The Art of Seeing - Part II: The Red Plaid Dilemma

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The Gondola Singer Watercolor John Hulsey

“As our eyes grow accustomed to sight, they armour themselves against wonder”.
- Leonard Cohen

Since our last Perspectives, The Art of Seeing - Part 1, several readers have asked us to explain the reference to “The Red Shoes Test” that we described there. That moniker refers to the concept of individual visual bias—that is, each person’s propensity to focus intently on his or her interests, to the exclusion of other visual events/data around them. The Red Shoes example is the instance of an eye-witness, while very certain that a burglar was wearing red shoes of a particular brand, could not describe any other details of his appearance. The witness just loved shoes. Similarly, art students love certain parts of the world above all else, and it is on those things that they naturally tend to focus, sometimes to the detriment of the structure of a painting. We have…