I hope you enjoy this refurbished post from four years ago. A musician's sensory entrance is the ear, a painter's sensory entrance is the eye. A sensory entrance is that part of our physical being
through which we pick up from outside ourselves signals that enable an experience. Our tongue's ability to taste, our nose's facility to smell, our skin's sensitivity to touch, our ears' hearing and our eyes' seeing. Along with the sensory entrance, other things get triggered - our memories, our emotions, our associations, our empathy and more. We visual artists cannot always determine our viewer's response, but we can guide their sensory entrance. Let's do an experiment where I give you an image and you pay attention to what your eyes are doing. Allow your eyes to drift to the image below without thought. Where does your eye go
first? Do you notice that your eye moves more quickly to the disc? The pattern of colors, values, textures, and direction remain the same, but the shapes and sizes within the design change. Even though the
round shape is smaller than the other shapes, our eyes go to it quickly because of its difference. It was I who guided you there by constructing a round disc rather than another square and by placing it where it is. I guided your sensory entrance. Let's do this experiment again with a different image. Let your eyes drift, then without thought, look at the image, paying attention to where your eyes enter first and what they do next. Do you notice that your eye moves more actively back and forth across this image as compared to the first one? Notice that most of the image's space is occupied by square-ish shapes (negative and positive), but it's the round
shapes that call our eyes' attention. That's because I guided you to see the round shapes by doing five kinds of things: - I made these shape different from that of the other shapes in the
design.
- I placed each disc within a contrasting value.
- I spaced the discs horizontally across the piece.
- I alternated the values of the discs as they move from left to right.
- I used only two values, I used no hue, I kept only smooth texture, and I kept the direction horizontal.
The reason I asked you each time to see the images without thought is that when thought enters it influences the eye, prompting our tendency is to make a judgment. That judgment triggers our memories, our emotions, our associations, and/or our empathy. It might even cause us to reject the image because causes us to see implications rather than visual
characteristics. In order to see the visual characteristics of any image, we must learn to see it initially without thought. That objective training of the painter's sensory entrance can,
in the long run, enable creative freedom. Now, that's real food for thought! Enjoy a fun weekend of exploring your sensory entrance! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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