Art practice as research has gathered pace in the University system in the past decade.
As an artist researching her own vision loss within the University context, I have found visual art practice as research to be the perfect methodology.
So many of the elements of painting – form, tone, colour, light are affected by eye disease.
As a researcher I have also examined how the visual brain and visual perception play a role in both art and eye disease. The discovery of receptive fields and empirical theories of visual perception, particularly with the advent of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanning used by neuroscientists and psychology researchers, has revealed much about the inner workings of the visual brain and the role of perception.
These discoveries have helped explain why I see the way I do, through the prism of my own eye disease.
Digital work
© Erica Tandori 2012
In contrast to the image of the Van Gogh self portrait (below), Mona Lisa’s face seems to melt invisibly into the background, most likely due to the low contrast and tonal values of the painting.
Digital work
©Erica Tandori 2012
Van Gogh’s self portrait, showing the effect high contrast seems to have on the symptoms of my central vision loss. The face seems less seamlessly obscured by the scotoma and more scrambled. The stronger contrasts of blues and yellow in the original painting may account for why he has the appearance of a pizza as opposed to the invisibility of the Mona Lisa (above).
In the above examples, the face of Mona Lisa seems to melt seamlessly into the background, while the self portrait by Van Gogh has a more scrambled appearance when I look at it. This may be due to the interplay of receptive fields and visual perception. When the visual field has low contrast and subdued tones things appear invisible to me, and the scotoma (blind spot) seems to have no edges. The ‘filling in’ phenomena causes me to ‘see’ the background, as my brain tries to make sense of the areas that are missing in the visual field due to the eye disease. the self portrait by Van Gogh however, has higher contrasts and tonal values, so my visual brain seems to vacillate between the almost equally dominant areas of blue and yellow, causing a scrambling effect. It also makes the appearance of the scotoma more visible to me.
For further exploration on empirical theories of vision loss, neuroscience and the visual brain see some of the links below:
An Empirical Theory of Visual Perception:
Purves lab (Dale Purves)
Receptive Fields:
David Hubel’s Eye Brain and Vision
http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/book/b10.htm
Neurobiology and art (Samir Zeki)
Laboratory of Neurobiology
http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/inner_vision.php
Psychology Vision and Neuroimaging (Scott Murray)
Vision and Neuroimaging Laboratory
http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/inner_vision.php