An Artist Reveals How He Tricks the Eyes
A few years ago, James Gurney, a celebrated artist and author, stood before his easel to paint a deli in Poughkeepsie. Surveying the scene before him, he was immediately overwhelmed with literally millions of details. People strolled by. Insects fluttered overhead. Signs poked out from the store and up from the street. Every tree had about 200,000 leaves. ‘How am I going get all this down onto a 9 by 12 panel in a matter of hours?’ he wondered, despite having confronted this conundrum countless times before.
The task was a visual one: translate the three dimensional scene that your eyes and your brain compile into a flat picture that makes you and other viewers re-experience something similar. Your eyes play tricks on you. Your brain plays tricks on you. As an artist, Gurney knew, you have to trick them back or what you produce won’t look anything like what you thought you saw.
Although all good visual artists need to understand perception, Gurney has taken the study more seriously than most.
** By Ingrid Wickelgren on December 13, 2011
