Jonathan Fish
Biographical Details
I was born in England in 1933 and the greater part of my life has been devoted to either research or teaching. Having always been interested in both science and art, more recently in combining the two in the way that the brain and visual imagery cooperate in painting.
My qualifications and some of my experiences are relevant to the exhibition and to my theory about how figurative art interacts with the brain.
Qualifications, Education and Teaching Experience
1938-1943
Educated at Dunhurst – an unusual school founded by my grandmother – having good teaching in art, design and music. A large charcoal drawing “Soldiers marching” which I produced aged 8 was selected by my art teacher and exhibited with other works around the United States – no doubt to help persuade the US to enter the war against Nazi Germany.
1945 -1949
Followed by another boarding school called Dauntseys with exceptional science education. We were able to study by ourselves in the biology labs and chemistry labs at levels far beyond the usual syllabus for A levels.
1949
Awarded a scholarship to read Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge.
1951 Bachelor’s degree BA Botany / Zoology / Chemistry / Biochemistry
1954-57 Post graduate research in biochemistry
1956 Published in Nature : The activity and specificity of crystalline rennin. My research was supervised by Frederick Sanger, one of only two people ever to have received two Nobel prizes, the other person being Marie Curie.
Delayed by illness from writing up my thesis, I turned down an offer of a further research grant and left Cambridge to accept a job in industry.
I had just married my wife Lupica, a refugee from Yugoslavia brought up with her sister in Cambridge, by the family of distinguished historian G M Trevelyan.
1958-59
Scientific research for Unilever in London
1962-64
Return to study at University College, London for two postgraduate years at the Slade School of Fine Art under Professor William Coldstream. Whilst I was at the Slade, my wife was at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she obtained a degree in ceramics and became a very talented potter.
1964-67
Part time lecturer in Botany, in Chemistry and in Art, the latter at Wellington College. Encouraged to enliven the teaching of small classes of 14-year-old boys, I played recordings of African drum music to show the analogy of rhythm as a sequence of intervals in time, with painting as a sequence of intervals in space, except that they exist both horizontally and vertically. My young students seemed to understand this and produced interesting abstract designs whilst listening to the
Music
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1968-72
Lecturer in Complementary Studies, added to all art school syllabus with Art History by William Coldstream, when charged by the Minister of Education to update art education to degree-level. Here at Bournemouth I ran a first laboratory for teaching Colour Science and Visual Perception. I was greatly encouraged in this teaching by the new head of Complementary Studies, Peter Whapham who became a life-long friend and supporter.
1972-93
Senior Lecturer in Art and Design at University of Gloucestershire, where I ran a larger laboratory, teaching with demonstrations of perceptual phenomena: colour science, visual perception and the new experimental syllabus with computer-aided design.
In teaching I tried to follow the principles of American philosopher John Dewey, who believed that teachers frequently came in between the ideas to be learned and the students themselves. He taught instead that educators should design situations that then allow students to learn directly from their own experiences. This is clearly necessary in Art education, but is equally important in science. Fascinating how similar experimental method in science is to the practice of art. One of my early teachers, painter and sculptor William Turnbull said: “If you’re afraid of doing something bad in art, you’ll never create anything good”. How true! And yet so little understood. Up up up up
With my most interested students I pursued Dewey’s teaching method whilst researching Leonardo’s theory of the creative uses of confused drawings and other visual images, bringing this up to date with modern knowledge of memory and imagination in the brain.
I was invited to lecture on colour perception in a range of art schools, showing how untidy sketches and visual indeterminacies can support visual invention. As a committee member of “The Colour Group”, I took part in organising a conference at the Royal College of Art, inviting colour scientists and artists to examine together the nature of colour and its uses in art.
I received a request from the Smithsonian Institution Library USA (Perhaps the foremost world research institute into science and art history) for a copy of my paper “Colour as Sensation in Visual Art and in Science” Leonardo. Vol 2 pp 89-98, 1978.
.( I took this as a compliment completely unrecognised by my art department principal who did not understand it !!!)
1993
Took early retirement form the Art School and moved to France with my wife. I continued to work with a team for the Science and Engineering Council
1997
Obtained a PhD degree at Loughborough University for the design of sketching systems for artists and designers – How sketches work. This brought Leonardo’s method of using untidy sketches up to date, recalling his celebrated dictum – Confused things rouse the mind to new inventions – in this case, applying recent research into the ways in which the brain creates visual imagery.
The external examiner of my PhD thesis was professor Bruce Archer then head of design at the Royal College, and a leading authority on design education.. After my thesis was accepted with commendation Bruce wrote to me asking my permission to quote from it. He had been asked to read a paper at a symposium on the subject of “Drawing Education for Design Students”. He was expected to follow other contributors who argued that learning to use computer aided design systems (which are used for producing very realistic 3-d illustrations of designs) was more important than hand drawing. But Bruce argued against this stating that drawing education was very important for all children over the age of eight, not just for the study of art or design, but to develop the capacity to think visually. He pointed out that we had an imbalanced system of education based largely of verbal thought with very little emphasis on the need to develop visual thought. Moreover he said that all children should be taught to use untidy sketches to develop inventive visual thought. For evidence for this he quoted the “PhD thesis of one Dr Jonathan Fish”. So it is possible that I have influenced British education theory.
1998
Presented a paper at MIT in Boston on sketching and design with the Design Thinking group chaired by Gabriela Goldschmidt (head of design Haifa University). and William Porter (head of design at MIT). My paper was chosen for publication in the book Design Representation coedited by Goldschmidt and Porter. My paper, which draws parallels between science and design, is titled
“Cognitive Catalysis: Sketches for a Time lagged Brain”.
Gabriela twice invited me to attend large cybernetics symposia at Vienna University. At one of these conferences I won a prize for the best paper in the design section! Not a lot of money but enough for some good meals in Vienna.
Whilst I was in Boston ( it was a week-long symposium at MIT) I arranged to meet Stephen Kosslyn, then head of psychology at Harvard. Stephen is probably the world’s authority on mental imagery and I referred repeatedly to his research in my thesis. Over lunch we discussed my theory of how mental images function in visual perception and by forming hybrid images partly from the retina and partly from memory derived images. Stephen told me my theory was “very interesting” though he would not commit himself to saying it was correct. When I arrived back in France I found a large parcel of his most recent research papers waiting for me. We continued to discuss how the visual brain combines imagery and incoming visual signals by email.
Driven by the interests of my students I obtained a studied for a second degree in computer science at Gloucestershire Computing Department. I also drove four of my students over to Leicester University once a week for a new course in computer aided drawing. One of my students who went on t do post graduate work at the Slade School was given the very the first Slade computer assisted art laboratory by the liberal and open-minded Prof Wm Coldstream. I have been lucky to teach so many interesting students and to learn from them also.
Amongst other distinguished scientists with whom I have been able to talk about art and the brain has been Professor Richard Gregory, head of Brain and Perception at Bristol University, who came to visit my laboratory in Cheltenham. We met again at a symposium he had organised at Bristol on visual perception and art.
Semir Zeki is another distinguished scientist who has pioneered our knowledge of the many modules of the visual brain. We met on one occasion with the Colour Group and then I discovered later by sheer coincidence that he had a second home near Cordes! He is interested in art and has published a book Inner Vision. Zeki claims that “All visual artists are in fact brain scientists, even though they may not realise it”.
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Semir Zeki, is a pioneering neuro-scientist, expert on the visual brain and also very interested in art. In one of his books – Inner Vision, Oxford 1999 – he writes that “all visual artists are actually brain scientists even if they do not know it”. Whilst this idea is interesting, I personally have a slightly different idea as to how the conscious and unconscious minds mysteriously collaborate in the of making art. Subject for discussion the café in Cordes, where he has a second home.
However, to mis-quote Niels Bohr on the subject of quantum mechanics: “Anyone who thinks he understands visual art, does not understand visual art”
Hoping today to bring together my theories about art, which are presently published in four or more separate papers in English, into a single, shorter paper that could be translated into French for those who may be interested. Perhaps then we might even have an interesting discussion about exactly what visual art is, how it evolved, how it stimulates our memories and why it moves us so much.
I am currently working on what I consider to be a plausible theory of consciousness: what it is, and how it has evolved. I shall then attempt to explain how conscious and unconscious cognition in making and looking at paintings might help us to understand the nature of art..
I will close with a quotation by the artist Naum Gabo, who wrote in 1959 that “People often expect a painting to speak to them in terms other than physical, preferably in words, whereas when a painting or sculpture needs to be supplemented and explained by words, it means either that it has not fulfilled its function or that the public is deprived of vision”.
Conscious emotion is private to each of us, so I can only write about my own response to painting. For a painting to succeed it must move one in a way that is too visual to be described or explained verbally. The quality of a painting is directly related to the depth and persistence of the feelings that it generates. Its true nature will always remain mysterious. To repeat the adapted dictum of Niels Bohr about quantum mechanics “Anyone who tells you that they understand painting, does not understand painting.”
Current activities
I owe much to France where my wife and I took early retirement in 1993. It was here that I finished writing up my hundred and 30,000 word thesis on “How Sketches Work"and where I was inspired by the beautiful landscape tore take up my rather neglected painting. I will I have always been interested in landscape painting and recently have concentrated on trees. My wife and I have made many friends. My wife has regularly exhibited her racu parts with French potters and I have also contributed my landscape paintings to local exhibitions. I was very flattered when Eido Kisserl invited me to exhibit my paintings in this gallery and also to lead a talk and discussion on some of my theories about the nature of painting and its relationship to science, the brain and the untidy sketch. Thank you France!
Unfortunately I lost my wife 12 years ago and it feels like only yesterday. Constable never recovered from the loss of his wife and I fear it is the same for me. I only live on at 87 years old because I feel I have so many unfinished things which I should have done now must try complete with the little time left to me.
A fall in April this year caused a severe fracture from which my right shoulder and arm have not been able to recover. After three unsuccessful operations, I am told that I must learn to adapt to my present handicapped condition. Fortunately, I am left-hand ed
. Fortunately, I am left-handed and so still able to write, although slowly, and to paint and draw ed and so still able to write, although slowly, and to paint and draw slowly.
