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See What?
Have you ever done one of those tests to see if you are colorblind? It shows a whole series of dot in various colors. If you aren’t colorblind you can see a number appear amid the dots. If you are colorblind, you can’t. Why is that? Because your eye’s retinal cones aren’t developed properly and so the color doesn’t register with the brain. In other words, you couldn’t see that color even if you wanted to.
Trompe l’oeil
The history of art is filled with examples of the artist trying to fool your eye. As a matter of fact, there is an entire genre of art called ‘Fool The Eye’, better known by it’s French translation, ‘trompe l’oeil’. The goal is to make you think you see something that, in fact, is not what you actually see.
Pere Borrell del Caso, Escaping Criticism, 1874
Andrea Mantegna, Oculus (window to the sky), Palazzo Ducale, La Camera degli Sposi (The Wedding Chamber), (1467?-1474)
Surrealism
Another movement in art that uses the mind’s initial inability to comprehend is Surrealism. Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte are two who come to mind. There goal isn’t to fool you into thinking you see something you don’t. It’s to see one thing, then another and not easily understand how or why they go together. It’s that visual and mental dance of confusion that gives the art it’s power.
Salvador Dali – Three Sphinxes of Bikini – 1947
Rene Magritte, Empire of Light, 1950
What is Possible
The whole point of these and other works of art is to make you think about what it is you are seeing. To be fooled or confounded or challenged.
It’s telling about artists that so many like to fool us. Artists are great at challenging our pre-conceived notions of what is art, what is real, what is good, what is beautiful. Unfortunately, many of us respond to not immediately understanding something we see by cutting off our curiosity, our wonder, our open-mindedness. We judge and are done.
But if one is willing, in art and in life, to experience rather than judge, to allow for confusion and the unknown instead of demanding all answers immediately, then the rewards can be great.
Among the rewards are delight in discovering new ideas, enlightenment about how others see the world and inspiration for your own creative journey. And those rewards are definitely worth it in my book. How about you?
Drawing and commentary © 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Quote by Robertson Davies, 1913-1995, Canadian Novelist and Playwright