Our Artful Brain
What it takes to take in, say, a Picasso
What is it about our species that we make art and view art and love
art? I’m thinking of the ancient cave paintings in France and Spain,
begun 40,800 years ago—the age of the oldest red-painted dot to be
accurately dated. (It’s found in a cave called El Castillo in the
Spanish province of Cantabria.) The high cave-art era occurred between
17,000 and 12,000 years ago. How modern they seem, those lyrical
representations of bison, horse, mammoth, ibex, deer, and auroch
(pronounced OUR-rock, an ancestor of the dairy cow). They were made by
drawing curved lines in charcoal and adding shadows and highlights in
mineral-derived colors such as red ochre to convey movement and
three-dimensionality.
How we see—how the brain perceives what the eyes take in—is entangled
with how we see art, how we make art. This is one thread in the book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain
by neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel. If I were going to be washed up on a
desert island with my choice of 10 books, along with, I would hope, a
good supply of espresso, this thick and handsome volume—a tapestry of
art history, psychology, creativity studies, and brain science—would be
one of them.
For the rest of the story: http://theamericanscholar.org/our-artful-brain/#.UaZDdmRUNM4
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