Hello All,
Here's a short art lesson about how we can use the technological tools to change our perceptions.
The first premise is that we see with our minds. When I teach people the basics of drawing they often confuse what they know about an object with what they are actually seeing. For example in a still life a student will draw a symbolic apple, the one that they hold in their mind's eye. This apple is not the same as the one we are looking at, which is specific to the environment it is in. So I will ask the student to shut off what you know about apples and to look without input from elsewhere. We do this by asking very simple questions. What is the shape of the light area ? and the dark area? What are the exact colors of each area? Follow the edge where the apple meets the background, what is the nature of that line? And on and on.
I'm now requesting that we construct a more complex picture in order to expand our imaginations about the scene we may know well. I have drawn and painted the view many times. In it's familiarity I decided to play with a slight abstraction of the original photograph. I transferred the image into Publisher and began to collage portions into different magnifications. I then reassemble the work into many windows making a new wholeness based on the artful unifying of the fragments (see top picture). When I finally manipulated it to my aesthetic liking, I painted the resulting image. This changing of view points is closer to the way we naturally see. I thought you would enjoy the effect.
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