I’ve been making good progress on my book, endeavouring to pull together
up-to-date research on how the brain integrates visual information, and had
a bit of a revelation. It was after watching Matthew Cain’s excellent ‘What
Makes a Masterpiece’ on More 4. I reckon I’ve really got my head around a lot of the Neurology of vision processing and had really been enjoying putting it all down on paper and then Matthew interviewed Howard Hodgkin, whose work is strongly abstract and who insisted that art was ‘felt’ and couldn’t be deconstructed. It made me think. If the neurology behind vision processing was so easy to deconstruct then why was there such a strong emotional need to protect art’s mystery and I think I now understand it. True artists, and specifically abstract artists, are actually synaesthetics. Their brains are not wired up like everyone else’s. They work roughly the same but the neuronic pathways create subtly different connections within thier brains to the rest of us, meaning that they derive their own unique and sometimes hard-to-understand visualisations through sensing the world in a subtly different way to other people. To them art is ‘felt’ because they ‘feel’ it. They can’t sense the world the way we do any more than we can sense it their way because we really do sense things differently
I did some research and it seems I’m not the only person to have reached
these conclusions. I found this after a single Google search;
Synaesthesia, creativity and art: What is the link?
At the moment I’m thinking that while it is possible to deconstruct visual processing you can’t deconstruct some art because it’s origins are actually outside current research and rely entirely on the wiring of the individuals head, which is unique and will never provide a suitably large and statistically provable sample-set. I also think that with all things like this it’s a sliding scale, with most of us exhibiting synaesthesia to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that the really way-out-there stuff is down at one end of the synaesthesia spectrum while most of us are up here at the other.
Very interesting stuff
Landscape Photography Courses in the Peak District National Park
