[Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] J M Kennedy lecture

[John Kennedy]

Noon to One pm
on Tues 16th March 2010
Doris McCarthy Gallery
University of Toronto


   Understanding pictures in vision and touch:

   Lines, perspectives and metaphors from cave art to the present

   John M Kennedy FRSC
   Department of Psychology
   University of Toronto

A 40 minute lecture on the psychology of pictures, richly illustrated.

What did cave artists discover? 50,000 years ago, we discovered how to use
lines to picture the world. Six figure-ground uses of line are possible –
and one is impossible, Kennedy argues. Is it ontologically impossible for
lines to work as pictures in touch, for the blind? Kennedy finds blind
people know the 6 figure-ground possibilities. Renaissance perspective is
a discovery about perception, not an invention of an arbitrary convention,
Kennedy proposes. It is used by the blind, he finds.  Figure-ground and
perspective offers a base for Realism, he contends. Deliberate
disobedience of Realism can create highly successful pictorial metaphors.

With metaphoric pictures from EW, a Japanese blind woman.