Do you see the world as it really is?

24 August 2011

Do you really see the world as it is, or as you have been conditioned to see it?

The painting is a massive one hanging in the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. The simple principle of perspective means that you can make it look quite small when close to the camera (or viewer).

Just in case you are curious as to the reason for the painting. It depicts a great victory of Napoleon against the Russian army in 1807. It was painted in 1891. Purchased in 1893. It would have been quite a job to paint and to transport anywhere!

When I was younger, I remember my mother explaining some things about painting and art. When Europeans first came to Australia and started painting the trees, they often painted them not as they appeared but as they were used to painting trees back in England. Australian trees can be more twisted, irregular and sparse.

In High School I enjoyed technical drawing and Engineering Science. My mother also explained that painting in perspective was not commonly done for many centuries in Europe either. People painted more like an isometric diagram, where depth is drawn with parallel lines. In perspective pictures, you have vanishing points so lines converge further away from the observer. It is the logical consequence of things appearing smaller the further away they are. For example the Sun being 400 times larger than the moon but 400 times further away so they are the same size. When drawing objects that have parts close to you and parts further away, the lines need to converge to a 'vanishing point'. An example is a railway line disappearing in the distance where the tracks appear to get closer to each other.

What fascinates me is that the objective world out there is quite a different thing to how we see it and model it in our minds. Even painters and drawers who were trying to objectively capture just what they directly saw, often didn't actually succeed. They saw what they wanted to see. They saw what they have been conditioned to observe. Fascinating and sobering – it happens for more than just visual imaging but also how we model the working of people, society, the world and the supernatural.