ET. Instead Reeses Pieces paid the fee and their sales went through the ceiling. Our sense of reality, be it international, national, local and even personal, is formed by the illusions needed to sustain our economic structure. Television and film are perfect vehicles for those illusions.
It is often the business of artists, whether fine or commercial, to create illusions of one kind or another. The study of fundamental design seeks to enlarge the student’s vision and perceptual skills because those skills are at the core of forming new and fresh ideas, which are the essence of all art (Myers 11). In our economy idea and not the product is the basic commodity of art. The end product - the painting, the ad, the video, the sculpture - can be produced by a trained craftsman or technician, but the idea, conceived through creative visual perception is the real thing of value. The structure of an advertising agency verifies this, with the high monetary reward going to those who conceive the ads and considerably less to those who produce them. The same basic structure prevails throughout the business world. The creative idea is the germinating force in a market system.
Perceptual imperative was defined earlier as our brain’s intuitive drive to create meaning out of visual perception. One of the ways by which it does so is by creating “meaningful patterns.” This involves organization (pattern structure) and meaning (recognition). To do this the brain uses comparisons between a new visual perception and a series of models already in our mental storehouse. A search for similarity looks for a match to clarify the new visual experience. After this match is found, the brain continues to look for more models to confirm the first finding. It is a process of discrimination and of recognizing differences or unique qualities in our visual perception. This is why qualities of uniqueness always attract our attention (Myers 11, 13). The mind is stopped by the new visual experience and forced to search more. In a culture awash in visual imagery trying to catch your attention, the truly creative visual image that manages to stop you is a valuable commodity.
Out of necessity we pay attention to only a small part of the sensory stimuli around us. The number of messages that continually bombard the brain is so great that the brain must tune many of these messages out or we would cease to function - we would shut down. This ability to filter sensory experience is called “perceptual selectivity.” A problem a rises when this process of selectivity takes over and we begin to see only what we expect and want to see and remain unaware of those things we don’t expect. “Perceptual set” is the term given this thought pattern. This trait develops to a high degree in some people and governs how they react in nearly all circumstances. Wishing to retain stable norms, they ignore all that fails to conform to the norm and dismiss the unexpected as irrelevant (Myers 17). As an example a person may have developed the habit of always looking for the bad in people and circumstances. It can become such a mindset that the good in people or situations may be completely missed; the person has become so focused on finding and fixating on the bad. It is a way of creating a negative sense of reality with your thoughts by what you choose to perceive.
To review, perception is a process of forming patterns from information received by our senses, the information is compared to models already in our memory, and from this we make distinctions and evaluations. These perceptions govern much of what we do: what needs attention, what we can ignore, what we learn, what actions we take. At its most fundamental level perception functions as a survival activity. Perceptions are processed by the brain to protect us from harm, to obtain sustaining nourishment, and to maximize reproductive capacities (Myers 19). A key to remember is that as an artist or designer it is imperative to keep your mind to possible to new ideas, to let your perception be open. It is through exposure to new ideas, thoughts, and experiences that you will grow as an artist. To become caught in perceptual sets is to stagnate as a creative force.
VISUAL LITERACY
The word “literacy” suggests being able to understand messages in a written language, to gain knowledge from the meaning of words and how the are put together. “Visual literacy” implies the ability to decode and understand visual messages. In the case of visual literacy the basic components are not letters or words but the basic elements of visual perception: line, space, shape, mass, value, color, and texture. How these elements are arranged creates the system from which meaning is drawn, as a sentence structure gives meaning and context to words. The arrangement possibilities for the visual elements are as infinite for human-conceived design as they are for nature’s diversity. The objective of the aspiring artist is to learn how to structure and manipulate these elements to achieve the meaning desired. The significance of the visual elements is in how they are used; that is, in the structure that is created – the design (Myers 4).
Visual literacy is no more universal than any other mode of communication. If anything it might have a smaller group of “literates” than most major languages. Those literate in the visual elements and their organizing are those who have been trained in either their appreciation or application. Nowhere is the smallness of this insider group more evident than in the appreciation of modern art, where many times the focus of the work is on the visual elements in their pure forms…the use of color for color’s sake, shape as pure shape, etc. This “formal” use of the visual elements produces no meaning for the works outside the intrinsic value of the elements themselves and the value that the viewer brings to the work. To understand/enjoy many modern works, a knowledge and background in the visual elements is necessary: visual literacy. People lacking this literacy automatically judge such visual experiences as “meaningless.” The reaction can be as we discussed in visual perception: turn off, ignore, or even become hostile. An artistic elitist point of view sometimes snubs those who aren’t visually literate, who don’t know the “secret handshake.” This attitude makes about as much sense as snubbing someone who doesn’t speak Swahili. The fault lies not with the individual but with an education system that puts no emphasis on visual literacy.
The products produced by those who are visually literate have a major impact on all of us through our exposure to the mass media. But many people do not understand how this visual language produces what they see any more than they understand how physics put a man on the moon or how medicine created a vaccine for polio. The public is confronted with the end products of these foreign disciplines, but few understand the languages that create these products. There is no good reason for this widespread visual illiteracy. The language is easy to learn and offers many rewards.
VISUAL SENSITIVITY
Much of the study to become a visual designer or artist is involved in learning “how to see,” how to identify and structure the visual elements. Most of our lives we use our vision incidentally as part of a larger activity (Myers 18); we see but we don’t really look and think about what we see.
The ability to gain information from the perceptual experience could be termed visual sensitivity. A primary objective in studying art and design is to heighten this sensitivity, thereby increasing the stored information with which creative associations can be made.
In the technology driven world our society has created there is little doubt that people have an abundance of visual experiences. The question is whether this experience is sensitizing or numbing visual creativity.
In 1953 one of the 20th Century’s finest artists, Henri Matisse, wrote:
Everything we see in our everyday life undergoes to a greater or lesser degree the deformation given by acquired habits, and this is perhaps especially so in an age like ours, when cinema, advertising, and magazines push at us a flood of images which, already made, are to the senses what prejudice is to intelligence. The necessary effort of detaching oneself from all that calls for a kind of courage, and this courage is indispensable to the artist who must see all things as he did when he was a child.
(Honor & Fleming 639)
The flood of visual images mentioned by Matisse five decades ago has developed into a unending torrent. So
