13th Aug 2008
How Visual Art Changes Lives
Art can change the way we see the world so that our life is richer and fuller through our enhanced enhanced vision. The effect that art has on a person’s life is personal, and can be dramatic, but most certainly is physical.
For human beings who are normally sighted (including through corrective lenses), 60% of the brain’s space is dedicated to the sorting, storing and retrieving of visual data. Only 10% of the sense of visual perception is related to the eyes receiving and sending impressions of light to the brain. 90% of vision is based on stored data that our brains apply to make sense of the light images perceived by the eyes.
The primary perceptual sense for the overwhelming majority of human beings is sight. Plus, more people are visual learners or secondary visual learners than are aural or kinetic learners.
Human brains are stimulated by what is challenging and new. Of course, everyone who is normally sighted visually perceives 100% of the time that their eyes are open. When we see new images that we need to decipher, we add more visual data recognition to our brain’s databases. Recently, through new imaging techniques and discoveries neuroscience has proven that the healthy human brain can and does continue to grow, adding more information and understandings throughout life. The more a healthy brain is “nurtured” with stimulating challenges and new data the more it grows. Essentially, the more one understands, the smarter one is.
Science’s new understandings of how we see also rectify the notion that human babies are born blind. Actually, their eyes can see light impressions. However, newborns have not learned how to focus their eyes, and more significantly lack any visual data, which only begins to accumulate when they first open their eyes. Thus by about two weeks of age the baby has enough visual data that it can begin to recognize the human image it sees the most, usually the mother. Learning and sorting visual data continues through childhood, as a child learns to distinguish other faces, shapes, objects, colors, and then letters and numbers, etc.
It is easy to see how visual art and science, especially the mathematically based sciences such as physics, have changed how we see the world. These two disciplines have inspired each other and interacted throughout mankind’s history. J.M.W. Turner’s energetic use of light and atmosphere inspires the Impressionists to paint the then new discovery of light waves. If one can focus one the light energy in a painting, then one can focus on emotional energy; thus van Gogh paints and Freud analyzes. As Freud and his colleagues analyze looking at this side and that (reality is subjective), chemists and physicists delve into new understandings of matter, energy, space and time, and artists develop Surrealism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. While Pop Art commented on what seemed then as a visual barrage of culture, it also presaged the larger visual wave that now comes through, PC’s, cell phones, iPods, etc. Like the chicken and the egg, which comes first the art or the science remains debatable.
When an artist offers a unique and new way of seeing physical reality, as the Impressionists, Cubists, Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists did (and do for people newly exposed to their work, for instance: children), the viewer has new and visually valuable data that can now be stored and used to decode other images. This data can be used when seeing other art and also when seeing anything. For instance, for many people moving through the soup aisle of a supermarket there is a subliminal, if not recognized visual reminder of Andy Warhol’s work.
Art that is credited for changing our perception of the world has iconic value, which makes it valuable, and more valuable if it is a one of a kind piece. Almost every major art museum touts its most famous pieces to draw visitors, especially tourists. Tourism always helps support a local economy and a thriving local economy helps support its art museum(s). People, including tourists are drawn to the iconic, life changing visions provided by great art, for example: van Gogh’s Starry Night and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Warhol’s Gold Marilyn at MoMa.
The brain associates memories, including those of images cross referenced for later use. Thus when one sees an image of Marilyn Monroe on a magazine cover, her face is recognized from the brain’s stored data (memories) of previously viewed images of Monroe, possibly including some created by Andy Warhol. Creating cross references is part of how the brain grows. It could also possibly account for the higher prices collectors are willing to pay for minor works of art my artists who created iconic and visual reality changing art, like van Gogh, Picasso and Warhol. When looking at an early and minor Warhol work our brains naturally reference and even compare it to the other works of his we have seen.
That art can visually inform innovative ways of seeing may also account for some of the skyrocketing prices recently for Contemporary Art. Our technological ability to rapidly share images keeps newer images in demand in our quest to see more and learn (brain expansion).
Return Ye Children
Genesis: Sunset- Sunrise series
24 ¼ x 36 ¼ inches, acrylic on Masonite
Texts used for strokes: Genesis 1-2:7, Deut. 6:4, Psalm 90 frame
Places where technological or scientific learning and experimentation are concentrated tend to also be places where new visual art, including theories are born or nurtured. For instance, Expressionism really came out the geological area that is predominantly comprised of Germany and Austria, as did much of early psychology and also what became modern physics. However, both the scientists and the artists basically moved to the Northeastern USA due to the growth of the Nazi party. Currently, as China and India burst with technological learning this is accompanied by an outpouring of inventive Contemporary Art. Historically, military might not spur on a society’s economic prosperity as much as it’s thriving concentration of scientific study and innovative visual art.
Seeing art, any art which is new to us, will increase a person’s visual data for future reference, thus expanding the brain – but so will seeing new sights and foreign cultures.
But, art is capable of more. Art can show us new and unique ways to see. Van Gogh’s expressive, energetically charged paintings show how places and people can be charged with feeling. Pop threw current culture back at people, challenging the viewer to make choices, and see the new visual media filled landscape. Word Art deals with how we bring extrinsic meaning, memories and imagery into our moments of now. The art of the great artists who originated these artistic theories and understandings present more than new visual images, they present new ways of visual understanding. That kind of data can enhance future visual perceptions, and so is personally life changing.
For information on Judy Rey Wasserman’s new theory of Post Conceptual Art, which uses symbols for every stroke, including the branch of UnGraven Image art, click on the title below to download the free PDF of “The Manifesto of Post Conceptual UnGraven Image Art Theory – A Painting’s Meaning is Inherent in its Strokes”.
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