Me n Art: The Science of Art

[coberst]

Me n Art: The Science of Art

 

I am a retired engineer with much formal education. Also I have five children and seven grandchildren. Thus, I speak with some extensive first-hand experience with the educational system in the United States.

 

Until a few months ago, when I began studying the science of art, my only educational contact with art was a few late Friday afternoon classes in third and fourth grade, which dealt with using crayons to color drawings of turkeys, pumpkins, and pine trees during the holidays. Beyond this early formal contact with “art” I had only that which adhered to my mind via social osmosis.

 

Only after reading parts of a few books on art basics have I discovered just how deficient was my early education. From all that I can ascertain the present conditions of elementary and high school education have little improved. My evidence indicates that our (USA) educational system has perhaps deteriorated from its very low level that I personally experienced.

 

I have discovered that to study art is to study human nature. I have known for some time that our educational system has little regard for such matters because such matters add little to our ability to produce and to consume. Financial shenanigans are not the only means that CA (Corporate America) has used to take advantage of a naive population with little or no CT (Critical Thinking) knowledge or skills.

 

A recent BBC series “reveals art to be not the product of culture, but the producer and shaper of culture…how art changed the world, our ideas, and even our humanity itself…like science and technology, [it] has altered our environment and our identity…We are art.”

True Film: How Art Made the World

 

“Vision is an active grasp…A human face, just like the whole body, is grasped as an over all pattern of essential components…if we decide to concentrate on a particular person’s eye, that eye, too is perceived as a whole pattern…When the thing observed lacks this integrity, i.e., when it is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning, and the whole becomes unrecognizable…The young child sees “doggishness” before he is able to distinguish one dog from another.”

 

“The shape of an object we see does not, however, depend only on its retinal projection at a given moment. Strictly speaking, the image is determined by the totality of visual experiences we have had with that object, or with that kind of object, during our lifetime.”

 

Non BBC quotes are from “Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye” by Rudolf Arnheim.

[Thunderbird]

I remember when I was a boy I caught a strange and beautiful

fish. A large sculpin, It died in the bucket before I could show it to my parents. I could see it lose its color and made me sad cause I had discovered something new and had lost it. Years later I took up gem carving and from out of a rough stone emerged the lost fish.

I heard later that Walt Disney had the same kind of child hood experience with a baby squirrel. He had found this baby and was taking it home and it bit him. He reacted by slinging it accidentally into a tree, I can imagine him picking it up and the feeling he got watching the life light drain from its eyes. Now when I see a Disney movie I look at the special way he draws the eyes giving it life. A muti-billion dollar company that changed the psyche of an entire nation created from the bite of a baby squirrel to a boys hand .

http://www.lapidaryjournal.com/awards/gemmys08/newartists1st.jpg

[Turtle]

I remember when I was a boy

That's always a good start to art. :)

 

I heard later that Walt Disney had the same kind of child hood experience with a baby squirrel.

 

Speaking of Walt's art and influence on human nature, I first think of Fantasia in 1940 and then immediately after that I think about having read in the 1970's about Walty's fascination with butts & scatalogical humor.