Customer Reviews

Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a really neat book but the title is a misleading. It doesn't cover all visual art but concentrates on oil painting. The author is a neurophysiologist at Havard Med who can actually write intelligbly, entertainingly and accessibly about her field and how it intersects with 2 dimensional art. It is not an easy read. The book is chock full of visual illusions, detailed illustrations, carefully chosen paintings from the last 500 years and quotations from the scientists who have studied light, color and vision. The last chapter covers electronic media in the form of computer and TV screens and was particularly good but seemed to lack integration with the rest of the manuscript. Overall, this book is delighfully dense. Take some time and savor it.

Margaret Livingstone has produced a book so very useful to visual artists that it may, in its density of ideas, seem definitive rather than evocative. But evocative it is. As we learn from studying it, Livingstone's book offers implications that may be developed by any artist who reads it in almost any direction. One might take as an example the very rich Chapter 8, with its notions of luminance as a balance for the salience, or pushiness of certain colors - how Leonardo handled it, how Ingres handled it, and how today's painter or digital image maker might go even further. The size and shape of the book allow for illustrations that work on the eye at the right scale. And there is an overall visual loudness to the book that is jarring and satisfying.

The author gets to the structure of our visual systems, makes them very clear, and tells us things that are lasting and verifiable. Her spirit of personal experimentation shows in the book, and makes us think that looking inquisitively at the world will pay off.

Some teasers on the back cover:

"Why do Claude Monet's fields of flowers seem to wave in the breeze?"

"What is the secret of Mona Lisa's smile?"

The first two chapters cover some scientific fundamentals- how light and the human vision works. While this is all very scientific, every effort is made to make it understandable, with plenty of full-color diagrams illustrating the concepts. While these 2 chapters are not the easiest to read, they're not rocket science either, and provide a valuable foundation for the rest of the book. Not essential but VERY useful.

Things start to get interesting toward the end of the 2nd chapter, when we start to understand what a red/green colorblind person sees. But the best stuff starts to come in the third chapter ("Luminance and Night Vision"). Plenty of interesting illustrations are provided in this chapter (like red cherries in a blue bowl, where the cherries appear brighter or darker than the bowl depending on the ambient light, or flickering polkadots), and continues until the rest of a book, making it a truly fascinating read.

Oh, and the explanation on Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is very convincing.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in both visual art and science.
I also recommend it to anyone who's interested in science and how things work- you'll appreciate some art pieces a lot more after reading this book.

This is a book that every teacher of photography and serious photographer should read and study and re-read. Although the book contains no photographic examples, there are plenty of examples in famous paintings to support the visual research Dr. Livingtson so clearly writes about. The examples in paintings are easily transferable
to a number of familiar and famous photographs.
Ever wonder what Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were so successful with the black-and-white photographs but not with their color photographs? I have, and her book has provided me with insights into this and other photographic practices.

A very good book with great pictures that demonstrate key vision concepts. Near the end of the book, however, I started to skim the chapters because it became too tedious to read - very technical book overall.

I bought a used copy and noticed "student underling" in the first chapter, but an abrupt end to underlining in the second chapter. You know what that means: "This course is not what I expected; I'm dropping out!"
The student and I feel the same way, but I got a lot further.

Buy it, but I found Robert L. Solso's book The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain to be a far more exciting read. That one is a five star easily.

Another more engaging book covers many of the same things as Livingstone's but in a more readable style: Visual Intelligence by Donald D. Hoffman.

So, if your interested in vision, etc. I'd start with Solso, then move to Hoffman, and lastly to Livingstone.

I am now confident that I can make intelligent comments to high society folk at any art gallery. And I'll do it in a way unlike they've heard before.

My natural attraction to the arts left me searching for answers beyond artistic techniques. As much as I thought it was impressive how impressionist painters could portray a scene using thick brushstrokes, I wanted to know what was going on in my head when I looked at it. As a current undergraduate neuroscience student, I was drawn towards the ability of the subject to explain everyday phenomena. I chose this book hoping to come closer to discover why I thought a painting was good from a biological rather than emotional standpoint. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning things such as: why your brain perceives Claude Monet's rivers to flow or how Leonardo da Vinci's two dimensional paintings seem to appear in three dimensions.

Delivery:

Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, successfully articulates her research on visual systems on a level that can appeal to a broad audience. Her approach to communicate her research through the blend of art and science is an effective method. Although it helps to have some exposure to entry level physiology, all that is necessary to enjoy this novel is an interest in the subject. More complex technical information is easily digested with the help of the examples of famous artworks and real world phenomena that follow it. However, I am surprised that this novel did not highlight any sculptural art examples. Dr. Livingstone's tone along with suggested exercises and optical illusions promotes reader participation. The abundant photos and figures are especially effective due to the quality of the high gloss print, a necessary feature as the argument's effectiveness often relies on the ability of the reader to participate in the viewing. This book will fit nicely on a bookshelf along with science textbooks or on a coffee table next casual browsing.

Overview of Content:

The information is structured in a way so that it gives you all the basics in the beginning so that you can apply your knowledge at the end. This methodology promotes information processing and allows the reader to recall the information they learned in the beginning of the book when they get to the end. Since visual processing starts with light, so does this book. The progression to how we now understand light's source and its nature is highlighted by the reflections of recognizable, historical figures such as Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein. The wavelengths of colored light are discussed in terms of various oil paints, which is helpful in setting the stage for the analysis of art. The subtle differences in wavelengths between colors are particularly interesting, most notably the difference between violet and purple. These discoveries are related to the capabilities of man by outlying the structures and major functions of the eye. The physiology is easy to comprehend and includes valuable insights such as the dual dependency of cones to process both the wavelength and intensity of light. Simplified diagrams of the internals of the eye, brain, and neurons aid readers from non-science backgrounds. Visual acuity and spatial relation is also addressed using the most popular example in the book: determining the reasons for the oddities in Mona Lisa's smile. "I realized that her smile seemed most apparent and cheerful when I was looking away from it, and it seemed less evident when I looked directly at it (p. 71)." I won't give away the reasoning behind this, but Dr. Livingstone paints a clear picture of why this is so.

The most important discussion in the book is how light is processed by the `Where' and `What' Systems. First, color and luminance are defined using examples where either color or luminance is removed to allow a person to focus on each entity separately. This also correlates to how each of these factors is analyzed by different parts of the visual system. Dr. Livingstone's explanations of theses systems made it is easy to understand how evolutionary necessities shaped the way we process information. Optical illusions aid in our discovery of how the primitive, colorblind `Where' system is responsible for positioning and the `What' system's color opponent cell model is used to see color using an objects border. Examples of artwork highlight the `Where' system's ability to detect detailed luminance and the `What' system's ability to identify what we're looking at.

The later stages of the book drive home the main points of the novel through its application in viewing art. The techniques of impressionism and pointillism utilize an understanding of how the visual system works to create depth, motion, and effective use of color. Claude Monet, Leonardo da Vinci, Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh are just a few recognizable artists whose works are featured based on their aesthetic appeal to the visual system. The book concludes with how factors effecting vision are used in the present day such as use of visual techniques in advertising and the relation of television to the functions of the eye.

Overall:

This work is a very interesting revelation of the powerful and sometimes finicky nature of the brain's perception of the world through sight. Although heavily technical in some aspects, the average reader can skim the more grueling portions and understand the main point the author is trying to convey by looking at breathtaking works of art and the captions beneath it. Scientists and artists alike can benefit from Margaret Livingstone's powerful insights. I would recommend that anyone who enjoys viewing or creating art, especially the frequent gallery visitor, that is looking for a deeper understanding of how we perceive it biologically, to pick up this book.

My Favorite Explanations:

- Why the snow looks blue in the shade?
- The evolution of luminance in art especially Leonardo da Vinci's success
- How Claude Monet creates motion in art?
- Why certain text can appear jittery?
- Color mixing and its relation to the receptive field

This is a most outstanding work on the anatomic and physiologic concepts underlying visual perception. It is aimed at any interested layman and should be required reading for visual artists, neuro-physiologists and any vision science practitioners. It requires attentive reading initially, but the extent of its insights are breathtakingly rewarding for those efforts. It is a visually stunning book that is the product of an inquiring and perceptive mind who is a senior member of the neuro-physiology faculty at Harvard. As an ophthalmologist and vision scientist-educator, I have strongly recommended it to trainees and older colleagues alike. Try it - you'll like it. MAH

Any artist/photographer will find a wealth of information about color, light, seeing and the brain in this book. The science part is not hard; anyone who has taken a general science college will have no problem. The book is also beautiful, with gorgeous color images of paintings and excellent illustrations. (Definitely not a book for the Kindle reader!) Well worth the money.

This book describes how the brain has two modes of visual interpretation: the "Where" mode, a color-blind mode that monitors motion and location, and the "What" mode, that describes color. I found this aspect the most interesting of the author's many ideas as it helped me understand why it is so difficult for artists to see objectively.

The book informs us that the eyes and brain are constantly generating a series of optical illusions based on minimal information. This information is then cobbled together in the mind to create a sensation we call reality. It is much more complex than this but the author communicates her ideas very clearly and I generally understood her explanations despite not being well versed in the technical side of this field.

This book will be of most interest to artists and anyone fascinated by the visual world. If you want to continue your study of why we love art you probably will enjoy The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.

art techniques for dummies written by a neurologist.
i learned as much about vision from the retina to the image in our minds as i did about art, mostly painting techniques. good enough for me to buy several copies for my kids who are artistic.

probably a stretch for the mythical average reader, but well worth the time and effort to understand it. i can't recommend it too strongly.