How do we perceive art ?
Art is a dance between the painter and the viewer. The viewer leads the dance, he transforms mere strokes upon the canvas into a three dimensional world. His interpretation are private, intimately private.
Interpretations are driven by convergence of psychology and human visual perception. The artist provides the canvas and you add your interpretations, thereby adding meaning to the painting. The is the quintessential process of perceiving art.
Psyche is beholden to viewer’s personal experiences, knowledge, and emotions. You see what you already know.
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend” – Robertson Dave
Prime example of human visual perception is a phenomenon known as pareidolia, making meaningful interpretations from abstract inputs. Like seeing faces everywhere.
What I perceive are not the crude and ambiguous cues that impinge from the outside world onto my eyes and my ears and my fingers. I perceive something much richer—a picture that combines all these crude signals with the wealth of past experience… Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.
Reference : Chris Frith in his 2007 book “Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World
The question Kandel raises in his book is :
Can any aspects of art or art in entirety be studied objectively ? Can creative interpretation be explained logically?
His answer is that brain has two approaches for processing information. There is a bottoms up approach and tops down approach.
In reductive terms – Tops down is framework based on our experiences/knowledge while bottoms up approach is inherent to computational circuitry of the brain. This idea is similar to First order / second order thinking articulated in the “Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman”
Physiology of visual processing ( simplified )
Input from retina to lateral geniculate to visual cortex. The output goes to via two pathway:
1. ‘Where’ pathway which is concerned where an object is located in external work ( somewhere in parietal lobe)
2. ‘What’ pathway which is concerned with what the object is ( it uses subjective memory ) and simulates hippocampus
Right before lateral geniculate this information is also channeled to amgydala where emotive response to the image is generated. It is the reason why you ‘feel‘ after seeing something.
Example of bottoms up process :
This is a painting titled scream by Edvard munch
It is silent yet you can actually feel what the artist is trying to convey. The sense of terror is evident from looking at the first instance.
Example of top down process :
Here, you cannot just ‘know’ what the painting is about.
It could be just about anything.
My interpretation is that since there are multiple squares inside a big square in primary colors. it could be about fibonacci sequence. Your interpretation would vary. You might see symmetry, flatness or harmony.
These are Piet Mondrian’s own words, so feel free to interpret them as you wish.
I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so
that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external Foundation!) of things.(Mondrian 1914)
You lead the dance.
MEDLEY OF DISCORDANT THOUGHTS 