Art and illusion a study in the psychology of pictorial representatio
Ideas from the chapter –
What is needed for western illusion? Linear perspective, shading (shadow and light), color, reflections, texture.
How/why the illusionists used flat space to depict illusions. Impressionist painting are of less documentary value to the social historian than paintings of conventional realists.
The amount of info reaching us from the visible world is incalculably large, while an artist’s medium is inevitably restricted.
Illusion — cut down the info on the canvas and thereby stimulate the mechanism of projection.
Velasquez’ invention from Hilanderas – comic strip artist’s use of lines to suggest speed or where an object has been moments before.
Van Gogh’s discovery: we can see the visible world as a vortex of lines. Is this pre-dated in old print media? But is the ‘expressive’ component absent?
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Read chapter 11 from Gombrich “From Representation to Expression”
Ideas from the chapter –
Inventions in the history of art: foreshortening, tonal system of modeling, highlights for texture, clues to expression.
Art offers a key to the mind as well as to the outer world has led to a radical change of interest on the part of artists.
There is no reality without interpretation… just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear. …they imposed an alternate reading on reality and thus gradually succeeded in exploring the dazzling ambiguity of vision.
Foreigners imitate the sounds of the new language as far as the phonemes of his native tongue allow (“speaking” as “eh-speaking”).
Those all pervading qualities we call “style”. Importance of motor habits in style. In the microstructure of movement and shapes, we find the personal accent of an artist.
The question of relationships, a matter of distribution and sequences which one perceives as a whole without being able to name the elements in combination.
Is there really a sharp division between representation and expression? (National Geographic magazine cover of early Native American).
Be aware of the three factors: medium, mental set and problems of equivalence.
Forms of art, ancient and modern, are not duplications of what the artist has in mind any more than they are duplications of what we see in the outer world. In both cases, they are renderings within an acquired medium, a medium grown up through tradition and skill – that of the artist and beholder.
