the world.