| | This should be a fun exercise:  What in the world is this thing:
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It's fair to assume that your knee-jerk response would be "a face." Okay, I'll go along with that, it's a face. Well, actually it's a picture of a face.
| Or more accurately, a cluster of pixels that resemble a drawing of a face, encoded digitally and transmitted as electronic information from our server in Carlsbad, California.
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 | Well, really, it's a signal processed in the occipital lobe of your brain, sent by the optic nerve which is reacting to light that . . . but never mind all that, we'll call it a face.
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| Now, what's this?
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| Or this? |
| If this shape is half of a mustache...
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| | ...then is this really a necktie
decorated with a facial-hair motif? |
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| | Somehow, the identity of an image or object changes when the relationships between visual elements change. A bagel has a hole through it, but wouldn't it cease to be a bagel if that hole were filled with dough? Is the bagel defined by the dough or by the empty space?
A viewer sees a work of art as a whole that is more than the sum of its lines, or color, or size, or the space it occupies, or the materials used to construct it.
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| Taking notice of how the artist has chosen to orchestrate the various elements that compose a piece can lend insight into what the piece might be trying to suggest to a viewer, or why a piece of art evokes a particular response from you. A piece could suggest something as specific and figurative as a person's smiling face, or it could suggest something esoteric and subjective, such as the indescribable mood evoked by a painting that stands twenty feet tall in front of you, while not necessarily depicting a recognizable thing. |
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