Quotes from Art and illusion by E. H. Gombrich.
"When we say that an image looks exactly like its prototype we usually
mean that the two would be undistinguishable when seen side by side in the
same light. Place them in a different light and the similarity will
disappear."
"What a painter inquires into is not the nature of the physical world but the
nature of our reactions to it. He is not concerned with causes but with the
mechanisms of certain effects. His is a psychological problem -- that of
conjuring up a convincing image despite the fact that not one individual
shade corresponds to what we call "reality"".
"Painting is an activity, and the artist will therefore tend to see what he
paints rather than to paint what he sees."
"But what matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful map,
is an end product on a long road through schema and correction. It is not
a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful the chessboard."
"Nature cannot be imitated or "transcribed" without first being taken apart
and put together again. This is not the work of observation alone but rather
of ceaseless experimentation. For here, too, the term "observation" has tended
to mislead rather than enlighten."
"The statement, "From where I stand this picture here looks like the
castle there", is manageable and sometimes even testable. The general
statement, "This picture represents reality as it appears to me", may
undoubtly be sincere, but strictly speaking, it makes no sense."
"Where we receive a visual impression, we react by docketing, filing it,
grouping it in one way or another, even if the impression is only that of an
inkblot or a fingerprint. Roger Fry and the impressionists talked of the
difficulty of finding out what things looked like to an unbiased eye because
of what they called the "conceptual habits" necessary to life. But if these
habits are necessary to life, the postulate of an unbiased eye demands the
impossible."
"The amount of information reaching us from the visible world is incalculably
large, and the artist's medium is inevitably restricted and granular.
Even the most meticulous realist can accomodate only a limited number of
marks on his panel, and though he may try to smooth out the transition
between his dabs of paint beyond the threshold of visibility, in the end
he will always have to rely on suggestion when it comes to representing
the infinitely small."
"The painter relies on those clues which give us the most reliable information
about texture in real-life: the way light behaves when it hits a surface and
is either reflected, absorbed, or dissolved into innumerable light points."
"All communication consists in making "concessions" to the recipients
knowledge. It is didacted in the context and the awareness of possible
alternative interpretations that have to be ruled out. The beholder's
identification with the artist must find its counterpart in the artist's
identification with the beholder."
"We have all come to see art too much through the falsifying media of
photographs and slides; thus this old insight that it is naive to demand
that a painting should look real is gradually giving way to the conviction
that it is naive to believe any painting can ever look real."
"Geographers who draw sections of mountain ranges will exagerate the relation
of height to width according to a stated proportion. They have found that a
true rendering of vertical relationships looks false."
"Some photographs, like some paintings, do look convincing; other do not."
"The question is not wether nature "really looks" like these pictoral
devices but wether pictures with such features suggest a reading in terms of
natural objects. Admittely the degree to which they do depends to some extent
on what we called "mental set". We respond differently when we are "keyed up"
by expectation, by need and by cultural habituation. All these factors may
affect the preliminary setting of the lock but not its opening, which
still depends on turning the right key."