![]() The idea of trying to capture the broad, simple masses of a scene is a valid artistic enterprise. What I’m questioning is not the artistic tradition of impressionism, but rather our habits of thinking about it. Maybe it varies widely from person to person. Perhaps eye-tracking and fMRI studies can help us to better understand what really happens cognitively in the first few second of visual perception. What happens in the first few seconds for you? I don’t know how other people see, because I’m stuck inside my own head. I’ve altered the photo to try to simulate this experience by sharpening and heightening these disconnected elements. ![]() ![]() Small individual elements, such as a sign, a face, or a doorknob, take on particular importance immediately, perhaps because the left-brain decoding process (seeing in symbols) is so heavily engaged in the first few seconds. What I see in the first two or three seconds are a few extremely detailed but disconnected areas of focus. If I’m really honest about my own experience of vision, my first-glance take on a scene is nothing at all like a Monet. Does our first impression really look like an impressionist painting? I believe there are some assumptions here that need examining. Here’s an “impressionist” take on the same scene (using the Photoshop filter “paint daubs” and a heightened color saturation). Here’s an unaltered photo of a street scene. Let me see if I can simulate this idea using a photographic image. We’re told that this is how the eye perceives on the first glance. Recognizable small details are conspicuously left out. Typically, “impressionist” images have high-chroma dabs of color that resolve into a larger blurry image. The first-glance impact is usually represented by an image with simple masses of color, painted with big brushstrokes without much detail, often with soft edges between the masses, such as this haystack painting by Monet. The World Book Encyclopedia says that “impressionist painters try to show what the eye sees at a glance.” Some people define “impressionism” as an approach to painting where the goal is to capture the first perception of a scene. Cambridge Music/Sketch Event this Sunday.
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