Cognitive Daily: Artists look different
Cognitive Daily alerts us to a study quantifying the different visual scanning techniques used by artists and non-artists. Here’s a figure from the study, tracking eye movements in yellow:
The trained artist (right) looks at more of the entire picture, while the non-artist (left) focuses on “key areas” – in this case, the swimmer, but similar results were obtained for non-human “key areas”. (The non-artist control group were psychologists – also highly trained to study and retain information).
If you have artistic training (including self-guided training), you may have noticed this shift in your own observational techniques. An artist considers the scene as a whole: focusing on the subject in relationship to its context, rather than in isolation. I especially appreciate the way the artist’s eyes follow the rhythm of the waves diagonally across the painting – identifying and enacting an important compositional pattern that the non-artist appears to completely ignore.
The jerky, flyaway eye movements of the nonartists, which seem to repeatedly slide right off the image, are not a surprise either. Artists plan for those effects when composing a work, carefully guiding the imagined viewer’s eyes within the painting’s field. A standard rule of thumb is to avoid a strong, unbalanced line, or any object ending right at the border of the composition, because they tend to draw the onlooker’s eye irrevocably off the edge of the artwork (sort of like a ship falling off a flat Earth).
In my experience, beginning artists, like this non-artist, tend to concentrate on the subject to the exclusion of everything else – leaving the setting out completely, neglecting to identify a light source, and focusing disproportionately on points of special interest, especially faces and eyes. This behavior makes perfect sense when you’re processing an image as efficiently as possible – you extract, categorize, and identify the most relevant objects in the scene, ignoring the irrelevant lighting and background. An apple remains red in bright sunlight, shadow, even colored light (color constancy). The ability to consistently recognize an object in both light and dark conditions, from different angles, is absolutely essential to survival; the ability to paint a convincingly realistic scene, not so much! At least not unless you’re an artist, and that’s your job.
Unfortunately, common errors in art result from excessive intepretation, and relying too weakly on what is directly observed. This is the basis for the “draw what you see” principle, and the human face is the best example. We all know exactly what a human face looks like, and (except for the occasional prosopagnostic among us) we each recognize hundreds or thousands of faces with great accuracy. But it’s almost impossible for the average person to draw a realistic human face. It’s not just a matter of manual dexterity: Cohen and Bennett (1997) showed that misperception of the object was a greater source of drawing error than decision-making, motor skills, or misperception of the drawing. It’s a matter of the brain interfering, telling you what a “nose” should look like, when in fact, a nose usually looks nothing like a “nose.” If you look at the noses in oil portraits from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, they are highly variable collections of blotches. And yet they all look like noses:
All of these examples are obviously noses, despite their varied shapes and lighting. Note how each example also readily appears to be human skin, despite some very unrealistic tones (mostly the effect of no-flash bad photography). To make it a little clearer how different each rendering is from the next, I’ve flipped them upside down, and removed the distracting color information:
I think it’s remarkable that we can identify each example as a nose, even in isolation from other cues like eyes or mouth. But in order to draw a nose, we have to stifle the powerful recognition process that screams “it’s a nose!” – and instead render contours and volumes. That’s not so easy. Of course, in this study the artists were not asked to actually execute a drawing – see this article for an interesting discussion of eye movements during the process of portrait drawing.
Even if the results of the eye-tracking study are not surprising, this is the first time I’ve seen them depicted so clearly. This sort of example could be quite helpful when teaching drawing – if you know why common errors of perception occur, you have an even better chance of learning to compensate.
A very interesting study, cicada. Those eye tracking movements are striking. I’m actually surprised by how very different the results were. I expected the artists’ scanning techniques to be more inclusive, of course, but not that much more inclusive.
Your careful consideration of composition and other technical tools, on the other hand, led to my speaking in tongues and my head spinning on my neck like a top. My dislike of art instruction followed me through all of my schooling, and professors were repeatedly frustrated by my insistence on not taking advice. Early on, I was more drawn to comic strips and then, later, those artists of the western canon who constantly ignored (or didn’t know) the “rules,” such as Caravaggio, Blake, Schiele, Rousseau, Klee or Bacon. It wasn’t long before I was turned onto “outsider” art, work produced by self-taught artists or institutionalized, clinically ill individuals.
I can produce work that satisfies all the requirements, but portrait commissions are among the most unpleasant and unfulfilling works I’ve had to deal with.
Not surprisingly, this distaste for “the rules” affects my teaching. You mention “errors of perception,” and this reminded me that, the few times I’ve taught to date, I’ve left the classroom feeling dirty, angry and generally depressed. I have a lot of trouble telling an art student they’re “doing it wrong,” when I find their “mistake” more interesting than the “right way.”
It is possible, I think, to incorporate formal/technical strengths into works that don’t consider them. It’s best when they happen organically, with little or no thought. I’ve always wondered why there haven’t been more studies done on the neurological workings of visual artists and other creative types, compared to one another and to non-creatives, for lack of a better term, as well. Early on I remember looking at objects and calling the color like I saw it. A person in a yellow shirt sitting under a blue awning on a sunny day appeared to be wearing a yellow-green shirt. An apple never stayed red for me, even before art class told me as much.
Anyway, it’s an excellent post, as always. I just had to exorcise my demons.
Oh my. You’re right – you HAVE been in New York too long! For the most part you are absolutely right; if I pushed your artist buttons, I did it in ignorance. (I’m a bit of an outsider myself.)
In this post I’m only adressing a basic level of art proficiency – the ability to draw what’s in front of you recognizeably (assuming you want to). I do NOT mean to imply that realism is the ultimate goal of art. But I think it’s a starting point, since only when you can represent things realistically can you begin to control the effects you generate through defying reality. I actually prefer my portraiture with a dollop of feverish distortion.
As a self-taught artist I don’t have many critical theory demons to exorcise. So I apologize if my loose use of terms like “composition” made you foam at the mouth. I was just thinking of some of my informal art tutoring experiences: students drawing distorted faces on lined paper without regard for background or lighting, and not understanding why their artwork doesn’t look “real.” At that basic level, mis-perception of the face they’re drawing can be a big problem. So is mis-perception of the color of the apple – you are totally right about that. But how many beginning artists have you seen reaching for purple and blue to paint an apple? They always go for the red (and then try to shade it with black) and have no idea why it doesn’t work, because “an apple is obviously red!” One of my non-artist friends told me she finally understood color (non) constancy when she saw the scene in “Girl With a Pearl Earring” where Scarlett Johanssen describes the color of the sky. Whatever works!
Anyway, I’m trying to say that we all have useful mental “rules” like color constancy and facial feature identification, that hinder our ability to observe objectively – not that we should follow any set of “rules” in the art we produce. I think Outsider artists have to learn to draw what they observe without mental interference, just like anyone else (except in rare cases like autistic savants, but that’s a different post). Outsiders produce idiosyncratic work, but I don’t believe for a second that’s because they don’t have control of, or insight into, their own observations.
As usual, your perceptive comment has made it painfully obvious how I could have written my post more clearly and carefully in the first place. I love it when you come over and throw down the art gauntlet and force me to defend myself! Thanks
“A dollop of feverish distortion” makes everything better.
Thanks for the response. I’m not sure I threw down the gauntlet so much as had a little temper tantrum, but I appreciate your humoring me.
You can have a temper tantrum here anytime.
PS. Klee is one of my favorite artists ever. “Twittering Machine” rocks!