Art and the Critical Eye
Often I see a landscape painting by an untrained artist, painted in colors and hues they probably learned in grade school -- having not yet learned to break out of the familiar habit first learned in first grade, even though they might have the tools and supplies to progress beyond whatever limitations they had back then.
The sky is always blue. The tree trunks are always a rich, mahogany brown. The grass is an unnatural shade of bright green.
Why? Because we learn in kindergarten that those are how the colors are "supposed" to be. Tree trunks are "supposed" to be brown, so we use the brown crayon to make them that way. Water is "supposed" to be blue, and so we use the blue crayon from our limited color palette, etc.
Yet examine the colors of the real subjects and compare. Nary will you find such artists' colors in nature. The tree trunks will all be varying shades of grey -- not the mahogany brown that Crayola defined for us as "brown". If we want to define something for how it truly is, sometimes we have to put aside the assumptions we've learned and learn to become a more objective observer.
I wonder if this is where the phrase, "thinking outside the box" originated from. Sometimes we allow our perceptions to be clouded by the limited palette of personal experience. This is all perfectly natural; the brain is designed to economize information by storing it in memory for later use. But to be truly objective as observers, we have to distinguish between what we really are seeing, and the packets of assumptions and doctrine and memory that sometimes interfere with our perceptions.
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