Seeing, and Seeing As
Here's one of those bits of theory which seems obvious, once you know it.
What is this?
Yep, it's a circle.
And this?
A circle with two dots in it.
Now this ...
... is a face.
Show it to a baby of the right age and the baby will smile back at it. Which shows just how early we learn to do this.
Of course, we know that it isn't a face: it's a circle with two dots and a curved line.
This is how we learn to navigate the world. We take all the visual (and other) stimuli and make sense of them. We 'see as'.
Try to unlearn this skill just for a moment, and then walk into a room. What do you see?
What hits the back of your eye is a swirling mix of colours and half shapes. The things which are most important to us will dominate what we see. There will be some things which will be quite invisible to us even though, in one sense, they are plainly visible.
But we will see the room as something like a photograph, with everything where it should be (although there will still be those things which we are simply blind to until they are pointed out). Artists have been aware of this for some time. Consider this painting.
.jpg)
Actually, this isn't a face either, but we need to take that up elsewhere
Cocktail Party Fact
Impress your friends by pointing out that the clarinet in question is the old-fashioned version, and not the instrument played by Benny Goodman and Woody Herman.
Irritate your friends for life by telling them that the artist has included a cartoon sketch of his little dog's face just below the clarinet's mouthpiece.
He hasn't, but forevermore they will see that little dog there.
And so will you. Oops.
Clarinet with a Bottle of Rum
Georges Braques
1911
What on earth is going on here?
Imagine yourself spending a musical evening with friends and a few drinks. You step into the room ...
This is what Georges Braques has portrayed here. You can judge how successful you think he has been but in essence, he has tried to show what we see, and not what we see as.