Cheerskep: > Note: I'm not talking about the visual image of something you're seeing > right in front of you as you paint. I'm talking, in effect, about two other > kinds of images: Memory images, and imagined images.
What's the difference? Are you thinking of the memory of specific objects (your first house, e.g.) and images of things you never actually witnessed? For me, they are not very dissimilar, except to the extent that for "imagined" images, I can add or remove discrete objects at will, whereas in a "memory" image, I would feel constrained to recall only objects that I remember being present. But in both cases, they are imagined scenes. > My question is, how stable, how precisely-in-every-detail, reconjurable are > those images? Is it, say, as though someone asked you to pull out a given > photograph, and you can do it, utterly unchanged? It's never stable until I put it on the paper or canvas, even with the model in front of me. I can draw the figure pretty well, but when I draw a figure or object solely from imagination, it always looks wrong in some way. When I draw from the model, all of my previous drawings and manual skills enable me to see more clearly and transcribe to the canvas more accurately (i.e., to make the mark I want to make). I posted a message to this list about a year ago in which I mused on the fact that our daily experiences all happen in motion, and that we seem to tacitly accept on a degree of sharpness or focus, but that photographs and other ways of stopping a continuous action demonstrate that a lot of what seems to be sharp focus is actually a blurred behavior that our minds grasp as focused. Similarly, binocular vision sends two slightly different images to our brain, but we see the image as a single whole, with almost no sense of duplicated images or confusion. That strikes me as somewhat analogous to what you are asking about. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
