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Human vision systems

    Consider this: Our perception of colour is provided by cones in the eye’s retina.  About 6-7 million cones determine our sensitivity to colour and are massed mostly in the macula region.  The center of which is the fovea centralis - our focal region.  Which kind of explains our bias in colour expression for painting.  Except that, we actually have at least two visual systems to see the world.  The second visual system is offered by our retina’s rods.  These are much more numerous, twenty times more so then the cones - approximately 120 million of them.  They are also 1000 x more sensitive to light then our cones are.  These rods surround the macula region and offer incredible motion detection in our peripheral vision. Yet since they are not focused based, you’ll notice something, turn to look at it, and it will disappear as the focal area is full of cones which are less numerous ans sensitive then the rods.  Rods ‘require’ one to “look” at things askance.  The rod vision system is adaptive and  effectively becomes fully active only after about 30 minutes of darkness.  The rods are in a real sense our night vision system.  Peripheral, hypersensitive to very low illumination and “colourless”.

    

   So what if a painting “spoke” to this night vision system of ours? Why does art privilege the smaller cone vision system- effective only in the day hours? What would a painting for this visual system reveal? For one, it would in effect reveal itself over time. It would seem to change as our rod vision slowly became functional. It would disappear and reappear if we tried to focus on it. In effect, it would no longer be static, and would engage the viewer on a level as basic as night and day.  It would push the boundaries of  that assumption, that paintings are static and the viewer active. It might even start to address a way of knowing our world that the art world seems to have neglected in its history.

Camera vision

    The human eye is lumen sensitive, while the camera film or digital is increasingly being refined for greater sensitivity to low light, it remains to be noted that cameras are accumulative in terms of their lighting sensitivity.  In other words, the longer they are exposed to light, the stronger the resulting intensity of light in the image.  The human eye however is sensitive to changes in light, our perception doesn't increase in saturation, quite the opposite, we need a shift in our visual perception in order to notice the visual presence.

    * The upshot of this is that in taking pictures of the twisight painting genre, it may result in an image that is more saturated and stable then the actual viewing experience.  Nothing beats the subtlety of the experience.