{"id":624,"date":"2007-03-19T08:48:13","date_gmt":"2007-03-19T13:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/624"},"modified":"2007-03-19T09:08:57","modified_gmt":"2007-03-19T14:08:57","slug":"how-an-artist-sees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/624","title":{"rendered":"How An Artist Sees…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.  Here’s one comparison.  The yellow lines represent the eyes of two different viewers roving over the image…<\/p>\n

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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…\n<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,1],"tags":[57,29],"class_list":["post-624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-uncategorized","tag-drawing","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}