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Title: Vision and Art : The Biology of Seeing by Margaret S. Livingstone ISBN: 0-8109-0406-3 Publisher: Harry N. Abrams Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Shows you how you see and how you paint
Comment: Margaret Livingstone has produced a book so very useful to visual artists that it may, in its density of ideas, seem definitive rather than evocative. But evocative it is. As we learn from studying it, Livingstone's book offers implications that may be developed by any artist who reads it in almost any direction. One might take as an example the very rich Chapter 8, with its notions of luminance as a balance for the salience, or pushiness of certain colors - how Leonardo handled it, how Ingres handled it, and how today's painter or digital image maker might go even further. The size and shape of the book allow for illustrations that work on the eye at the right scale. And there is an overall visual loudness to the book that is jarring and satisfying.
The author gets to the structure of our visual systems, makes them very clear, and tells us things that are lasting and verifiable. Her spirit of personal experimentation shows in the book, and makes us think that looking inquisitively at the world will pay off.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating Science of Visual Art
Comment: Some teasers on the back cover:
"Why do Claude Monet's fields of flowers seem to wave in the breeze?"
"What is the secret of Mona Lisa's smile?"
The first two chapters cover some scientific fundamentals- how light and the human vision works. While this is all very scientific, every effort is made to make it understandable, with plenty of full-color diagrams illustrating the concepts. While these 2 chapters are not the easiest to read, they're not rocket science either, and provide a valuable foundation for the rest of the book. Not essential but VERY useful.
Things start to get interesting toward the end of the 2nd chapter, when we start to understand what a red/green colorblind person sees. But the best stuff starts to come in the third chapter ("Luminance and Night Vision"). Plenty of interesting illustrations are provided in this chapter (like red cherries in a blue bowl, where the cherries appear brighter or darker than the bowl depending on the ambient light, or flickering polkadots), and continues until the rest of a book, making it a truly fascinating read.
Oh, and the explanation on Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is very convincing.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in both visual art and science.
I also recommend it to anyone who's interested in science and how things work- you'll appreciate some art pieces a lot more after reading this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Worth a Look
Comment: This volume is very good at covering how the human visual system operates and how that affects the artist and art viewer. It's not too dense with abstruse scientific detail and it contains lots of good examples and demonstrations. The writing style and
organisation of the book are also clear.
On the whole, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the visual arts, although the scope of the book is not large.
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Title: Cognition and the Visual Arts by Robert L. Solso ISBN: 0262691868 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain by Semir Zeki ISBN: 0198505191 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Art and the Brain: Controversies in Science & the Humanities (Journal of Consciousness Studies Volume 6 (1999) June - July) by Joseph Goguen, V. S. Ramachandran, Nicholas Humphrey, Erich Harth, Joseph Goguen ISBN: 0907845452 Publisher: Imprint Academic Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $29.90 |
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Title: Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See by Donald D. Hoffman ISBN: 0393319679 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball ISBN: 0226036286 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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