Seeing Things Differently

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Photograph © Craig P. Burrows*
(Used with permission)

It is interesting to consider that a viewer of a work of art may be seeing it very differently than the artist who created it, or even another viewer.

We each seem to see a little differently. Our visual biases may be the result of learned survival skills or just personal preferences. Our biological and chemical make-ups may have a bearing on our vision. We know that persons who are functional tetrachromats (having a rare fourth retinal cone) have been identified (see: Do You Have Super Vision?). A tetrachromat may be able to differentiate between up to one hundred million colors, compared to our normal trichromatic vision, which can differentiate between about a million. Complete colorblindness (achromatopsia) is prevalent on two remote islands in the South Pacific. (See: Island of the Color Blind.)

After the lens of Monet’s left eye was removed from cat…