Vision sciences and the visual arts are more closely linked than many might think.
As optometrists and opticians, we tend to think of vision in terms of neural representation of focused images of different objects emitting light of a range of intensities (amplitudes) and hues (wavelengths). We forget the perceived image is largely created by the brain and is far more detailed and filled with meaning (both semantic and experiential) and way more representative than the aberrant and inverted light image projected onto the retina.
This perceptual process has allowed artists over the years, knowingly or unknowingly, to create visual art of interest. Even the most rudimentary of cave drawings are easily recognisable. Renaissance artists developed skills of perspective (monocular cues) to recreate three dimensional spaces on flat canvas.
Later, Escher was able to break these rules to simulate impossible spaces or paradoxes, such as his famous eternal staircase. Arcimboldo was able to construct whole ambiguities from individual unrelated components. The Law of Pragnatz, which states how the visual system will tend towards an image with most redundancy, explains how skilled artists can create realistic portraits from individual units that the brain will combine into a whole – as did the pointillists such as Suerat. A direct challenge to the expected percept, such as Magritte’s massive room-filling apple or any of Dali’s images, set up a conflict in the viewer who is not expecting the image presented. Op artists like Bridget Riley deliberately used geometric visual confusion to disturb the viewer.
Only occasionally is art mentioned in scientific studies, and it is usually concerning how eye disease has influenced an artist’s output, such as discussions of Monet’s tendency to bluer flowers as his cataract progressed. Good to see, therefore, in last month’s Ophthalmology Journal a paper showing how training medical students in art observation techniques significantly improves their ophthalmology observation, description and recording skills.
