I have to confess to finding Vision Science very difficult. This is the sort of article that 4 years ago I would have found very demanding. However having studied vision science these past four years, and read both the works you recommended to me, I have really come to understand the points you are making fairly well.
The way I understand it is: if we imagine someone looking at a subject, then light comes from the subject and hits their eye. When it does, it then initiates a sequence of electro-magnetic impulses that surge through the brain and body of the person.
The job of the artist therefore is to trigger those exact same electro-magnetic impulses.
Thing is however, is that these electro-magnetic impulses that are triggered will vary from one person to another. Let’s suppose an artist does a portrait of a boy. Now, when the boy’s mother sees him, there are going to be an awful lot of electro-magnetic impulses that will surge through the mother and these will be very deep rooted. For example all sorts of memories, emotions and instincts will be triggered.
On the other hand, if a random man, who only knows the boy very vaguely, sees the boy, it sets off a (mainly) entirely different set of impulses, which are probably not so numerous and not very deep rooted.
However what you have to understand about the fact that the mother and the random man react differently to the same stimulus, is that this phenomena doesn’t just start at the eye. I mean it is not the case that the same light patterns hit both the mother’s eyes and the random man’s eyes. That is not true. Rather each eye is already biased toward looking for what it ‘wants to see’.
To explain this further, remember that we can put an object directly in front of person 1, then replace person 1 with person 2, so that they are in the same position and their heads and eyes are facing the same way. That still does not mean that they are looking at the same thing because each person will move their eye, and squint to a different degree, and so on, according to their own biases. You cannot force two people to take the same patterns of light upon their eyes.
For example, suppose the boy has a big birthmark on his face. The mother’s eye however, has become trained over time to virtually not see it. Whilst the random man’s eye will be on factory settings default, that will specifically hunt out such a birthmark. Obviously, if the artist makes a big thing of the birthmark, the mother might find the artwork both unrealistic and bad, whereas the random man might think it very accurate.
Anyway, in general, what this all means is that the artist is up s**t creek so to speak! Because he cannot guess how the mother sees her child, nor either the random man. I mean there is probably more chance that the artist sees the boy in the same way as the random man, but if, for example, the random man was bullied at school by a boy who looks like the one in the painting, then all bets are off.
Thus an artist should be able to somehow know what the eye of the beholder is ‘looking for’ (an impossible task) whilst at the same time being aware that it’s a waste of time anyway since all beholder’s have eyes that are looking for something different!
And even if the artist somehow manages to overcome these two obstacles, if the surrogate deviates ever so slightly, it might fail to initiate the full cascade of electro-magnetic impulses that surge through the body of the viewer, when normally they see the boy.
A further problem arises in setting off unwanted electro-magnetic impulses. For example, let’s suppose the artist draws the boy well but puts on an artificial blue background. Now, the mother of the boy let’s say, when she was young, was abused by a man who always wore blue. She is deeply psychologically scarred and blue triggers her, but the birth of her son and his childhood belongs to a totally different era of her life which she doesn’t ever connect to her abusive childhood.
Anyway, by arbitrarily painting the background of the work blue, the artist has now triggered a series of electro-magnetic impulses in the mother, which are not only traumatizing to her, but they are not ever triggered simultaneously as those triggered by the sight of her boy. This will confuse her, and make the painting of the boy both less realistic and not as beautiful as it would have been without the blue background.
Anyway, I’m interested to know, did you always have an appreciation that vision science was important to art? It is not something I have ever seen any other artist talk of, at least not at a scientific level. Most artists never seem to consider such subjects, and I too never would have, had it not been that you always raised the issue in your writings.
Having said that, it does seem like all the painters of the classical era were very scientific in their thinking so perhaps this – the separation of science and art – is just a 21st century problem.