Lightness and Brightness and Other Confusions

Zeki goes on to say to say that Monet was in fact trying to bypass the phenomenon
of colour constancy that is an integral and natural part of our visual
mechanism. When Monet painted a series of some thirty paintings of the
façade of Rouen Cathedral, he turned his attention to the changes of perceived
colour arising from the different illuminations and weather conditions.
Zeki says that he was able to achieve this astonishing series by his supreme
‘cerebral powers’, or one might say, visual intellect. According to Zeki, Monet
was “…using the knowledge in his brain to deliberately paint something that
departed from what he was actually seeing.” (Ibid.) Zeki argues, that Monet
was, in fact, working in precisely the opposite way to how he had had wished
in his conversation with Clemenceau. Instead of attending to what the eye
‘sees’ only, he used his memory (Monet finished the works in his studio) and
his knowledge of light, accumulated over a lifetime of painting outdoors. Paul
Gauguin is reported as exclaiming that Monet painted with his eye, but, Great
God, what and eye! This famous quote presupposes modes of attention that
deploy different parts, indeed different levels, of the eye–brain mechanism.
What Zeki is saying is that to see and to depict objects as remaining constant
in colour despite substantial changes in their illumination is natural to us. To
do otherwise requires a special mode of attention that demands a trained eye
and brain. Zeki concludes that “Perhaps it would be better to say that ‘Monet
painted with his brain but, Great God, what a brain.’ ” (Zeki 2002, p. 215). To
paint like Monet requires both living perception and the reflective attitude –
an awareness and apprehension of the difference between the two.
The parts and the whole
We do not see or perceive space as spectators of events unfolding before us;
neither is our visual experience of space an exploration of stimuli waiting to
be revealed to us. We experience space as active participants; our spatial
experience is created in the interaction of outer stimuli, our intentionality and
our actions. 43 Our intentionality has many levels: the personal, the social and
the biogenetic. The biogenetic intentionality stems from the process of natural
selection that has moulded our species into what it is. This intentionality
governs our ecology, which in turn impresses on – and sets constraints on –
how we see and perceive.
Seeing is the integration of our perceptions into a total visual experience. In
order to try and understand spatial experience, object recognition and the
perception of colour and light, we can try to break down and analyze this
totality into its components. This can be done in many ways, but not all of
them contribute to a deepening of the understanding of the human experience
of light colour and space. We need many approaches to understand how
we see and experience space, light and colour. Some of these are of necessity
43
See: Noë 2004.
42