When I was in art class in middle school, I was never the worst. I sat somewhere in the middle of the class, skill wise. My teacher evaluations often pointed out that my sense of perspective was good, but that the composition was sub-par. I distinctly remember working for hours getting the horizon line perfect, then losing interest. One of my biggest issues was drawing faces.
Professor George Eastman, who teaches my Abnormal Psychology class, mentioned that there is a specific part of the brain that is active when recognizing faces. The face isn’t just another object to our brain.
Doris Tsao, a researcher at Harvard Med explored this idea in depth:
"We don’t just perceive faces—we respond to them,” she explains. “We determine their emotional expression, store them in our memory, categorize them as friend or foe." (Scientific American)
In retrospect, it’s possible that my difficulty with faces is that I never thought of them as being any more than just that- a set of eyes, a nose, a mouth. But as humans, we’re more likely to glean a specific emotion from a face and completely disregard the characteristics of each part of the face than we are to walk away thinking “Damn, that was an epically big nose.”
This week’s self-imposed assignment: noteworthy visage depictions.
P.S. Not ignoring photography as an art form, I absolutely LOVE photos of people. But ça, c'est cheating, non?
