What Brain Science Teaches Us About Painting-PART 1

James Gurney shares how new insights in visual perception and neuroscience can help us as artists

- James Gurney

Margaret S. Livingstone, a neurobiology professor at Harvard, said something different." She's right: we have a professional interest in being aware of how we see, and we are experienced at translating what we see into techniques for drawing and painting.

Understanding how we see is an essential key to painting well. Fortunately, in recent years there has been great progress in the scientific understanding of visual perception. In this article I'll share some of the new insights and consider how they can help us as painters.

DO ARTISTS SEE DIFFERENTLY? 

Does everyone with normal vision see about the same? It's hard to be sure how our vision compares to others, because each of us is locked inside the prison of our own consciousness. But experimental data has revealed some general patterns. Artists do see differently-differently from non-artists, differently from each other and differently from cameras.

Let's consider each of these distinctions in turn. Trained artists, compared to non-artists, spent less time looking at the focal points, such as a face or a figure, and more time scanning the overall image, according to an eye-tracking study conducted by Stine Vogt and Svein Magnussen in Norway.