What we see and what we perceive are two different things.
According to Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, our brains filter out everything unnecessary for our survival. The things we think we see are more like icons on your computer screen; representatives of things we have encoded in our brains. There is an interesting Ted Talk about this: Do we see reality as it is?
I have been aware of this phenomena to a certain extent for years. As someone who paints realistically, I know that once my brain has labeled what I see, I can no longer see it without bias. If I know a chair, which is in shadow, has four legs for support, I might paint what I know to be true and not what I am actually seeing, which is part of only three legs that reflect some of the light. There is the need to identify individual objects with clear delineation of form, even when they are grouped in such a way that in reality, you can not distinguish them from their surrounding. Equally true are issues around perspective. We just want to paint that desk as a rectangle even though to our eyes it’s a trapezoid.
Artists use tricks to see more accurately what is in front of them. We blur our vision to see the values better. We look at our paintings in a mirror or turn the canvas upside down to see it fresh and new. But I have found that the best way to render something correctly is to have no idea what it is that you are painting! Simply observe the color shapes and the changes in the edges and the values of those shapes. If you record that accurately, voila! a perfect painting!, or at least a painting that mirrors what your eyes are seeing.
You can try this without painting. Look at something near you or look at the whole room. If you can, pretend you were just beamed here from another planet. You have never seen it before. You have no idea what it is. Look at the colors, the values, the edges and let what you see just be, without any explanation or identification.
Were you able to do this? Did you see something new or something that had been unnoticed before? I’d love to hear back from you!
Maybe not knowing can get us closer to the truth.
Lorena Pugh 