fbpx

Tag: human vision

Posted on

The science behind ‘don’t be boring’

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

“The limited bandwidth in our optic nerve is reserved for those things we don’t expect. We effectively only notice things that are surprising – that’s how we can compress information efficiently. It’s similar to what happens in a television. There’s an expectation value for each pixel and the data is only used to the extent that the pixel deviates from the expected level of the one that precedes it, or the one that adjoins it. So that very thing of being interestingly less wrong: there’s a complete difference between things we notice and things we perceive.“

That’s Rory Sutherland in The Spectator, and he was quoting a theory from The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, by Andy Clark. Clark is a philosopher, not a neuroscientist, and one of his key theories—that our brains are essentially prediction machines—seems awfully simplistic to me. Nevertheless, his point about the optic nerve is backed up by science.

Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

How your eyes work

The optic nerve has a limited number of axons, which are the things that conduct electrical impulses. That bandwidth constraint means our visual system must prioritize and condense information. 

Much of that data compression happens in the retina itself, where photoreceptor cells and ganglion cells focus on edges, contrasts, and motion. Then these signals are sent to the optic nerve. 

Our retinas filter spatially by detecting changes in luminance across different areas of the visual field. They filter temporally by detecting changes in brightness over time. If there are no changes, there’s no need to forward more data.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Once that happens the brain uses context and prior knowledge to interpret what the optic nerve has sent. Much of what we ‘see’ is really a reconstruction built on what we’ve seen before. So the value of ‘don’t be boring’ is that it makes the eye and brain really look.

How Colin Page does ‘don’t be boring’

One of my favorite galleries is the Page Gallery in Camden. I’m constantly surprised by something there. This week, Lisa Renton gave Poppy Balser and me a detailed audiotour of (of all things) their Christmas tree. It combines natural plants with unnatural finishes and iridescent tinsel (which is a lot better executed on their tree than in the product photos).

Right now Colin seems to be in a rainbow sherbet phase; it’s cool, arresting, luminous, and you can’t really understand the subtle high-key balance from the online photos. Nathaniel Meyer is painting somewhere between the Canadian great Lawren Harris and fairy tales. Marc Hanson has some lovely small monotypes that say nothing and everything. Next time I go in, there will be something else that stops me cold or makes me laugh.

Stuffed animal in a bowl, with Saran Wrap. 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

How you can do ‘don’t be boring’

I’ve written before about the importance of not being boring, but maybe it’s more accurate to say that we should strive to be innovative and surprising. That doesn’t mean awkward or badly-composed, and it certainly doesn’t excuse terrible drafting or paint handling. But with technical competence comes the freedom to think about whatever you want, rather than what others have thought about before. That means spending less time painting and more time drawing and thinking. What are you thinking about that might translate into something new and different in paint?

Speaking of drawing

I still have room in my drawing class starting right after the new year. It’s the best thing I can recommend to improve your painting in 2025. (Yeah, I’m talking to you.)

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Looking at paintings on your video screen

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, by Georges Seurat, is ten feet across. All those dots shimmer in real life. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes is a monumental work in every sense of the word. At 10 feet wide and 5.5 feet tall, it takes up an entire wall in the Met. It’s intricately detailed, but that is not what makes you suck in your breath when you first see it. It’s the sheer audacity of the work, its scale.

Imagine the response at its unveiling in April, 1859 in New York. In a massive, theatrical frame that increased its breadth and height, it was artificially lit in a darkened chamber. An epic success, it drew 10-13,000 viewers a month, each shelling out 25¢ for the privilege. (Church went on to sell the painting for $10,000, setting a record for the highest price ever achieved by a living American artist. Yay, Church!)

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

And yet, if you’ve only ever seen it on your computer screen, it looks-well, meh. It’s a lovely example of the picturesque, that English ideal of beauty, but it’s hardly moving. It’s only when you experience it in person that you begin to understand what the excitement was all about.

Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is even more colossal, at about 14 feet wide by 12 feet high. The Rijksmuseum published a 44.8 gigapixel image of it in 2020, right after it was restored. I’ve crawled over that image. It allows me to get closer to the painting than I ever could to a ‘live’ Rembrandt. But what it can’t do is give me the sense of scale of the actual painting. I’ve been to the Met innumerable times, but, alas, I’ve never been to Amsterdam.

The Night Watch, 1642, Rembrandt van Rijn, courtesy Rijksmuseum

How we see

Humans have tunnel vision compared to other animals, but our peripheral vision is still important. It is not acute, and it gets worse as we get to ‘the corner of our eye’. Peripheral vision helps us perceive sudden changes, like cars veering into our lane of traffic. More importantly, we ‘know’ what’s happening in our peripheral vision because we know what the images on the edges ‘mean’ without needing to focus on them. Our brains interpolate and fill in the information. When they can’t, we turn our heads and figure it out. It’s an irresistible impulse.

When we look at a painting in real life, we’re using every part of our visual field-both the focus and the periphery. We flick through the painting’s focal points with our tunnel vision, just as we would flick through a natural scene. That gives us a sense of reality. That’s far different from when we look at a painting on a screen, especially when the screen is tiny, as on our phones. Then we’re just seeing it with our narrow tunnel vision. We lose the spatial sense that our eyes are designed to use.

The Water Lilies – The Clouds, 1920-26, Claude Monet, courtesy Musée de l’Orangerie. At 14 yards across, it simply can’t reproduce on the small screen.

That’s not even considering the color inaccuracies and loss of detail that are inevitable in photographs. Large canvases can look overworked and stilted in photographs even when the brushwork is lyrical in real life. A small photo reduces brushwork to an afterthought.

The 21st century artist must constantly think of his work in relation to the small screen, in addition to its real-life appearance. In some ways, that’s healthy, because it drives good composition. But it does change our approach to painting. How would Monet’s Water Lilies series have turned out had he had one eye on our phone screens?

I love living in a time where I can tour the world’s museums at a click of a mouse, but that should never be confused with the tactile experience of paintings.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: