Visual Perception
One might assume that to make any form of art one must have good eye sight. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many great works of art have been created by artists known to have had various forms of visual impairment. Their disability has enhanced their work giving it an individuality we come to recognise. Auguste Renoir was shortsighted (myopia), his landscapes blurred in contrast to his more detailed portraits. Claude Monet is known to have suffered from cataracts and thought to have had a form of colour blindness. This affected his colour perception and visual acuity, His colours often look muddy with yellowish tones and his paintings slightly blurry representing the world as he perceived it.
"I am convinced that these differences in vision are of no importance. One sees what one wants to see. It is false, and that falsity is the foundation of art.”
Edgar Degas
In this piece of work colour perception and myopia (shortsightedness) are used to help explore the subjective nature of human vision and enhance the viewers experience and understanding of it.
Colour Perspectives
Colour perception has both a biological and a psychological component.
The distribution and density of light-sensitive cone cells in the eye varies across people with “normal vision”, biologically causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.
As well as our individual biological make-up, colour perception is also about how our brain interprets colour. The perception of colour occurs mainly inside our heads, and so is subjective and prone to personal experience. Gender, age and language can all affect how we individually see colour and shades.
Here the medical condition red/green (propantopia-type) colour blindness – a defect or absence of cone cells in the retina that are sensitive to specific colours – is used to demonstrate colour-perception differences between individuals.
Colour blindness is an inherited sex-linked condition, affecting 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women in Europe.
