Transcriber: Kana Tsumoto Reviewer: Akinori Oyama
It all started when I bought my bucket truck.
You know, the kind that electric line repairmen use to work up high.
I was tired of sneaking up fire escapes, climbing trees,
and even telephone poles with a camera,
all to get the angle that could lead to a great painting.
The bucket truck turned out to be ideal.
Ten meters high, above it all. Just birds and the breeze.
As you gaze out over the landscape
and brush in hand, take joy in painting it.
Ahh.
One shiny morning,
I dropped one of those brushes into the slow-moving stream below me.
I had to get to get it back.
Groping behind me for the controls to lower the boom
I leaned over the bucket's edge to see how far downstream
that brush would float before I could fish it out.
And in that distracted moment it struck me.
The sensation of seeing; what it really feels like.
Ask yourself:
How does it physically feel looking at the world around you?
Had you ever considered that?
Until that morning, I certainly hadn't.
Seeing, vision, that incredible team play of eyes and brain.
It develops before we are even age two,
before conscious memories are retained.
Also, we do it all the time, whenever our eyes are open.
For these reasons, the sensation of seeing is subliminal.
Pointless to even try to think about what it feels like, right?
Except, for an artist, whose life is making images, there was a point.
And it's one that led me to this new, more powerful way of painting.
So, I'm up in that bucket, looking first straight down at the stream,
then, as I raise my head looking downstream to where the brush might be,
then, to the shining pond,
the village beyond, and up to the morning sky.
In that instant, the sensation of the visual sphere
burst into my conscious awareness.
The visual sphere; what seeing really feels like.
Try to get the feeling of this visual sphere.
Realize that our eyes are balls that rotate.
Our head rotates.
All our movements are curvilinear.
Even moving, we are continually at the center
of a sphere of subliminal awareness.
So subliminal, it's almost impossible to consciously feel it.
So, move around, turn your head as you go.
Try getting higher, like I did with my bucket truck.
Because, the ground basically cuts off
half your visual sphere when you're down on it.
Up higher, even here, with space below,
it's much easier to feel this visual sensation.
All this became so obvious, and then in the next instant,
the idea for parabolic painting came to me.
Curving a painting's panel
could convey this spherical sensation.
I grabbed a piece of paper, scrawled a sketch of the scene on it,
cut that out in a curvy shape,
and held it up, bending it like I'd envisioned.
And...and...it worked!
Try to imagine what this means to a painter.
This was new, original, compelling!
And--talk about fresh, fast prototyping.
I had the model for the first parabolic painting
minutes after dropping that brush.
Originally, I was just doing a watercolor of this section here.
Instead, I have this dynamic slice of my visual sphere at that moment
from the stream below all the way out and up to the sky above.
So, with this very first one, I also discovered
that a parabolic painting can depict a very wide field of view,
much wider than a flat painting,
without fisheye lens distortion.
It looks natural, and this is also new.
And one more thing:
One more thing.
The contoured outside shape of this panel.
It conveys your visual trajectory,
the path your eyes take through your visual sphere.
These mysterious Moai stand frozen,
halfway down a slope on Easter Island.
Can the shape of a flat painting in a frame such as this
convey this sense of eye motion?
Look at this dynamically curving panel,
shaped to convey your visual swoop up that slope.
It tapers to suggest perspective, a sense of distance.
Curving forward, it expresses the arrested movement of these Moai,
and a sense of nearness.
Swelling up into the sky, down into the grass, it expresses size.
And all this is expressed,
not with paint, but by the panel's very shape.
I call this Parabolic Painting, traditional and modern at the same time.
Painting with a sense of stillness, but a feeling of motion, too.
And, by evoking your visual sphere,
painting with a sense of presence that no flat painting can match.
It's this sense of presence,
of the painted view seeming to really exist,
that is central to the magic of realistic art.
Deliberately configuring a panel to express these sensations.
"Ah--well, now that's original!" (Laughs)
So I thought.
Until I began looking with fresh eyes
at the painted caves of Ice-Age Europe.
You know, Lascaux, Altamira,
the sensational Chauvet Cave, many others.
These are as close as we can now get to the first depictive art.
And these cave paintings? (Laughs)
They're definitely not flat!
In fact, the finest cave artists used the irregular curvatures
and projections of this cave wall, with a stunning parabolic effect.
Unfortunately, flat reproductions can never convey
the true impact of this first art.
You have to be in front of the three-dimensional cave walls
to really experience it.
And I did.
I visited every cave painting that I could.
In their muted light,
I saw that my discovery had happened before
to the very first artists long ago,
and had then been forgotten.
Lost.
A powerful painter's tool, the 'parabolic effect' was lost.
Lost when we began to build flat walls, paint murals on them,
and then make flat paintings to hang on those flat walls.
To show people what I meant,
and to relive the making of the very first art,
I decided to make my very own cave painting.
It was quite an adventure.
It was also deeply, deeply moving
making that connection with the first artists.
I even lit a fire in my studio
--smoke everywhere-- and I painted by the flickering light.
Cave shadows pulsed like the heads of running beasts.
And I saw, I learned,
that my parabolic painting reaches back to the very origins of art.
So many things, so many things we never question.
We simply assume they have always been that way.
Paintings are flat, rectilinear.
Flat wrong.
A lucky accident got me questioning that linear thinking in art,
and parabolic painting is the result.
Now, parabolic painting is transforming
the way I look at so much else in life.
In particular,
the world's persistent predisposition for linear thinking.
Listen to how we talk:
"Let me straighten you out here,
line it up, state it flatly."
We rely too much on linear thinking.
It underlies our unbending thought,
our rigidly-defined actions.
Even the verb 'to correct' means 'to make straight'.
We impose flat-line grids on rolling land,
use linear projections for everything
from financial planning to resource allocation.
And then we're 'surprised' by unexpected results.
Water: it flows in curving patterns,
but we control it with straight embankments and jetties,
and disastrous coastline erosion is everywhere worldwide.
A more important example:
Burning less than a fourth of the world's oil reserves
will lead us directly to catastrophic global warming.
But, Big Oil keeps marching straight ahead,
spending billions of dollars, searching for even more oil?
That is suicidally insane.
There are better ways of thinking at hand.
But we mock them with words like 'loopy'.
We scorn going around in circles.
But that's what the planetary system does.
We try to define reality with Euclidean geometry.
It only works on flat surfaces.
The world is not flat;
it is spherical, and it advances in cycles.
In Nature, the straight line is an anomaly.
Watch and listen to the Allan Savory TED talk,
"How to fight desertification and reverse climate change".
This is a man who admits his own tragic mistake,
based on linear thinking, about overgrazing in South Africa.
Forty-thousand elephants were shot as a result.
Forty-thousand.
And the land continued to degrade into desert anyway.
Then, 'going in cycles',
Mr. Savory arrived at an axiomatic realization:
Large and--this is crucial-- large, continually-moving herds of animals
are indispensable for healthy grasslands.
Allan Savory has applied his findings in projects worldwide
with spectacular results everywhere.
Now, he offers one of the most promising solutions
for reversing climate change, restoring ravaged lands,
and reducing global hunger, all at the same time.
And there are many more like him
thinking, and then acting outside rigidly-delineated parameters,
avoiding the straight-line thinking, that so easily leads us astray.
Instead of marching straight to our doom,
we can take a roundabout path to saving ourselves,
and what's left of the beauty that makes this earth so magical.
Thinking outside, going in cycles,
thinking outside of all those little straight-line boxes in every area of life,
offers us an expanding sphere of hope for our future.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)