|Flamenco by Ann Trusty, oil painting, 48 x 60.
The science community is busy investigating the mechanisms and
processes by which people are able to perceive the world around them and make
visual sense of it. There are many basic questions still to be answered. For
example, a six-year-old possesses the mundane ability to distinguish things that
are out-of-place at a glance-something the most powerful computers can't do.
How does the brain interpret a vast amount of seemingly unrelated visual
stimuli and cohere a picture of the world from it? Is it just in the immense
amount of neuronal (yep, it's a word) connections or their interrelated
connectivity, the sum of all individual specialized functions adding up to a
Current research points to the possibility that the latter is the
case. Simply wiring up an immense network of computers won't do the job. It is
how the information gathering and processing parts relate to each other and at
the same time to the whole system that gives us our unique ability to be
sentient. No computer can do this now nor likely will be able to in the near
future. Scientists are pursuing a parallel track of visual investigations to
those that many artists are. Science wants to understand the general mechanism
of human perception, while artists are more interested in expressing the
essence of those perceptions about the world. More often than not, artists are
inspired to express beauty in their work.
A child is also able to perceive beauty, something that may never
be possible with a computer brain. After all, what is beauty? Would it ever be
possible to take a massive poll and have a supercomputer distill the data down
to a definition of beauty with which everyone would agree? If we could define
it then would it, like Art, cease to be?
|Glories by Ann Trusty, oil painting, 30 x 40.
Each one of us has a slightly different, personal "beauty
register," yet, generally speaking, people are able to recognize an
artist's personal expression of beauty in art, and be moved by it. But try to
describe a beautiful painting, event, piece of music or sunset with language,
and the magic is easily lost in a laundry list of individual parts.
Apparently, the use of language must itself be beautiful to
communicate beauty effectively. Poetry and some exceptionally inspired and
sensitively written prose are able to achieve that quality. So it would seem
that the perception of beauty is created by the interrelationship of all the
parts of something, be it a painting, dance, concerto, or poem, to each other,
as well as to the whole. In order to create a beautiful work of art, the organizational
structure of all the parts must be as beautiful as the work itself.
This so precisely mimics the structure and organization of the
brain that we must conclude that we are wired for beauty. Why? What survival
advantage does this give us? Would sentience eventually lead to despair without
it? Why do we need to make art? Leave a comment-we'd love to hear your
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--Ann & John