Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

RELATIONSHIPS

Three Interrelated
Components of Perceptual
Information
The perceptual psychologist Margaret A. Hagen . . . . offers what she calls a "generative theory of perception" that would embrace much more of what she believes perceiving and the making or art have involved across styles of art from the "rock art" of Altamira of 10,000-12,000 years ago, to ancient Egyptian art, to modern art--not a theory of art, she insists, but "a theory of the nature of the perceptual information that makes successful picture making possible." An adequate theory, according to her reasoning, must conceive of visual perception as consisting of three interrelated components, three choices, that confronted the Egyptian artist and that still confront the modern painter and graphic artist:

(1) Station point or points (near/distant, central/oblique), an inherited and/or chosen projection system, extending to what is called perspective and even to "mixed systems";

(2) Relative degree of emphasis on variant (immediate, transitory) versus invariant (ideal, timeless) features of the object or objects;

(3) Relative emphasis on two- versus three-dimensional components of objects and of the total pictorial environment, inclusion/exclusion, degree of transformation, abstraction, distortion, and the like . . . .

[On Gestalt Theories in: Harlan, Calvin. Vision & Invention, An Introduction to Art Fundamentals. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986.]




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