Monday, July 20, 2020

Painting a Frog and Wondering about Umwelt


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.
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10 comments:

Knits and Weaves said...

The "in this video" link goes to a cicada video, not the frog video. I enjoyed both of them.

James Gurney said...

Thanks. Hopefully link is fixed now.

Clem said...

Thanks 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.

Steve Gilzow said...

Love the Beston passage. Love the painting. Yes, different equipment, different starting points for participating in the one Life.

Warren JB said...

All my philosophical ponderings get diverted into wishing I could find an animal to hold still for me that long...

Virginia Fhinn said...

I love these videos where you share quotes and deeper thoughts with us, I find it really inspiring.

Anonymous said...

Wonderful thoughts and sketch! as always, James. "Umwelt" is actually the German word for environment. :-)
From 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!

broker12 said...

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.

James Gurney said...

Broker 12. I recommend the podcast "Stuff to Blow Your Mind" and their episode about the cognitive abilities of animals.
https://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.

Mark Martel said...

I just started reading Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, which begins with the same Beston quote.

Someday 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.