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January 22, 2006
Proof positive
It’s all trickery. It’s obvious if you think about it, when I make something look solid on a flat surface I’m tricking you.
It’s not witchcraft, but it is illusion – optical illusion. And the reason I can make a portrait look like someone is the same reason that this sort of thing works:
The squares A and B are the same shade of grey. If you don’t believe me go here for the proof. Our eyes are more cunning than they let on, which is the reason both artists and magicians make a living.
When you are outside in the bright sun and you go into a building everything looks dark dark dark for a while until your eyes grow accustomed to the change in lighting. When painting a figure, it can be tricky accommodating this ability of the eye to adjust itself according to the light. Study the tones in the shadows of the figure, then look at the lit side of the figure and your eye will tell you the tones are similar, indeed, as above, your eyes will often tell you they are the same.
Don’t underestimate the complexity of the eye. We’re impressed with digital cameras offering images with ten million pixels. Well that’s peanuts to the eye, which has 127 million pixels [or equivalent] – and we’ve got two of them!
It isn’t the eye itself that’s the problem, it’s the brain. The brain receives all this information, all 127 million bits, and ignores most of it. [For those of a technical bent this is the same as converting a .raw file to a .jpg, almost literally.] The brain has enough to do moving us around, picking up eggs, hearing the doorbell, smelling the dog and feeling the edge of the worn bit in the carpet with our bare feet, to be processing all the information it receives. So it makes assumptions, vast assumptions, which is where artists come in.
Posted by john at January 22, 2006 06:14 PM