ODE to JOHN DOE

[T]he brain is an artist, creating images out of separate visual components. Maybe our ability to read a curve drawn on a flat surface as a three-dimensional figure is related to our reception of visual data from the world as edges—lines and curves. Maybe when artists draw they are doing with their hand what the brain is doing with its electrical pulses.

Consider, too, our brain’s extensive face-recognition equipment, including the ability to read feeling in facial expression and body language. Our “face patches,” located low in the temporal lobe, along with our emotion-tracking amygdala, light up equally when confronted with a face or a picture of a face. Art is intermingled with biology and inseparable from it. As we are wired to recognize faces, so portraits and self-portraits—images of the human face and body—have proliferated throughout the history of art.

[…]

Making art requires persistence, the ability to work in a rather dogged manner over time, openness to unconscious material plus the patience to receive it, technical skill with materials, and the practice of engaging in a dialogue with the work as it develops. Making art also requires a particular sort of brain. The sort of brain we happen to have.

In a meditation on art and the brain, Priscilla Long adds to history’s finest definitions of art and echoes Dennis Dutton’s Darwinian theory of art.

(↬ The Dish)

(Source: , via explore-blog)