The chapters in both The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain and Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing brought me back to experiences I had in my color theory painting course. Looking back through these experiences I am now able to grasp the biology of the “seeing” eye and the “seeing” mind. In the first still life painting I did for that course I differentiated the objects by color. I believe I viewed this still life primarily through color constancy. When I painted a maroon cloth in the still life I used value to differentiate one part of the cloth from the other. I used this technique throughout the painting which consisted of several different hues with various values. During critique my professor tore my painting apart. The fact that I was seeing the still life through color constancy was my primary problem. After attempting the still life once more I noticed I could train my eyes to see beyond the color constancy of any specific object. Rather than one color with different values I now saw that in fact the maroon cloth consisted of deep cobalt in one shadowy corner, a dark forest green in another and a bright orange pink where a strip of sun shine fell on it. At times the cloth did have value distinctions but in many places on my canvas entirely different colors were used to represent it.
What I believe I trained myself to do in that course was to use trichromacy and opponency to a higher degree than constancy. While painting I squinted, used peripheral vision, one eyed vision, and staring to combat the urge to use only constancy when viewing the still life. On page 46 Livingstone writes "Some aspects of visual perception-such as object recognition, face recognition, and of course, color perception-depend heavily on color, and other aspects of vision-such as motion perception, depth perception, figure/ground segregation, and perceiving positional information-are colorblind." Rather than using value to determine depth perception. which is what I instinctively wanted to do, I used my new found in-depth seeing to portray depth with the color that represented that part of that object. In the case of the maroon cloth, bright orange pink accurately represented the spot where the sun shone on it. With a lesser trained eye I saw only a value differentiation not a color difference. On page 51 the Where and What systems further support what I believe I experienced in my art class. The Where system was the part of my seeing that picked out value and wanted to represent the maroon cloth through value only. The What system is the part of my seeing which I honed in order to “see” the cobalt and bright orange pink in the maroon cloth. The amazing thing is that the subsequent painting I painted which used many different hues and value where necessary had a greater perception of depth than the first one which primarily utilized value.
This leads me to what I learned next in my color theory painting course. Color can evoke intense emotion even when a minuscule amount is used of a certain color in an overall impressionistic painting. Livingstone points out that “low spatial precision may lend vitality to a painting because the visual system completes the picture differently with each glance” and Solso makes a similar inference when discussing Monet’s Impression: Sunrise when he writes “Monet has captured the impression of this setting and presented a psychological view of motion and color.” I learned that a tiny strip of lemon yellow on the edge of an impressionistic cloud scape suddenly captures the essence of the sky at that moment in time, daybreak. I also learned that shadows, while representing a type of value, were often represented on the canvas by a specific hue. In other words shadows were not always gray but rather had a distinct color depending on illumination.
Lastly, in my art course we experienced another phenomenon, light source. Some of the art students painted primarily in the evening and some painted primarily during the day. The studio during day time got most of its light from the sun; however we always put on the overhead light source. The studio at night used only the overhead light source. Our paintings of the same still life had dramatic differences. Livingstone touches on this on pages 95 – 98. Often a bright pink bowl in a daylight painting looked grayish greenish pink in a nighttime painting. One question I have is if artists can train their visual cells to see items as they appear in a given light source? Our paintings seemed to suggest that this was the case. Sometimes an art student had to work during the day and during the night and this caused the painter to spend long amounts of time remixing colors on their pallet because the still life simply did not retain the same colors in the different lighting situations.
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I was also struck by the ideas that Impressionist art presents a psychological view, as Marcella quotes from Solso. To begin with I think that Solso describes visual perception well when he says that vision, and other sensory processes, merely allow us to sample the physical energy in the universe. Thus, human vision in itself is merely an impression. I was really fascinated by the ideas both Solso and Livingstone about how conventions of impressionism play upon this physiological aspect of vision. Solso describes how the structure of our eye causes us to see a painting not all at once “but by forming an impression based on a large number of individual eye fixations that examine details falling within foveal vision and input from the periphery.” I’ve always been attracted to Impressionism and find myself always explaining that it compelling to me because I feel like I see the world in the same way that the Impressionist painters show it. Solso and Livingtonse give some evidence for way this may be true based the nature of foveal and peripheral vision. Livingstone writes that the technique may evoke memory or a single moment. Perhaps these works resonate emotionally with me, partly, for this reason.
Impressionist paintings also seem to offer the viewer an active role in organizing the painting. This gives the viewer a feeling of interaction with the painting, an openness, and a sense that it is the human eye that provides meaning to the painting. In looking at Impressionism you may feel that you are discovering the painting and constructing it anew with your viewing.
I was also really fascinated by the discussion of impressionist art--particularly as it relates to the Where and What subdivisions of visual processing. The David painting in Livingstone was what you would call hyper-realistic and yet, as she pointed out, there is no possible way we could capture so many details at one time in such a large and complex scene. And while Monet's painting wouldn't fit into the "hyper-realistic" category there was something undenyably "real" about his painting. The sense of motion and vibration that we can capture with our Where function exists only Monet's painting.
Livingstone points out that Renoir often captures-- to a certain extent-- both the motion of Monet and the focus of David and different parts of the painting. He represents both the Where and What subdivisions in portraits where faces and the eyes on faces are in relatively sharp focus while the rest of the painting seems to be more in motion.
I was interested in Solso's description of how we perceive a painting. He states that because of the structure of our eye we are unable to see the whole painting all at once. We construct the image as we go. For the same reasons that Lilly mentioned, I too am fond of impressionist paintings. The artist leaves a little work for the viewer. We get the chance to experience a moment, often something fleeting.
I am also really interested in the idea of capturing motion in a painting and how the motion in Monet's works seemed to influence Renior's work. However, like Gordon mentioned in his post, Renoir is able to put a moment of sharper focus among the surrounding movement. It is amazing to me the effect that changing pigments can have.
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