The Shadow Hand in the Vermeer

It wasn’t until I saw Vermeer’s original painting in the National Gallery that I noticed an oversized shadow-hand worked into the woman’s headdress.  Although the hand has only three discernible fingers, the heightened clarity of the thumb helps me to make the visual closure.  The boundaries and shading of the hand meld into the shadow of the headdress.  Because of Vermeer’s subtle handling and our expectation that we should see a shadow, we may fail to recognize the hand, and yet there it is.  Once we recognize the hand, for a moment, it may be difficult to see anything else.  In my mind, after weighing the alternative possibilities, it suggests the act of comforting, and a godlike protecting presence.  The shadow-hand was in my mind as I decided to use outreaching fingers as a metaphor for addressing Vermeer’s image in the collage Shadow Hand in the Vermeer #3.

When a congenial and soft-spoken child psychologist friend recognized this dark and murky shadow-hand, he thought it heavy and oppressive, while his wife emphatically offered reasons why the hand should be read as supportive and comforting.  The context that we create for a symbol or a sign is critical to these contrasting interpretations.  It would be interesting to test a number of male and female subjects to see if there might be a correlation by gender of interpretations of the shadow-hand.  My wife tells me that her first impression of the hand suggested a mother supporting a child’s head.  A male student in a college seminar thought it might be a sign of the husband.  Science tells us that during evolution we have adapted to see what seems to be in our practical interest, what conforms to our preconceived ideas of things rather than what is merely raw data in the visual field.  Perhaps my wife’s response to the hand was initiated by her unusually deep interest in children and mothering.  Usually we are unaware of how the mind networks associations among raw data and our notions of things.

Today we might consider Vermeer’s shadow-hand to be a benign forerunner of effective yet subversive subliminal images used in magazine advertising.  Artists have designed human skulls and black color fields into liquor ads to stimulate latent fears of death and, consequently, liquor consumption in heavy drinkers.  Nike has been accused of employing not-quite-hidden swastikas and Nazi colors in a sales campaign directed at young, inner city males.  As I look at a pattern of four circles filled with black, placed symmetrically on the diameter of a larger black circle, and image of Mickey Mouse ears intrudes into my consciousness.  This is an association that I imagine many Americans and, perhaps more recently, other nationalities would recognize, and suggest how most any visual cue repeated in a sustained public context can become associated with cultural connotations.

Subliminal cues fit very well into Whitehead’s event theory.  Perception gives us far more information than we can consciously process.  We normally narrow down our selection of data to conform to predigested interpretations that allow us to expedite thought and action.  Yet we may respond to conflicting or supporting data on unconscious levels, which can effect behavior and feeling.