Visual form agnosia is the inability to recognize familiar objects. The problem isn't just being able to name something that you see; it's understanding the meaning of them, recognizing what they are.
Roses from my video Flower Painting in the Wild
A person with such a condition might look at a bunch of roses and say it's "a cluster of convoluted pink forms held up by vertical green attachments."
People with visual form agnosia typically have otherwise normal eyesight, intelligence, memory, attention, and language ability.
Scientists have studied patients with this condition, often caused by a brain injury. These studies have yielded insight about the localization of functions in the brain and the pathways followed by neural activity as images are decoded. Recognition of objects seems to happen in the sides of the brain, not along the top of the brain.
That led me to wonder if there's a resemblance between visual form agnosia and the particular mode an artist shifts into while doing a painting. That is, don't we have to shut off the "naming engine" or the "categorization machine" in order to really see what we're painting?
Perhaps one day scientists will study what happens in an artist's brain at various stages of the process of drawing and painting.
5 comments:
Jim, some day I want to pull together the varieties of machine vision and compare them to the different modes of visual art. Seeing values, edges, contrast, shape, etc. from a simple garage door electric eye, to night light motion detectors to self-driving vehicles. These brain "fails" are an even better window into how we see.
I think that is one of the practice assignments in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"; you copy a drawing that has been turned upside down so that you cannot recognize as easily what is that you are drawing. I think there was another where you draw an object and name every part as you do, and draw the same object without naming everything (although I don't remember the technique recommendations for how to not think the names).
I think that is one of the practice assignments in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"; you copy a drawing that has been turned upside down so that you cannot recognize as easily what is that you are drawing. I think there was another where you draw an object and name every part as you do, and draw the same object without naming everything (although I don't remember the technique recommendations for how to not think the names).
This is very interesting, I always have think that, when I'm spending a lot of time on a drawing, he start to be faded into a nosensical or no usual logical figure, like some abstract form... I'ts nice know that I'm not losing progress, I tought was a flaw.
I know that spot well, F Scott Fitzgerald was married in the stafford in the far left corner, behind you is the peabody library which houses a very old printing of Canterbury tales and I worked at the Walters a long time. Love this idea of journaling with images. really admire your skill and work and knowledge.
Thanks for sharing,
Sean from Baltimore
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