To a great extent, our perception of his paintings is determined by this kind of knowledge. We can visualize him sitting in his garden or on the seashore, in front of his easel, painting what he saw on the spot. Some people today reject this approach as being 'elitist' - we have a right to respond anyway we want - but wouldn't we be missing much in the works of artists like Monet, Picasso, Duchamp, Pollack, DeKooning and others without the words of the art historians and critics? When we discover the way Monet painted a picture, the kinds of colors he used and the way the brushstrokes were applied, we learn to see 'broken color' as well as sunlight and atmosphere in his garden at Argenteuil or the beach at St. We would want to have some idea about how we were expected to respond.
#Describe someone becoming tremulous professional#
But even beyond that, if we are serious about art, we would want to know what the professional art historians and critics say about the history and milieu of the work, the biography of the artist and the form or the ideas underlying the work. That is how we know what is going on in a Persian, Chinese, or Medieval European painting, what myth or historical event is being depicted, who is being represented and where the scene represented is located. Often, we actually see what we have learned from what we have read or been told. We have to learn to see what they are about. But beyond such perception, in most societies, pictures are ways of articulating experience they are objectifications of personal and social value and therefore require knowledge in order to be understood. Not only do we learn to see what we are describing on the basis of what we presume the picture to be our perception changes when our understanding of the picture changes.Įven the ability to recognize and describe the shapes, colors, people, animals and depth in pictures is culturally mediated although the extent to which this is so is controversial. The perception of pictures, like all perception, is constructive before it is descriptive because it is built on the assumptions we possess before coming to the picture. We select from the same available information, but create different kinds of significance. They are 'projections' or 'readings into' what is 'in' the picture. Because they develop out of differing kinds of knowledge, perceptions involve interpretation and do not passively represent visual information. Our perceptions differ because they are derived from different personal and cultural histories.
There is no 'objective' seeing, no such thing as an 'innocent eye'. Beyond primitive visual recognition, all perception is mediated.
This is because what we see is not a copy of what is in front of us but is rather the result of a dynamic interaction between ourselves and the picture. Even though we can see the characteristics we describe and although the same visual information which is available to us is available to anyone else who is standing where we are, everyone will literally not see the same thing. He might be asking, "What is there to be seen in the work of Van Gogh or Picasso which would make it worth so much money?" All these kinds of 'seeing' can be called metaphoric, subjective or personal opinion rather than pure sensory experience, but they are not necessarily imaginary or fantasy and, in a very fundamental way, they do determine what we actually see. The questioner might want to know what we saw in, say, Elsworth Kelly's 'Red, Blue and Yellow', implying that he saw nothing of significance in the object. We might explain what we saw as an indication of what the artist was feeling when he painted the picture, his state of mind or what he was trying to convey. We could describe the feelings expressed by the people being represented. What did we see in the painting that was being communicated to us? Then we might answer by describing the mood of the picture or our feelings when we looked at it.
More likely, we would assume that the questioner really wanted to know what we saw in the painting that made it significant to us. If someone asks us, "What do you see in that painting?", we might answer by describing what we saw represented or what appeared to be happening in the picture. Leo Segedin | | Print this essay Paper given on Apat the Phillips Gallery, Barrier Island Group For the Arts, Sanibel, Florida Do You See What I See? How People See Pictures
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