Beauty & the Brain #202

William Seeley:

Why, as a researcher, should we only learn one methodology and limit ourselves? We might not be able to avail ourselves of information from all contexts, but we can certainly learn all sorts of stuff. And cognitive science is born of the idea that you invite a bunch of people to the table and ask them to share their solutions, gather up the usual suspects and see what you get.

Jane Bianco:

But what the impressionists were capturing were the effects of light. And the effects of light had everything to do with color and touches of color and juxtapositions of color. The artist actually causes you to readjust your brain and your thinking through your vision and to read into the painting.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 202, Beauty and the Brain, airing for the first time on Sunday, July 26, 2015. Many of us have an emotional, almost physical response to things that we consider beautiful. This can be true of a piece of art or a compelling vista. Why is this so? Neuroscientists are beginning to offer answers through the use of modern technology and the study of what is being called neuro aesthetics. Today we speak with Professor William Seeley of Bates College and Jane Bianco, Associate Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, as they help us understand the relationship between beauty and the brain. Thank you for joining us. I've often had thoughts about what it means to be living in a place as beautiful as Maine and how it must impact my brain, the brain of my patients, my family, the people who live in my community. The person who going to speak with us today is Professor William Seeley. He actually can give us some information on this subject. He's going to tell me exactly what it is that I've been wondering about all these years. William Seely, Bill is currently a lecturer in philosophy at Bates College. His research interests lie at the intersection of neuroesthetics, cognitive science, embodied cognition, and philosophy of art. He holds a PhD in Philosophy with a concentration in cognitive science from the Graduate center of the City University of New, an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University, and a BA in philosophy from Columbia University as well. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with us today.

William Seeley:

It's my pleasure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You spent a lot of time in New York being educated.

William Seeley:

I did. I think it comes out to 20 or 22 years, if you count them out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you've been in Maine for how long?

William Seeley:

Seven years in Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So why the change?

William Seeley:

Well, the funny thing about becoming a college professor is you discover that you're a little more mobile than you imagined. And so we came to Maine because there was an opportunity at Bates College.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Bates has a lot of interesting things going on. I know that we interviewed the college president maybe a year or two ago. She was relatively new at the time, and I spent time on the college campus with the TEDx organization. There's good stuff happening there.

William Seeley:

It's a great place. Bates is a nice kind of. It's like a teaching lab. It's an interdisciplinary community where we share and share ideas and teach across boundaries. Students are absolutely curious and dive into every project we give them. It's been a really nice time at Bates.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's also known for art, and I think dance is very important at Bates, but art specifically. Tell me about your connection, because you're a sculptor.

William Seeley:

I'm a sculptor. Although at Bates, I've done some different projects. I've had a connection to the dance department. We have a dance professor named Rachel Bogia who also has a BS in neuroscience from Cornell University. And she and I have done some collaboration, and I've had a chance to incorporate some pretty neat improvisational dance, let's call them installation projects, with my students into my philosophy of art courses because of their active and vibrant dance community. And there's a summer dance festival, which has been an awesome opportunity for me as a researcher, to gain contact with dance troops from all over the country and learn a lot.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting because you have not only an interest in art as a sculptor, as an artist, but also as a researcher and also as a teacher. So you have this very, I guess, complex brain configuration that enables you to cross disciplines. Do you find that that's common?

William Seeley:

I think it's very common for an artist. I think that particularly. Particularly in the contemporary art context, artists are expressing ideas more so than maybe expressing themselves aesthetically. Maybe aesthetic expression is a tool. We Use. But I think that artists are natural born researchers by virtue of their curiosity about all things. And that artists have habit of reading and exploring like scavengers to look for ideas and different productive techniques that would enable us to express what we're thinking while we're thinking about making art. So I think that's where that comes from, honestly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also have a musical background.

William Seeley:

I did admit to that earlier.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes, before we came on the air. And now I'm outing you as a musician here.

William Seeley:

Yeah, I do. I played in garage rock bands in New York city for about 10 years when I was younger. And I think that all also was a fun project. It was about learning and about engaging with the community. And diving in and playing music is being in a room full of people who are reacting. So again, I think that probably it was my background as an artist that made it a fun project to learn how to dive in and figure out how to have a band and get it on the road and figure all this stuff out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So it seems as though you're engaging in kind of multi sensory living and learning and teaching, really. Whereas some people might get very focused in on one particular art form, say music or say sculpting or even a different sort of art form. And I'm putting that in quotations like teaching or research. But you really like to bring in lots of different aspects of the self as you're doing things.

William Seeley:

Yeah, I think that an artist that I worked sort of in conjunction with, an artist who shared a studio space with the artist Ursula von Ridgeward, who I was assistant for, was a woman named Judy Pfaff, who currently teaches at Bard College. And I remember as her teaching assistant, once I made a comment about a media, about working within a sculptural medium. And she said, you know, there are no sculptural media. There are just opportunities to express yourself. There are tools. And if you can, if focusing in a medium is the most expressive way for you to go about your business, then you should get in and focus on that. But her thought was that sculptors don't limit themselves to media any more than you might think of a sculpture as an object that you look at. But you might think of a sculpture as activating the room, the space in a room. You might think of a dancer as having a posture and moving in a particular way, or you might think of the dancer's movements as activating the space of a room. And you might think of a company as a group of people who learn to intuitively activate space as they Move around. And when you start thinking more expansively, your opportunities for expression become gigantic. I also suppose, just in this context, that I think that to not chat with other people thinking about the same thing from different angles would be to cheat yourself. If we want to know about our culture, we certainly ask people to read about other cultures. We ask ourselves to be open and learn from the different ways different cultures have approached common tasks and complex tasks like morality. So why, as a researcher, should we only learn one methodology and limit ourselves? We might not be able to avail ourselves of information from all contexts, but we can certainly learn all sorts of stuff. And cognitive science is born of the idea that you invite a bunch of people to the table and ask them to share their solutions, Gather up the usual suspects and see what you get.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's a relatively young and sort of rapidly evolving field, isn't it? Cognitive science?

William Seeley:

I think so. I have one. I'm not sure I have a date to put on it, but I think we would think of cognitive science as having been born in the mid-1970s with the advent of small enough computers that we could really think about how to use computers to model cognitive behaviors. We recently took our family down to D.C. and we saw a funny video at the Air and Space Museum where Dick Cavett was describing the Wang computer. And my children thought that was a very funny thing. But of course, in 1978, or 76 or 81, the idea of having these computers was kind of brand new. And so cognitive science is as old as sort of the common vernacular of the computer in our culture.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It also seems as though we've evolved with things like the functional mri, which has enabled us to actually do brain imaging while something is happening that a human is engaged in, that probably has moved cognitive science along significantly. I would think.

William Seeley:

Yeah, I would say again, just thinking back anecdotally, that when I went back to graduate school in the early 1990s, we didn't have as easy access to non invasive ways of seeing what was happening inside the skull. And that there has been an explosion of research based upon our capacity. FMRI machines or MRI machines weren't as widespread. I. I really don't know the numbers, but just off the top of my head, a professor of mine gave us a number that went something like, in 1984, there might have been two machines in New York City. And when I was in graduate school in the late 90s, there might have been 25. And I think, if you think now every hospital has an MRI machine, they aren't all research grade. But if you think about the capacity that we have now, we can create lots and lots of research. Some of it is useful and some of it maybe isn't. But we can explore the possibilities of that media now, since we're keeping to a sculptural metaphor.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So talk to me about neuro aesthetics. What is it about the beauty of something, or even if it's not beauty in the strictest of senses, but the appearance or the sound, or what is it about the being, the isness of something that activates our brain?

William Seeley:

I think that that's a question that I'm not sure we have a good answer for. I hope this next bit is going to be fit to our conversation. I think that's a tricky, tricky question. I think what we learn from empirical aesthetics, which is a branch of psychology dedicated to studying art and aesthetic experience, aesthetic phenomena, is that we have preferences for certain sorts of things. But I don't think we learn from that research alone why we find some things so compellingly beautiful. This is a question that's it's interested psychologists since the birth of the discipline. There's a researcher named Gustav Fechner from the 1870s, who is sometimes credited as the father of psychophysiology, was very interested in and the way we could measure our physiological responses to stimuli in the environment. And that kind of measurement was very complicated to sort out. And one of his. One of the books he wrote at the very beginning of psychology in the 1870s was called aesthetics. It was an investigation of why people prefer the golden ratio. I think looking into it, I think what we get is that we have a category of behavior that we culturally refer to as a response, a beauty response to the environment or an aesthetic response to the environment. And we can measure why we have a preference for it. Or maybe better, we can measure how we have a preference for it. But why that preference exists and how that preference differs from my preference for hot chocolate is hard to puzzle out. And. And I'm not sure we have a fantastic answer for it. I think sometimes people think that we have evolved certain preferences and at some point we can abstract out from their utility and then we fix on them and then we have a cultural preference for these bits and pieces of our natural preferences that we've been able to abstract out. But again, I don't know if that gives us any purchase on the question of beauty because we also have a cultural preference for football and fairness in football, maybe, or ice hockey, but I'm not sure these are also cultural preferences. We've Abstracted out certain bits and pieces of competition, maybe, or social behavior, and put them in this representational framework. I think we get the same kind of explanation in neuro aesthetics for our preference for sports as we get for our preference of art, maybe.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is there still some idea that humans have a certain. Just humans as a broad category as opposed to individual cultures. Is there some notion that most of us have a preference for, say, a symmetry of face or the golden ratio as applied to human bodies and art forms and nature? Is that still the case?

William Seeley:

No, I think that that is the case when people. When neuroscientists speak about beauty, and I'm going to use that word very broadly, neuroscientists, a common example that is given is our preference for symmetrical faces. I think that the one thought is that we have an evolutionary preference. This is a preference that has value for us because a symmetrical face is a marker for a good immune system. I think we'd have to dig back and look. This is my field. I think of slightly different things when I think about neurosthetics than the concept of beauty. The thought is that we have a preference for these symmetrical faces. They have value at an evolutionary level. There's this phenotypic trait that there's a clear reason from an adaptationist perspective, why it appears. And then as we gain our aesthetic preference, it's just, well, these are the things that we have a natural preference for because, well, it's been selected for. We don't like them because they're adaptive. We like them because of the potentially adaptive traits. Those were the ones that were passed on. So there absolutely is that sort of a preference. We also have a preference for average faces. So composite faces that give us the average of a number of faces are preferable over individual faces. The thought here is that this maps, and this comes more closely to what I think about when I think about neurosthetics. This maps to the sort of computational processes that we would use in order to recognize a face. If we think that we encode our general category, human face, as a prototype, and individual faces are recognized by their closeness to this common schema, we would think we would naturally have a preference for prototypes because they're the easiest to recognize. You might have a processing fluency thought that there's the least dissonance when we engage with a prototypical face. Again, I'm not sure that this gets us, though, to why we find some of these things so absolutely and deeply compelling. We have a story about why we might gain preferences for Some things, but it's not so different from the story about why I might have a preference for. I know sometimes Sugarloaf has this canonical mountain ish shape. Right. So if we like prototypical faces, we ought to think Sugarloaf is an ideal mountain. I'm not sure that's going to play in quite the right way. So anyway, so when I think about these things, what I wonder is

Jane Bianco:

how

William Seeley:

is it that we engage with the artwork? What is it that drives us when we're actually looking at the artwork? And then maybe we can build from the bottom up from understanding this to gain some purchase and what's happening. But I haven't answered your beauty question.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, if there isn't an answer, that's fine for me to know. Maybe someday there will be one. It's hard to say, but it is. I've thought often about. It seems that all of us like Impressionists, for example. You know, most of us can go into a fine art museum and we can relate to an impressionist. And maybe it's because we've seen that person before, we like the colors or there's something about it. It's less likely that we're going to like say cubists or postmodern artists or. I mean I keep going on. Or even abstract art. I think when I was 16 and somebody showed me abstract art, I was just start with confused and wondering why one would even put that on a wall. But then a few years ago I saw a Rothko piece and all of a sudden it spoke to me and I don't really know why. Do we know why this happens? Does this evolve over the course of one's life? And why do we seem to as a culture embrace Impressionists? Verses.

William Seeley:

Right? I think that's an excellent and awesome question. And I think, and maybe you're familiar with this, that they didn't like Impressionism at first.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's the other interesting thing is when people were the artists of the time, people didn't care for them at all. And then afterwards, after they've died and they can't make money off their paintings anymore, now they're great, right?

William Seeley:

So this is a. So neuro aesthetics confronts this issue. And the issue is if you are going to try to understand art in terms of our automatic physiological responses to artworks. The way they sort of drive our preferences. Right, the sort of. The way. I mean the way affect drives our preferences. You seem hard pressed to be able to explain why cognitive influences might impact our understanding of artworks. There's actually an interesting paper that Was in a journal called behavioral and brain sciences last year. Precisely about this question. How could neuro aesthetics Come to understand historical and cultural influences in our engagement with art? From the philosophy of art? And there's an easier way to go about this. The thought is following from some theories of perception that what we know always influences how we perceive the world that we it's built in. And so the thought there would be that understanding the sets of productive practices and appreciative conventions that define a category of art, Knowing that an impressionist painting is made with rough brush strokes that represent light, and that we're concatenating the object out of our understanding of light, and understanding something about how different impressionists were different, Will actually shape how we see the painting, Will shape how we perceive the world. And so categories of art in this context actually determine our understanding of categories of art, Determine which features of the painting Are aesthetically appropriate and aesthetically interesting. In this case, maybe beauty isn't the interesting aspect of our engagement with art, but maybe it's understanding how we, as thinking beings, Shape our own environment in some sort of curious way. So in this context, we might ask ourselves what it is about our understanding of different cultural conventions that drives the way we see the world. And there are ways that we can tie this into neuroscience of art. And sometimes I use the phrase neuroscience of art for this way of thinking about things and neuro aesthetics for the other. Neuro aesthetics is interested in why we have this sort of aesthetic feeling when we engage with an artwork, Whereas neuroscience of art might be interested in a broader category of things about how we engage with artworks. But the simple thought really quickly Is that artworks are attentional strategies that an artist wants you to look at Certain parts of the painting, for instance, and they're going to construct the painting In a way that will tell you what category of artwork you're looking at. And once you recognize what category of artwork you're looking at, you, understand which parts of the artwork Ought to be more or less important. And so recognizing that it's an impressionist painting Tells you how to appreciate it. If you thought you were looking at maybe hudson river landscape painting Or a main plein air painting, you'd be a little confused by the impressionist painting, because the landscape wouldn't be there in the right way. And you might think it wasn't all that interesting, pleasing. So there's a standard example in the philosophy literature which asks us to imagine Picasso's guernica painting, which is a painting of accidental bombing of a city during the Spanish Civil War. Part of what makes that painting so jarring is that it's a cubist painting, and so it's flat. All the figures are jumbled onto one another. And the confusion and. Right. The anxiety and tension comes from an inability to resolve the surface into individual features. So we're asked to imagine that there was a culture different from ours that had exactly the same. Exactly the same painting, except instead of a painting, it was a bas relief. So it was flat and gray. So for us, this would be a dull painting because we wouldn't have the jarring black and white surfaces to find those fractured figures. Whereas for the folks who had the bas relief Guernica, it would be very. It would be very hard for them to appreciate. Not to see, but to appreciate the painting because it would have the wrong features on it. One is done a sort of flat, gray, low relief, and the other is a cubist painting. So I think that's the kind of thing that interests us in philosophy when we think about neuroscience.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, broadening it out to neuro aesthetics. What about something like a landscape? What about something like the ocean? People are drawn to Maine. You came to Maine after being in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania. Now you're in Lewiston. You're also. You are a canoe guide. You've been up in Canada. I mean, you clearly are drawn to nature for whatever reason. Why are the rest of us drawn to nature, and why do we like Maine so much?

William Seeley:

Well, I don't know the answer to that. I'm not sure everybody that I knew in New York City would find a quiet street in Maine to be quite as beautiful as all of us do. I can say from personal experience, it's the stillness that I'm drawn to when I think about being in the mountains or being out in the woods on a portage, or even being at the ocean where there's a certain stillness to hearing the sound of the waves. I think in neurosthetics, people like evolutionary psychology, they think of a. When they think of landscapes, they think of landscapes as being things we prefer because over the course of the evolution of human beings as a social species, these were particularly rich and verdant. Right. The kinds of landscapes that we tend to appreciate have a broad vista. We can see that there would be plenty of game to feed the community. There's plenty of water. Oftentimes landscape paintings have a flat field in the foreground. They have some sort of. There's something of the economy of engagement that's there. And so I think in Neuraesthetics folks would think that that's what we appreciate. I suppose, keeping with the attentional. With the attentional metaphor. If we think of artworks as attentional engines. It might be that what we like about landscape paintings. Is that they have more going on. Than what we find. When we ordinarily walk through the environment. So there's a lot to explore, a lot to see when you engage in a landscape painting. So if we think of Hudson river landscape paintings. Or we think of. Of John Constable's paintings. And he derived, if I understand my art history. From Ernest Gomberg correctly. He's inheriting formal composition from Jacob von Ruysdael. We have. These are all structures that have. These are all paintings of a very particular formal structure. In the foreground, there's usually someone engaged in some activity. And then you can follow a road or a river down into the landscape. And so puzzling out what's happening. Involves having your eyes trained to this landscape. In a way. That maybe gives you a lot more attentional direction. Than the ordinary landscape. And we might find that interesting. Simply because we're more engaged. I don't know if simply is probably the wrong word. But it might be that paintings present us with a lot of information to engage with. And we enjoy that because it's a puzzle to solve. We borrow this from thinking about film. When you go to the movies. It feels like you're passively engaged. In watching events happen in front of you. But in point of fact, the filmmaker's editing techniques. Are designed. To explicitly grab your attention. And maintain that attention over the course of sometimes two and a half hours. So you get cut to cut to cut. And each cut presents a piece of information. There's never. There's very rarely in a movie. A scene that's just nothing to give you a break, right? You're not actually wandering around the scene as if you're walking. Your viewpoint is moving from perspective to perspective to perspective. The camera angle and the zoom is being used. To bracket and index very important information. And so you're captured the whole time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So maybe one of the things we like about going to quiet forest or to an ocean front. Is that we don't have the sense that there's anybody intentionally trying to direct us to do anything.

William Seeley:

I actually. I hadn't thought that I had set myself up for that. But that, I think, is an awesome observation. That it might be that what we love about the beauty of Nature. Is that that stillness is a rarity, certainly, in our contemporary lives. And having the opportunity to be enveloped by the sound of the waves, so that the ordinary activities around you don't capture your attention, but you're just there in the space of the waves. That might actually be a nice thing to pursue, a nice thing to think about. Leibniz, who was a philosopher a long time ago and is credited in some ways with some of the ideas that become our concept of aesthetics in the 18th century, thought that what we liked about waves was that we could hear every individual part of the wave, but we couldn't discriminate them as one from the other. So the wave isn't just a sound, it's a concatenation of sounds. And we have sort of an experience of multiplicity and unity all at the same time. We can hear sort of how replete that soundscape is, but at the same time, it's one thing. And that kind of transfers into a nice idea. I think that's a great suggestion, given

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

that you are an artist and many people who are listening to the show are artists, and many of the people that we know are artists or at least engage in some creative activity. Do you know why it is that engaging in that creative activity might actually change the brain in some way, impact it? It's called neuroplasticity, as it might be called.

William Seeley:

There's a lot of interest in neuroplasticity in art, and there's a lot of interest in neuroplasticity in creative contexts. And also how using art to expose ourselves to novel ideas is a creative context for the viewer as well. It's not something that I know a lot about. It's not something that I feel comfortable commenting on. It's not a literature that I understand. But I will say that when I speak about these things, I find that artists are deeply interested in the idea that their work, that their working procedures gain them some intuitive access to the bits and pieces of how we think about the world. Samir Zeki has a nice tagline that artists are intuitive neuroscientists. There's another neuroscientist at University of Pennsylvania named Anjan Chatterjee who always replies, well, if neuroscience is defined by a methodology, maybe not. But I think that Samir's comment is kind of nice because by reverse engineering the way we think, the way we perceive the world, artists have stumbled upon some neat little tricks of the trade that really do find fit to the way we break down the sensory experience of the world in order to ground perception. And that's kind of a nice idea. And I think that artists are Very interested in this idea of shaping perception. So it's a great question, and I'm sorry that I don't have an answer for you, but I know that we could find out something if we dug around a little bit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I like the idea that none of us has to be an artist per se, because we all have the capacity to be creative. With Instagram, with Facebook, I mean, purely the visual media that is available to us now, we're all activating something in a creative way or we have the ability to.

William Seeley:

Right. Well, and certainly as our visual interface with data becomes more developed, I mean, just think of. I always think of it, the dashboard of your car is a visual data interface that we. We don't even think about all the energy that goes into making the smooth interaction with your car so comfortable. We're a very. We're becoming. I don't know if we're becoming more and more, but I mean, the capacity to use these visual interfaces to direct our attention and give us a smoother interaction with things we didn't even think of as data interfaces is kind of awesome. And then when we use things like Instagram, we become creators of this visual interface with the environment. We think about our. Anytime you have a personal website, every time you move a block of text around, you're creatively interacting with somebody else and showing them how to see your ideas the way you think of it. So I think it's a great idea, too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How can people find out more about the work that you are doing and perhaps the sculptures that you have created?

William Seeley:

I see. Well, my sculptures currently live on my website, although most of the artwork that I've done recently has been with my students at Bates. And I've been very, very interested in chance procedures for production and installations that don't get repeated.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So perhaps some people can't see those.

William Seeley:

Well, you can. I mean, perhaps we can, but I've been very interested. So the irony about our talking about beauty is that art in the 20th century becomes anti aesthetic because the focus on beauty and aesthetics has the trappings of art, critical elitism. And so we have this movement where people use concrete, they use I beams, and they try to make expressiveness anti aesthetic in a way to make it more direct, which I think we think of as kind of funny from our folk psychological perspective, because I think we like art to engage us in this aesthetic and beautiful way. So the ideas I've been exploring in art have to do with this kind of not making the artwork this cherished and dear object, but making the event of engaging with the artwork a little more. It's the particularities of the event that matter. So the best way to look at my artwork is to go to my website at Bates College and, you know, stay tuned because there's always artwork being produced. And if there were a show coming up, I would gladly use this opportunity to tell you where to find it. But there'll be something coming.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, very good. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. My brain is still trying to wrap itself around all the things that you've been talking about as far as brains in general. It's probably gonna take a while for me to kind of, I don't know, find a place for this. It's interesting. It's really interesting what you're describing. We've been speaking with Professor William Seeley, Bill Seeley, who is a lecturer in philosophy at Bates College. He lives in Lewiston with his wife Christine and his two children. Thanks so much for being here in Maine and for doing the work that you're doing with art and neuro aesthetics and being an artist.

William Seeley:

Thank you very much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Longtime listeners of Love Mean Radio Know that we love art and we spend a lot of time talking with artists and with art lovers. And today we get to speak with someone who actually works at an art museum. This is Jean Bianco, who is the associate curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Jean, thanks so much for coming down here. You have a great museum up there on the coast and it's something that I've enjoyed many times myself. So it's nice to be able to spend time with you today.

Jane Bianco:

Oh, it's lovely to be here. And yes, it's a gem. The Farnsworth Museum is a true gem.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How did you end up in the curator field?

Jane Bianco:

I first studied applied arts as a graphic designer at Boston University some years ago. And then I went back to school and studied art history because I was always reading art history books for pleasure. And I became employed by the Kohler Foundation. I did a fellowship when I was at the University of Wisconsin in graduate school. And that led to a museum position in the John Michael Kohler Art center in Wisconsin where I focused on research for so called outsider artists and art environments throughout the Midwest and beyond. It was quite an interesting job. I was in a grant funding position, did some work research and writing for a catalog. It was a four year grant funded position for which I did research, writing, editing, etc. For an exhibition which culminated in a symposium and a huge catalog. I was focused on outsider art art environments, the core of the collection at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. But I wanted to move beyond that and came back to the east coast where my family lived. So I took a position at the Farnsworth Art Museum which has as its core a fabulous American art collection. And I'm particularly interested in late 19th century century, early 20th century modernism.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Last year you put together a very interesting exhibit for people. And I think it was a way, the way that you and I were speaking about it, it was a way to bring people in and almost allow them to just experience art rather than have to think too much about it or be intimidated by it. Tell me about that.

Jane Bianco:

Well, I try to do that with all the exhibitions that I organize because there's such a fabulous collection at the Farnsworth. It lends itself to all sorts of narratives. This particular show was about color. I looked at the American Impressionist paintings in the Farnsworth art collection and I thought, what is it about them that really appeals to me? And it seemed to be the color, the color combinations. And I thought if it appeals to me, it must appeal to a lot of other People the same way. So I put together about 25 paintings in this case in a smaller of the various galleries at the Farnsworth. Just because of the way the color seemed to be an emphasis within all the paintings. And I asked people to come into the gallery and to, if possible, or just for an instant, to try to divorce the subject matter from the color. Or try to see the color first before the subject matter. That was the sort of invitation into the show.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah, it was a broad array of paintings that you had on display. I know I wasn't able to see it, and I'm very sad about that, actually. But having looked down through the paintings that you had, it was impressive. You had Rockwell Kent and William Burpee and Lillian Hale. You also had Will Barnett. He is a well known main artist who passed away not too long ago. Tell me about his piece.

Jane Bianco:

Well, one of the premises of the show is that we all see color differently, perhaps. And that color is influenced by atmospheric conditions, by weather, by type of lighting, and perhaps even if you happen to be colorblind. And also by associations we bring to color as we look at paintings. The Wilbarnet done in the 20th century, of course, is a wonderful composition with a very limited range of color and value. His forms are almost silhouetted. Cats at night, up and down stairs and a porch of a house against the light of the. Perhaps the night light, which might be lit by the moon, who knows? But what was interesting to me is that when you do get up in the middle of the night, everything looks gray. There is a sort of a limited palette. You don't really see color unless you turn the lights on. And then it takes your eyes a moment to adjust. Rather, you see a variation on grays, warm grays or cool grays, depending on the light, which might filter through some light source, through a crack in the window light, which might lend some sort of light or white edge to an edge of a form.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now you have an interest in American Impressionists. And I know that the Farnsworth has a collection of American Impressionists. What is it about the Impressionists and color and this new form that was coming out that made art more, I guess, accessible and different?

Jane Bianco:

Well, the Impressionists were looking at light. They were able to paint outside because of the invention of the tubes for carrying mixed paint, mixed pigment. And so paint became portable, painting became a portable thing. Of course, artists did go back to the studio. In some cases, they did color studies outside. And then they finished paintings in the studio. But what the Impressionists were capturing were the Effects of light. And the effects of light had everything to do with color and touches of color and juxtapositions of color. In one of the paintings that we showed in the Coloring Vision Show, a Child Hassam painting, it's very convincing. Although you wouldn't suspect at first glance that baby blue and baby pink and high keyed colors can convince you of a scene, but they do just that. In his painting of Union Square in New York, the artist actually causes you to readjust your brain and your thinking through your vision and to read into the painting that the blue, for instance, is delineating trees or a figure, and that the pink highlights and the white create a sense of dazzling light. And that dazzling light is something that we all may know from. Well, especially in Maine. There's another painting which relates to that, I think, and that is NC Wyeth's painting of Eight Bells in Port Clyde, his home here in Maine, there are days late in summer and early in fall, in September, when the light is so dazzling it hurts to look at it, it's so bright. And he creates that feeling within that painting because of the purple shadows, the white roof, the water in the background. You almost feel when you look at the painting that you need to squint your eyes because you've experienced that main light or some light that is intrinsic to Maine, which I believe he captured so beautifully in that painting.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

There was also a painting by Rockwell Kent in the show.

Jane Bianco:

Yes, that's unusual because. Well, Rockwell Kent was someone who traveled to far northern regions. He was somewhat of an adventurer. He was a wonderful writer. He was a fabulous wood engraver. He did very graphically strong drawings and paintings. And this painting that we have is done mostly in blues and greens. And those cool blues and greens give you the sense of icebergs. In Greenland, there is a mountain with a very blue shadow cast facing the viewer, because the sun, and there is sun even in northern climes, is behind the mountain. But that yellow glow of the sun permeates, we imagine, the backside of the mountain, but it also comes through and infuses the translucence of the icebergs, so that you get a sense that even in very, very stark, extreme coldness, that warm yellow sun permeates. And that it does. Perhaps you. You can extrapolate from this with your imagination and think that the ice may be starting to melt because of that warmth from the sun. I think in all the paintings in that show, the color was a vehicle for, first of all, enhancing the subject matter. But even if a viewer could go in and just appreciate the combinations of color without even thinking about the subject matter. It's very difficult to do. I think we associate not just impressions of our experience of the real world, but expressions of our feelings towards the real world because of color.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's true. I'm thinking, as you're talking about these paintings. The times that I've stood in front of a picture painting and just kind of absorbed it. And allowed it to make me feel the way it was going to make me feel. So this description of the cats at night, the Will Barnett, and just those muted grays that you're describing that we all see when we get up in the middle of the night. And maybe there's just a little bit of moon and there's. You know, you could hear, perhaps, the peepers out in the distance and just that. Just the quietude of it all, I suppose.

Jane Bianco:

And what Will Barnett did, unusually in this painting, you know, I mentioned that it's grays, but he used blues and violets. But in very, very subdued ways. Very toned down, grayed down. So at first glance at that painting, you think it's all gray, but it's really a really very good use of color.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What is it about the main landscape, the atmosphere, the water, the mountains, that draws artists here to make it their subject?

Jane Bianco:

Well, it's for me, and I'm also someone who paints and draws. I think that this is one of the most beautiful places I've ever lived. There's the sort of the range, the extremes of the water, the sky, the elements, the light. I'm sure that every artist who's ever painted in Maine outdoors would say that the light is very different here. Just as you go to Wyoming, you might say, the sky's bigger in Wyoming. Obviously, it's the same sky, but the light, somehow off the water or off the forms of the mountains or the trees, the dense forests, it all plays together. The scents of the firs, the mossy undergrowth as you walk through the woods. All of that is very inspiring. Two artists who paint in both realistic, naturalistic ways. Or perhaps abstract from this natural world that we find around us. It's the variety of Maine. And it's also. Maine is a place where you can do your own thing. It's big enough and remote enough or crowded enough to find a place where you belong.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think when people went through this exhibit, the Coloring Vision exhibit at the Farnsworth. What did you hear them say? What were their responses?

Jane Bianco:

People were thrilled by the beauty of some of the paintings. It's very easy to look at Impressionist paintings and to find ones that you like. They're very easy on the eye. I think that people in general may have slowed down a little bit to think about to stand before pictures a little bit longer, or perhaps they may have gravitated toward something that appealed to them immediately. And I would argue that it was the color that may have drawn people rather than the forms. There were a number of landscapes. There were a number of figurative compositions. There were things that might be slightly early abstraction. There were no color field drawings or paintings. There were no just colors on canvas. It was all very concerned with subject matter. Although I asked viewers to try to subordinate the subject matter, it was always there and it was the color that enhanced the sense of atmosphere that the painters were trying to accomplish.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think although this exhibit is no longer up at the Farnsworth, there are many beautiful pieces of art that still exist. For individuals who are listening that may not have an art history background or an art background. Can you give some suggestions for how they might appreciate what they're seeing?

Jane Bianco:

Oh, I would say come into any of the galleries in the Farnsworth and wander around, and I guarantee that there's something that will draw you. I can't say what it will be, but we have a fabulous, fabulous collection going back as far as the 18th century century. We have folk art. We have paintings, drawings, sculpture, textile arts. Of course, there are works by the Wyeth family, NC Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth. Right now you'll find a summer block buster in a variety, more of a variety than you would normally see at the Farnsworth because this extends beyond the collection to collectors of Maine. So we have mounted a show which opens at the end of June, covering the treasures, I would say the treasures of Maine collectors, at least 50 of them, ranging from Asian to European American art, and in many forms, textiles, paintings, works on paper, sculpture, furniture, pots, ceramics, metal work, you name it. I would suggest that people come to the Farnsworth and be surprised.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What is the Farnsworth's website, www. Farnsworthartmuseum.org well, I appreciate your coming down. I know this is a very busy season for you up at the Farnsworth and there's a lot going on. I also thank you for the work that you're doing up there. As a non artist, non art historian, I have myself wandered around dust, just as you've said, and had found great joy in being there. Not only the interior space but also in the back where there are sculptures to be seen. And I think it is a gem to be found up in Rockland.

Jane Bianco:

Yes. And one thing I didn't mention were the two historic sites also. There's Lucy Farnsworth's homestead, which is attached to the museum, so to speak, which is there on the museum campus. Lucy Farnsworth was the woman who had great foresight in creating a museum for the public, a museum that came into being after her death in 1935. The museum opened in 1948 and she stipulated in her will that her home be open to the public forever. So it is the Farnsworth homestead is what's glorious about it is that all of the furnishings within are things that were owned by not just Lucy Farnsworth, but her parents. So it's a grand example of mid 19th century architecture and interiors. The other property which is closed this summer is the Olson House. And of course the Olson House in Cushing is a national landmark. And that is the place that inspired Andrew wyeth for over 30 years when he was visiting mainly during summers. And it's also the locale for his very well known painting Christina's World, which is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, this gives people who are listening a lot to look forward to. Maybe not this summer the Olson House, but maybe in future summers, but certainly the Farnsworth Art Museum and Lucy Farnsworth's house. So I appreciate you coming down here and speaking with us today. This is Jane Bianco, who is the Associate curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Thank you so much.

Jane Bianco:

Thank you very much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Lovemain radio show number 202, Beauty and the Brain. Our guests have included Professor William Seeley and Jane Bianco. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on itunes. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Beauty and the Brain show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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