Art and Visual Perception, Second Edition

Art and Visual Perception, Second Edition
Author: Rudolf Arnheim
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2004-11-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520243835

A 50-year-old classic, which was revised and expanded in 1974. Explains how the eye organizes visual material according to psychological laws.

Citizen Spectator

Citizen Spectator
Author: Wendy Bellion
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 080783890X

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

Visual Intelligence

Visual Intelligence
Author: Amy E. Herman
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0544381068

An engrossing guide to seeing—and communicating—more clearly from the groundbreaking course that helps FBI agents, cops, CEOs, ER docs, and others save money, reputations, and lives. How could looking at Monet’s water lily paintings help save your company millions? How can checking out people’s footwear foil a terrorist attack? How can your choice of adjective win an argument, calm your kid, or catch a thief? In her celebrated seminar, the Art of Perception, art historian Amy Herman has trained experts from many fields how to perceive and communicate better. By showing people how to look closely at images, she helps them hone their “visual intelligence,” a set of skills we all possess but few of us know how to use properly. She has spent more than a decade teaching doctors to observe patients instead of their charts, helping police officers separate facts from opinions when investigating a crime, and training professionals from the FBI, the State Department, Fortune 500 companies, and the military to recognize the most pertinent and useful information. Her lessons highlight far more than the physical objects you may be missing; they teach you how to recognize the talents, opportunities, and dangers that surround you every day. Whether you want to be more effective on the job, more empathetic toward your loved ones, or more alert to the trove of possibilities and threats all around us, this book will show you how to see what matters most to you more clearly than ever before. Please note: this ebook contains full-color art reproductions and photographs, and color is at times essential to the observation and analysis skills discussed in the text. For the best reading experience, this ebook should be viewed on a color device.

The Power of the Center

The Power of the Center
Author: Rudolf Arnheim
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780520050150

The tension between two systems for understanding and picturing space, the concentric and the Cartesian, is regarded by the author as the key to composition in painting, sculpture and architecture

Visual Thinking

Visual Thinking
Author: Rudolf Arnheim
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1969
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520018716

The 35th anniversary of this classic of art theory.

Art Since 1940

Art Since 1940
Author: Jonathan David Fineberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 496
Release: 1995
Genre: Art, American
ISBN: 9781856690584

This survey looks at art from 1940 to the present as an accumulation of unique contributions by individual artists. These are examined in depth together with chapters which concern the broader context of the past six decades.

Art, Perception, and Reality

Art, Perception, and Reality
Author: E. H. Gombrich
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1973-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780801815522

Explores questions relating to the nature of representation in art. It asks how we recognize likeness in caricatures or portraits, for instance, and presents the conflicting arguments and opinions of an art historian, a psychologist and a philosopher.

Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat
Author: Michelle Foa
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-07-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300212828

This revelatory study of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) explores the artist’s profound interest in theories of visual perception and analyzes how they influenced his celebrated seascape, urban, and suburban scenes. While Seurat is known for his innovative use of color theory to develop his pointillist technique, this book is the first to underscore the centrality of diverse ideas about vision to his seascapes, figural paintings, and drawings. Michelle Foa highlights the importance of the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose work on the physiology of vision directly shaped the artist’s approach. Foa contends that Seurat’s body of work constitutes a far-reaching investigation into various modes of visual engagement with the world and into the different states of mind that visual experiences can produce. Foa’s analysis also brings to light Seurat’s sustained exploration of long-standing and new forms of illusionism in art. Beautifully illustrated with more than 140 paintings and drawings, this book serves as an essential reference on Seurat.

Visual Perception

Visual Perception
Author: Michael T. Swanston
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135431426

Vision is our most dominant sense, from which we derive most of our information about the world. From the light that enters the eye and the processing in the brain that follows we can sense where things are, how they move and what they are. The first edition of Visual Perception took a refreshingly different approach to perception, starting from the function that vision serves for an active observer in a three-dimensional environment. This fully revised and expanded new edition continues this approach in contrast to the traditional textbook treatment of vision as a catalogue of phenomena. Following a general introduction to the main theoretical approaches, the authors discuss the historical basis of our current knowledge. Placing the study of vision in its historical context, they look at how our ideas have been shaped by art, optics, biology and philosophy as well as psychology. Visual optics and the neurophysiology of vision are also described. The core of the book covers the perception of location, motion and object recognition. There is a new chapter on representation and vision, including a section on the perception of computer generated images. This readable, accessible and truly relevant introduction to the world of perception aims to elicit both independent thought and further study. It will be welcomed by students of visual perception and those with a general interest in the mysteries of vision.