S H Bean ~ Photographer

What do things look like when we do not look at them?

By S H Bean on August 7, 2014

If as Ruskin noted: “the perception of solid form is entirely a matter of experience” the same may be attributed to the light and color on (or around) an object. As an artist I am interested in this proposition and in the infinite ambiguity of visual information in a scene.

There is a difference between seeing (profane vision) and perception. It is perception that provides for the “gradual discovery of appearances” not profane vision and it takes knowledge or perception and not profane vision to know that in the early morning or late afternoon the “sunlighted grass is…yellow” or the shadow black.

We know that the Impressionists had great difficulty at deciding what things looked liked…..so perhaps as Berkeley said the world as we see it is a construct slowly built up by everyone of us based on knowledge and experience.

Quotes from : Art and Illusion, E H Gombrich. Phaidon 1996