abstract drawings

Robert Breer’s A Man and His Dog reminded me very much of a game my friends and I used to play whenever we grew bored during class. A shape or line is drawn at random, without any forethought or definite form ascribed to it, and then the person must draw a picture incorporating that shape. Since the original shape cannot be modified in any way, the finished drawing usually has irregular proportions but still manages to have an identifiable figure. Despite the abstract nature of the sketches in this film, I frequently spotted images that I interpreted as familiar entities and scenes, such as the face of the man, or the clouds over the horizon. Of course, my mind may have been subconsciously trying to “look” for anything related to a man walking his dog, rather than simply “see” the larger picture. Science has proven that humans tend to perceive human-like faces in other images, no matter how abstract they are. I do feel certain that if some of these stills were presented a group of people along with the title of the film, and the group was asked “What do you see when you look this image?” as in an Rorschach ink-blot test, they would respond with similar interpretations.