Perspective is probably the most important aspect of art -- the difference between a childhood drawing and an adult drawing is the addition of perspective. Actually perspective is a difficult thing apparently to grasp. It took me four years, from the time I started doodle drawings in mid-2005 to now, late 2009, to gain a beginning understanding of perspective drawing. I think part of the reason was that I didn't understand or appreciate the explanations in most drawing texts. Actually, I'm sure I could have learned perspective-drawing when I was in grade 1 because I remember being very interested in drawing at the time and rummaging through all the drawing books in the school library -- but none, alas, contained anything informative on perspective-drawing. I started to gain my own grasp of perspective drawing just this past week when I noticed that the kitchen tiles next to where I was sitting were apparently much longer than the tiles just a few feet from me; and the tiles closer to me were also apparently much wider apart than those at a distance. That lead me to try to mimic the floor on the page in such a way the tiles further from me took up progressively less room on the page (see the floor on the drawing below).
I think that perspective-drawing is very important for the experience of "illumination" of the mind -- the subject this blog has come to be about. The reason being that it allows the mind to see that the senses -- well, sight particularly -- reveal nothing as it actually is -- the distortions of perception come glaring through when the mind is made to reproduce perception through visual art. The mind realizes that, given the fact that it is able to apprehend the illusion of visual perception, it must partake, at least in part, of a reality higher than the one to which it is normally exposed as a result of sensory experience; otherwise it could never perceive the illusion as illusion in the first place -- it would simply be stuck in that reality. This is the beginning of illumination.
If we look again at the drawing of the floor above, we notice that the horizontal lines, although they get closer together as they move up the page, still remain horizontal to each other. In contrast, the more vertical lines, constituting the sides of the tiles, actually all converge to a single, though not delineated, point. This type of drawing is called one-point perspective because eventually one set of lines converges to one point -- perhaps it should more properly be called one-vanishing-point perspective because the point is termed the vanishing point.
Most art books when discussing perspective do not show the horizontal lines as getting progressively closer together as I did -- I think it's a good idea, though, to draw these lines as gradually converging in order to get an initial understanding of perspective-drawing. Practiced artists do not draw horizontal lines at all, their grid consisting only of a vanishing point and a series of lines converging to that point. I will illustrate this with three drawings of "boxes" below. Note that the front of each box (and the back as well) consists solely of horizontal and vertical lines, but the lines joining front to back all converge to one point, the vanishing point.
I might reiterate that in one-point perspective the vertical and horizontal lines exhibit "zero-point perspective", in other words they do not converge to any vanishing point but remain forever parallel, as per Euclidean geometry. Only the lines extending into the page exhibit perspective (in one-point perspective drawings), and therefore, only they converge to a vanishing point. A box or cube consists of three sets of parallell lines, the horizontal, the vertical, and those extending into the page. Again, in one-point perspective only the latter converge to a single point. This next drawing is also one-point perspective but without grid lines. In this case several cubes take up the page; the one beneath that is the same drawing, with one cube added, but with the grid lines included.
You can see in the picture with the grid lines that the sides of the cubes moving into the page all converge towards the single vanishing point. In two-point perspective, the boxes are viewed from such an angle that not only the sides but also the 'fronts' of the boxes exhibit perspective. Here are two identical illustrations but with the grid lines drawn in the second. Note that in two-point perspective, the vertical lines are still parallel to each other, i.e., they are not drawn in perspective.
This next picture is two-point perspective with the second vanishing point being well off the page, to the left. In this case, we see that the further one vanishing point is from an object, and the more the other vanishing point is directly behind the object, rather than to its side, the more we approach one-point perspective.
The last picture is three-point perspective, where the final set of lines, the vertical lines, is finally included in the perspective -- such drawings are usually called birds-eye or worms-eye view. The picture below is an example of the latter, i.e. looking up at a really tall 'building'.
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