As human beings move through the three-dimensional world, the objects we see and name appear to constantly change, before our very eyes, but we do not notice that they are changing, unless the objects themselves are moving. Human beings learn that people, places, and things have a fixed location and size-shape in three-dimensional space. Moreover, we learn through past-experience, and trial and error, to expect certain results and consequences from our own agency, as we move through our world.
When our brains build a model of the world, it constructs images of people, places, and things by processing an enormous variety of visual information. Sensory experiences—touch, taste, smell, sound, and vision conflate to build our brains’ models of the world. Our own bodily movements, as well as position, direction, and orientation are some of the variables encoded in these brain models. Despite the visual facts to the contrary, our brains learn to see the world, not as we see it, but as we learn to know it. Once our brains construct models of the world, we rely on constancy (the term borrowed from psychology) to describe our expectations and assumptions about the people, places and things in the three-dimensional world.
While driving along a familiar road near my house, I noticed the cars parked on the side of the road were different sizes. Some cars appeared smaller, and some cars appeared very small, too small for me and my car. If I believed what I saw, I would have stopped. If I decided to turn around and go back, I would realize that the road had the same strange appearance.
If I believed what I saw, I would be afraid to move. Because everywhere I looked, I would see everything changing, the road getting smaller, people walking away from me shrinking in size, things disappearing. Even those familiar to me, would appear to me to be different sizes. None of my rooms would look as I remembered.
I would think I lived in a whirling, topsy-turvy, converging, and constantly changing world. In fact, I do live in such a world, we all do, but we do not believe it. We all have learned that familiar objects, family, and things like cars, roads and buildings, have a constant size and shape even though they may appear smaller, larger, hidden, partly covered or disappear; we know they remain constant. And our knowledge often gets in the way of our drawing and painting.
NOTES
This constancy example is also in my article, “Michael Torlen on John Torreano,” painters_on_painting, August 24, 2018, https://paintersonpaintings.com/michael-torlen-john-torreano/
In STUDIO SEEING, readers will learn more about Constancy, and the Visual Cues operating in the theatre of drawings and paintings.
Michael Torlen