A Photomontage of a Painting as Seen During Visual Fixation

Leonardo,Vol. 13, pp. 38-39. Pergamon Press 1980. Printed in Great Britain A PHOTOMONTAGE OF A PAINTING AS SEEN DURING VISUAL FIXATION William J. Kelly* 1. Amongst visual artists there has been some discussionthough more often than not general acceptance-of concepts related to how the eyes move and what they see when looking at a painting. In the past 10to 15 yearsthere has been some important research carried out in these areas. The use of highly sophisticated equipment has made it possibleto test long-held hypotheses and to arrive at certain factual explanations. Artists have long known that the eyes do not see everythingin front of them with fineclarity. Art students, in the first stagesof their studies are told that composition isthe necessarystructure of a painting and that it ‘...may be achieved in many different ways: by geometric means, by lines or curves, or by areas related in value or in hue, which lead our eyes from portion to portion as they construct the image in our brain’ [I]. The history of art informs one of the use of one-, two- and three-point perspectiveaswell as of the time-honoured work of artists who employed compositional devices, strong contrasts, gestures and facial expressions in order to direct the eye movements of viewers. Numerous devices have been employed to provide various ‘excitation points’ upon which eyes may fix or, alternatively, paths along which they may move. 2. The information of painters (the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of making a picture) has mainlycome through two channels. Thefirstisthechannel of convention: Thisishow we doit. The second is the empirical trial-and-error approach In this instance how far away from ‘ X should mark ‘I“be located? The results sometimesdiffer but little. However, when the results of the empirical approach are accepted by others, the results may ultimately becomeconventions. In this paper I present somebasic scientificinformation underlying vision, and I employ some of it to the making of a photomontage. The problem that I posed for myself, in view of the results that have been adopted as conventions , was stated as follows: How can I represent by means of a photomontage what I see when I look at a painting? (An approach that is different from mine has been described by P. Trevor-Roper [2].) 3. The approach I have chosen will seem strange to most artists because they are accustomed to take vision for *Artist and teacher, School of Art, The Victorian College of the Arts, 234 St. Kilda Road, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Received 7 April 1979) granted and to overlook the details of the visual process. It has been stated, for example, that for a painter ‘visionis conditioned by the artistic conventions which he inherits’ [3].It is true that painters realizethat the visual processis complex. Most do not know about the fast saccadic movements of the eyes when they are focussed on a point and how little the eyes seebetween saccadeswhen theyare fixed on a portion of a painting. Theexperimentson eyemovementsperformed by A. L. Yarbus indicate that during a period of fixation, which may be a fraction of a second or at most a few seconds, only a small area of a 2-dimensional visual field is seen clearly [4]. Thus, generally,only a small part of a picture being viewed appears distinct during a period of fixation. The reason that a picture is not seen with uniform clarity during fixationis that the retina of the human eyeis not uniformly sensitive. The retina contains photoreceptors called conesand rods [5].In the central location of the retina, directly behind the lens, there is a slight depression called thefovea, which isdensely populated by cones. The concentration of conesdrops sharply and that of the rods increases with increase in distance from the foveaoutinto the surrounding retinal layer [6].Thecones crowded in the fovea react to light to provide the high resolution in seeing‘clearly’in bright light in the interval between saccades [7, 81. Furthermore, color is perceived only when the cones are activated by light. The rods populating the relatively large surrounding portion of the fovea respond sensitively only under dim illumination and do not result in color perception. Consequently, when a picture...