On Dec 8, 2008, at 12:07 PM, William Conger wrote:
This is the old trick of portrait painting, too, to keep the features a bit vague to allow the viewer to see what is desired (good or bad).
Once again, I'd like to bring up the fact that in normal, everyday experience, we perceive objects and events in flux, not static and stationary. We see objects and people blurred by movement, both ours and theirs, and we construct a perception that we accept as sufficiently sharp and "focused" as we need. Only the camera can give us the famous person's face with the lips perpetually twisted in an idiotic sneer, or with one eye closed, or the hair sticking straight up from the scalp. Only the camera can give us the depth-of-field blur (which is exploited in movies when the camera assistant, called the focus-puller, shifts the sharp focus from a foreground speaker to a rear-ground speaker as the dialogue switches from one to the other). In everyday experienced, we rarely notice the depth-of-field phenomenon because we use our intent to look at the near or far object to switch the focus of our vision; in film, the shifting of the camera focus leads the viewer's change in interest. (The only time we can be aware of this blurring, I think, is when we play the parlor trick of putting our finger near our nose and looking at it with each eye so that we see the shifting of the background--i.e., a parallax--but which must be out of focus because of how near our finger is to our eyes.)
As I said, in our daily experience, we perceive everything with *sufficient* sharpness to satisfy most purposes. I've been near- sighted since the 6th grade, so I am aware of the blurring of focus. Also, I often don't hear people's speech clearly (which I attribute to lazy listening, because my hearing is within normal range). I jokingly say, "I mumble when I listen."
The point: Art helps us see the world by means of its fictitiousness. An Italian artist paints a blurry sfumato to suggest atmospheric perspective while a Dutch artist paints a painstakingly sharp still life of game, fowl, and fruits. Another Italian paints a small dog on a leash with blurred front and rear legs, showing them in rapid motion. All are visual fictions of one kind or other, because they freeze and capture a fleeting instant of a blurred event which we perceive clearly.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
