Art Grows People — Literally
Changes in artistic standards happen. What happens when it means normal people aren't represented?
Maybe not hard to forget, depending on your interests, but curious, and raising questions about society. Art can do that, reflect the world and posit considerations about how we behave and what it all means. However, it’s not usually a contemplation of artistic techniques and
For those who don’t know, artists in figure work (whether fine art, comics illustration, etc.) frequently discuss the human body broken down in how many lengths of head — for the entire body, distance between the chin and navel, leg length, and so on.
The approach helps guide the artist to general layouts. If you spaced out the height of the figure, you can then preliminarily mark important delineations that give a guide to where different parts appear. You can make adjustments because people come in all shapes, sizes, and sets of proportions, but it’s a good starting point.
A short video by an artist talking about body proportions set me off on this post. The person said that an “heroic” figure (think a lot of classical sculpture or monuments) was 8.5 heads high compared to 8 heads for a regular figure.
Traditionally, a normal figure was 7.5 heads high, an “ideal” figure was 8, and an heroic one was 8.5. Shifting half a head up for each might seem inconsequential, and for many it would be. It does, however, distort the figure. The head takes up a smaller amount of space in the figure, as it is the measuring stick. Torsos, legs, and arms become longer.
None of this is a rule, but there are perceptual implications. The more heads to the body length, the greater the psychological emphasis on the body at the expense of the head, which is the seat of thought, contemplation, emotion, invention, and artistry.
Changes happen in the arts at times, and they can have effects. Take music and the reference tone A. It’s had different reference values over hundreds of years. Currently, it’s 440 hertz, although it gets pushed higher at times in recorded music for a brighter sound. But 432 used to be widely used, as was 435 (adopted by the French government at one point). Mozart supposedly used 432, but supposedly a tuning fork kept for him by a piano builder was 421.6. If you listen to classical music, there’s a good chance you don’t hear a piece from the 18th century or earlier the way the composer did.
What is the bigger implication for society? No idea, and I welcome anyone’s thoughts. But the arts do affect people and the world. If more visual artists start to adopt ideal proportions as normal, where does it leave normal humans?