The Art of Seeing and Painting
Abstract
The human urge to represent the three-dimensional world using two-dimensional pictorial
representations dates back at least to Paleolithic times. Artists from ancient to modern
times have struggled to understand how a few contours or color patches on a flat surface
can induce mental representations of a three-dimensional scene. This article summarizes
some of the recent breakthroughs in scientifically understanding how the brain sees that
shed light on these struggles. These breakthroughs illustrate how various artists have
intuitively understand paradoxical properties about how the brain sees, and have used that
understanding to create great art. These paradoxical properties arise from how the brain
forms the units of conscious visual perception; namely, representations of threedimensional
boundaries and surfaces. Boundaries and surfaces are computed in parallel
cortical processing streams that obey computationally complementary properties. These
streams interact at multiple levels to overcome their complementary weaknesses and to
transform their complementary properties into consistent percepts. The article describes
how properties of complementary consistency have guided the creation of many great
works of art.