There’s a really interesting article up on Cognitive Daily that looks at the difference between how a trained psychologist looks at a scene, and how an artist does.  Here’s one comparison.  The yellow lines represent the eyes of two different viewers roving over the image…

I knew right away which one was which, because I know how my own eyes scan, and because I’ve actually talked this over with others like me who draw, but also photographers too.  The thing is, the human eye/brain system tends to lock straight on to what it determines is the import stuff.  That’s probably because natural selection enhances a critter’s ability to size up a situation quickly.  Even those of us with a creative, exploring turn of mind, when we’re just starting to learn to draw, or to do photography, need work at looking, really looking at…well…what we’re looking at…

Art teachers have noted that when beginning students attempt to draw accurate portraits, they tend to exaggerate the size of key features: eyes and mouths are too big relative to the size of the head. Trained artists learn to ignore these temptations and draw the world as it really appears. Even world-famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci have had to resort to tricks such as looking at their subject through a divided pane of glass in order to render proportions accurately.

And it’s true.  Even now there are times I will try looking at my own drawings in in a mirror, when I’m not sure I’m getting it right.  But I’m convinced it’s not all a matter of training either.  This would be a good experiment to run on a group of children, and then follow them into adulthood to see which ones took up art as a pursuit, to see how differently their eyes explored the world before the training set in.  I’ll bet the training only enhances a tendency that is there to begin with, to rove over it all, absorbed, curious, fascinated.  I remember when I was a kid, I would be drawn to even the smallest details of any scene that held my interest.  The delicate colors in a sunset…or in the ripples on water, as in the photos above.  I’ll bet the way my eyes roved over that photo when I first looked at it a few moments ago, wasn’t all that different from how they would have looked at it when I was a kid.  The difference would only be experience.  Now I know why I’m doing it.  You can’t render what you’re not really seeing.  You have to look.  Deliberately look.  That’s the training.

But here’s the inner reflex: This is a beautiful world.  Look…look…there is more there then first greets the eye.  See?  It is richer then it first appears.  Look.  Look.