New paintings and regular art updates.
Today at choir someone had spilt water on the floor. Like a Rorschach test, looking at ink blots, I saw the figure of a fairy swinging. Both legs bent at the knee, wearing pointed toe boots, sitting forward on a swing, butterfly wings behind and a little pixie hat on her head. If I can I will try and draw on top of the image to see how much more I can make it look like a fairy. This is an example of Pareidolia, where the mind sees images from random patterns.
Pareidolia, the ability to see creatures in patterns. Well I call it an ability. Some may feel its more a curse! I’ve always looked at patterns and shapes and seen things in them. Some of my earliest memories were looking up at clouds and seeing birds and animals, things like whales and elephants. The human mind is good at seeing patterns, that’s why Percival Lovell the astronomer seems to have seen canalli, I think he called them? on Mars (not canals).
The human mind recognises things and that visual ability must help our instinct for creativity and science. Concept design is probably aided by it too. I think that’s part of our success as a species…..
So I was looking at this Christmas cactus and noticed the flower buds. Then I decided to play with it and voila! A green crab shape..
I saw a post on Facebook today saying you have to have a high IQ to read upside down. I don’t think that’s true. I learnt in my childhood. I can’t remember exactly when. I can remember seeing my teachers notes, which was useful and I guess that I practiced doing it later on. I also used to look at text in the mirror, probably after hearing about Leonardo Da Vinci. Strange what you do as a child. Maybe it’s inquisitiveness, maybe pattern recognition?
A fellow blogger mentioned Pareidolia today because he noticed he could see a face in a piece of lichen. Of course I then had to look back over my recent photos to see if I could find anything that looked like a face?
I’m one of those people that see faces in everything. I had to get rid of my shower curtain as I could see five or six bubble faces in it which was quite disturbing! I wondered if the designer had done it deliberately!
When I was a child I would often lie on the grass and looked up at cloud faces and animals, elephants chasing camels across the sky….
I might write a poem about that….
Mallaband-Brown