Right brain, left brain myth debunked

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Prior to 1900, at any rate, the term "leading line"...

Just to be certain we are talking about same things, Peter's initial "nonsense" claim referred not just to "leading lines" but also:

... how certain lines, shapes, and compositions in an image "lead" the viewer's eye around the image in a certain way.

[amolitor]

I make no large claims!

It's possible that the idea of a photographer's "leading line" (a line that the eye follows from one place to another) was in fact around prior to 1900 in textbooks on drawing and paintings. The phrase "leading line" does not seem to carry that meaning, however, prior to sometime in the 20th century, and my reading (by no means complete) has not run across the idea under any name.

I don't know if "eye leading" works, and I don't know if "eye leading" is an older idea, although I am beginning to suspect it is not.

It is the sort of thing they might have thought of. Voice leading is a definite thing in music, and it's reasonable to suppose that someone might have tried to do something similar in painting and drawing, by analogy. I have not found any references to the idea, however.

[amolitor]

I finally got around to reading the eye tracking blog posts. Thanks for those.

While a limited study to be sure, they make a lot of sense. It's widely established that faces are interesting to us, and that we have huge amounts of brain devoted to studying them. If there's a face in-frame, it's practically a no-brainer that's what we're going to look at most. Human figures, animal figures? Sure, that also makes sense.

If you think about it, it's ridiculous to suppose that we're going to slavishly be directed by geometry, by tonal values. Our eyes exist to examine and evaluate the environment, not to blindly "follow lines" or to "identify high contrast points".

In the absence of other clues, probably tonal and color values are going to serve some sort of function.

Slobodan is fond of citing Molly Bang's book "How Pictures Work" and if memory serves a great deal of the supplied example can be interpreted primarily as our ability to identify fairly abstract shapes as "figures and faces" with some minimal cues, and the rest is really just supporting those basic identifications with color and tone.

The eye tracking study was very limited, and I'm certainly not saying that it's Truth. It does seem to be consistent with other things I know to be true, however. There's definitely room for a much more detailed study, with a lot more abstract pictures examined, and a bunch of work to determine if whatever we learn about abstracts applies usefully to realistic pictures, and so on and so forth.

[amolitor]

If you google for eye tracking studies of Art you'll find there's tons of them.

A quick skim of a few of them suggests that:

human faces trump everything, unconditionally
human and animal figures trump everything except faces, again, unconditionally
after that we get some stuff about contrast and color

Nothing whatever about lines leading the eye around. We look at what's interesting, and we don't give a damn about the bloody railroad tracks.

But that's a summary based on a 10 minute survey of the literature, so, take with several largish grains of salt.

[Isaac]

Just to be certain we are talking about same things, Peter's initial "nonsense" claim referred not just to "leading lines" but also:

…how certain lines, shapes, and compositions in an image "lead" the viewer's eye around the image in a certain way.

Please take the time to read the text I referenced "Chapter 5 The moving eye of the beholder: Eye tracking and the perception of paintings." It's up-to-date, based on studies of 57 paintings from different epochs and different genres. You'll find evidence that supports some old ideas but not others.

"In 1767, … he drew an explicit link between the composition of paintings and the gaze of the beholder. For Diderot, composition is an instruction to the eye, a path which the gaze follows in a certain order.
…
Eyes do not follow any line of composition in a continuous manner, nor do beholders scan paintings from top to bottom or left to right continously. … the general assumption of art historians … that viewers' eyes move predominantly from left to right - as when reading - when looking at European paintings is empirically incorrect …
…
However, … several aspects of Diderot's text are indeed correct …"

[Alan Klein]

...I am not saying the underlying research are not helpful stepping stones, but like a lot of genetic research, are jumped on by people thankful for having a reason to explain why they are like they are. 

  It's more fun and less work blaming how your parents reared you.  It's their fault!  Now we don't have to change ourselves.

[Tim Lookingbill]

If you google for eye tracking studies of Art you'll find there's tons of them.

A quick skim of a few of them suggests that:

human faces trump everything, unconditionally
human and animal figures trump everything except faces, again, unconditionally
after that we get some stuff about contrast and color

Nothing whatever about lines leading the eye around. We look at what's interesting, and we don't give a damn about the bloody railroad tracks.

But that's a summary based on a 10 minute survey of the literature, so, take with several largish grains of salt.

It's more about breaking up space in an interesting way as demonstrated in this blog which borrowed pages from the "Famous Artists School" books from the 50's &'60's.

http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2006/03/10-minute-art-school-composition-101.html

In that you'll find references to leading lines but only as a starting point to build an overall interesting composition. Photographers do this composing through the viewfinder.

Here's another study on composition in the Famous Artist Course books provided by the creator of Ren & Stimpy cartoons.

http://animationresources.org/instruction-composition-how-to-make-pictures/

[jjj]

Indeed, Mike, that's what they are. And that is how I see all those studies I referred to as "clunky." Treating them, however, as an ultimate "myth debunking" or "evidence" that centuries of accumulated human knowledge is "nonsense" is not doing science a favor.

It's not unusual to find that 'centuries of' in reality is only a generation or two i.e. a few decades. Many long standing traditions for example are simply made up and often far more recently than people think.

[spidermike]

It's not unusual to find that 'centuries of' in reality is only a generation or two i.e. a few decades. Many long standing traditions for example are simply made up and often far more recently than people think.

If, as has been proposed, the eye studies negate the idea of leading lines because the eye does not follow the 'leading line' then the same could be said about perspective in a picture (itself an extension of 'leading lines') and the use of the golden ratio that has been the basis of composition styles since the renaissance.

[amolitor]

The golden ratio as a compositional device has been thoroughly debunked.

It is mentioned, I think, once, in relevant writings prior to the twentieth century, in an ancient book about architecture. The examples of its use are always the same handful of paintings with golden rectangles drawn more or less randomly on them.

While photographers have kept on that one with a glass cry, as they tend to leap on all simple mechanical systems for 'composition' this'd one doesn't serm to have been invented by a photographer.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

The golden ratio as a compositional device has been thoroughly debunked...

How so?

[amolitor]

A Google search will turn up as many references as you care to read.

The summary, though, is that nobody wrote about using it (and they wrote quite a lot about what they did use, often), and all the modern observations of golden rectangles in older art are, on closer inspection, remarkably loose fits, on a remarkably small number of objects.

The temple in Athens fits nicely in a golden rectangle if you include just the right amount of the porch steps. But not at all if you include all of the porch steps or none of them. And on it goes through the usual samples. The rectangles look nice but are, upon inspection, simply drawn on there, chopping off parts of whatever the figure is as necessary to fit.

Finding an approximate golden rectangle in Mondrian is not going to be hard. Finding virtually any other rectangle isn't any harder, though.

[spidermike]

The 'golden ratio' may have been debunked as a tool that artists used, but its prevalence in art suggests that there is something aesthetically pleasing about an image that has major constituents on, or approximately on, the relevant sections of the picture. I agree that some of the superimpositions that people put on a picture can be, shall we say, 'optimistic' as a justification but that does not mean that the brad principle does not have some justification.
So again, it may well be that the golden ratio has become a viable explanation of aesthetics rather than a tool actively used by the artist.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

The golden ratio as a compositional device has been thoroughly debunked.

You should tell nature, that the golden ratio (Phi) and related Fibonacci ratios do not apply. Evolution and designers of architecture apparently beg to differ, looking at the arrangement of e.g. sunflower seeds, as would Leonardo DaVinci and contemporates, and the Romans before him, and the Egyptians (A pyramid based on Phi varies by only 0.025% from the Great Pyramid’s estimated dimensions), and ...

Cheers,
Bart

[spidermike]

The golden ratio as a compositional device has been thoroughly debunked.

I will show you mine if you will show me yours

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/ca.22580/

http://www.goldennumber.net/fast-company-design-john-brownlee-golden-ratio/

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I will show you mine if you will show me yours

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/ca.22580/

http://www.goldennumber.net/fast-company-design-john-brownlee-golden-ratio/

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit2/unit2.html
https://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/nature-golden-ratio-fibonacci.html

Cheers,
Bart

[Rainer SLP]

Hi,

¿ What was the reason that the monitor viewing ratio changed from 4 : 3 to 16 : 9 ?

None of both fit the ratio of 35mm ... 3 : 2 ...

and then we have a circus of different ratios as shown below which go from 1.333 : 1 up to 1.78 : 1

just asking  

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Hi,

¿ What was the reason that the monitor viewing ratio changed from 4 : 3 to 16 : 9 ?

None of both fit the ratio of 35mm ... 3 : 2 ...

Often for practical reasons, and relatively little to do with aesthetics. 35mm film was just double the size of the 18 x 24 mm (35mm film) motion picture format. For 16:9 see here.

Cheers,
Bart

[Rainer SLP]

Hi Bart,

Thanks. Just digged a bit more in the internet about film sizes and well, looks like Kodak with their films had a major word and well now the producers of sensors I guess try to optimize the space of a wafer ... ¿?

Interesting things come up  

[Isaac]

A Google search will turn up as many references as you care to read.

And --

How do we know we are looking at the same 'evidence' you are?