One of the practices I have been picking up of late is that of working to identify where the various streams of information I percieve originate, and separate them to better understand how my mind edits the information it recieves.
Part of this push to understand for myself how my particular brain assembles the state of consciousness we typically call “ordinary reality” has come from my art practices. I’ve been taking classes in drawing over the last two semesters, and one of biggest ‘aha moments’ for me has come about as a result of doing a great deal of perspective drawing.
I was working on a long hallway drawing outdoors, focusing particularly on getting as many details correct as I could. As anyone who has worked in perspective can attest, the process by which one translates 3D into 2D and works to fool the eye into seeing objects on paper is a tricky one to perfect. I’d never attempted to pull apart the perceptual processes that create depth in a drawing before, and was having a time of it.
I got to a point in the drawing where I had to stand back and look at what I’d drawn and compare it to the picture, drop out of trance and make some adjustments. What I found completely flummoxed me. After spending a few minutes looking back and forth between my drawing and the scene before me, I came to the conclusion that somehow the assemblage point of my cone of vision was about ten feet up and maybe three feet behind my head.
Rather a disconcerting discovery, this was. I have since been informed by one of my other drawing teachers that this is not at all an unusual phenomenon.
Ever since this experience, I’ve been working to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanics of perception by reverse-engineering my perceptual tools…I will be posting more on this subject as I dig deeper and learn more.
