In this new video, I paint a green frog from life. I'll need him to hold still over an hour. Will he do it?
I consider the question of the frog’s Umwelt or its particular viewpoint of its environment, and I pose the philosophical question of whether we can ever understand the subjective experience or the cognitive ability of any animal, given that it lives in a very different perceptual environment.
---
"I Paint a Frog and Wonder What He Sees" on YouTube
The "in this video" link goes to a cicada video, not the frog video. I enjoyed both of them.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Hopefully link is fixed now.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, James. Do you have any special procedures/precautions when using cadmium colours in the wild? I'm trying to work out how I feel about cadmium as I build up my paint box.
ReplyDeleteLove the Beston passage. Love the painting. Yes, different equipment, different starting points for participating in the one Life.
ReplyDeleteAll my philosophical ponderings get diverted into wishing I could find an animal to hold still for me that long...
ReplyDeleteI love these videos where you share quotes and deeper thoughts with us, I find it really inspiring.
ReplyDeleteWonderful thoughts and sketch! as always, James. "Umwelt" is actually the German word for environment. :-)
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've learned about amphibians, their sight lacks acuity, and many of them only "see" or register things when the things around them move. So you might have been a static object in his field of vision while you were painting him (or maybe you registered as too big to be considered good prey..). How animals see their world is a really fascinating topic!
Jim: Can you tell us (me) more about your short musing about critters and how and why we cannot breech their world. As always, your video and comments are educational.
ReplyDeleteBroker 12. I recommend the podcast "Stuff to Blow Your Mind" and their episode about the cognitive abilities of animals.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.stitcher.com/podcast/how-stuff-works/stuff-to-blow-your-mind/e/76266772
They reflect on the larger issue of behavior scientists leaving behind the notions of sociobiology, which tended to underestimate the interior lives of animals.
Julia, yes, from what I gather, "umwelt" can be translated as environment, but it has a specific meaning in this context, because it's not an environment we all share, but rather a particular "bubble world" conjured by the sensory apparatus of each individual organism.
Clem, I often replace cadmium red with pyrrole substitutes, and I try to be careful when cleaning the palette. Cadmium yellow light can be replaced by Hansa or Azo yellow.
I just started reading Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, which begins with the same Beston quote.
ReplyDeleteSomeday I want to make a study of animal vs machine vision. There's a similar evolution from simple light-sensitive cells to eyes like ours, and it all also relates to the different components of visual art--shape, color, contrast, line, etc.
Garage door openers detect motion somewhat like your frogs, and so on.