mills:

A Rye Field (1878), by Ivan Shishkin.

Looking at Distorte’s post of J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, I was reminded of an elemental part of painting: it does not recreate reality, but reality as we see it. It is for this reason that Impressionism was both controversial and triumphant: in abandoning one form of isomorphism (the geometric and linear fidelity that characterized more realistic painting), it pursued a facet of the visual that had less to do with reality and more to do with how humans see.

We tend to think that we see reality, but as Schrödinger emphasizes in Mind and Matter, what we see has much more to do with our optical cognition than with any qualities of the physical world. To take a common example, the resolution of our vision is such that we perceive objects as solid although they are almost entirely space, empty vacuum around very tiny elementary particles.

In other words: the world is almost entirely void, but you perceive solids and their surfaces in your cogitated (in some sense imagined) sensory way. Your perception is creative; it generates a visual dimension where reality offers only waves of energy, empty lattices of atoms, and the like. Schrödinger says that your “sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves.” 

Analogies to painting are not hard to conjure; as popular a scene as that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which the character Cameron seems lost in the composition of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte presents us with an example of the mysteries of scale and emergence. What is remarkable isn’t that Seurat’s pointillism achieves meaning in the aggregation of those tiny points of color, but that our entire visual world works that way.

(The scene works because such mysteries fascinate us all. How do the points of color come together to make a sky and the people beneath it? How do the moments of our days come together to make our lives? How do the cells of our bodies come together to make us? And how do the tiny and unreliable particles beneath it all combine into this, this world of wonder and meaning?).

Even such contemporary work as later Chuck Close (whom we might term “post-pointillist”) possess this fascination with creating something on our scale -human faces- from something much smaller: the almost cellular masses of color he arranges variously.

The Shishkin above seems at that scale to be a photograph, which is no truer to the fundamental (non-human, unperceived) reality than is a painting. Thus it too moves along this continuum of scales and styles, mass and motion, structure and sensation.

(See here for a larger version).

Yes. I have a camera on my cell phone now and I love to be able to take pictures at any moment, but it has taught me a little bit about how I use my eyes to interpret and not simply record. When I see something and go to take a photo of it, my little camera with no zoom and no manual focus rarely manages to see what I saw that inspired the photo in the first place.  The implications for human relationships is staggering and goes a long way to explain how race/class/gender divisions become carved into our landscapes from a very early age. Everything is subjective.