GESTALT

It takes Two to Know One.

--Gregory Bateson. 

The pioneering Gestalt psychologists, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, and Max Wertheimer, in their study of human and animal perception, concluded that our visual experience, the world we see and name, is a construct of whole properties in which parts play a complex relationship to the whole. 

The Gestalt perceptual principles—similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, and figure/ground among others—point to universal principles organizing what human’s see. These phenomena are forces at work in visual perceptions, laws governing the properties of the part-whole process. An individual’s personal will or desire does not guide parts in whole processes; instead, the intrinsic nature of the whole governs the part. Visual structures, including drawings, paintings, and designs create new realizations when parts occur in relationship with other parts. 

This visual, drawing/painting process results in new realizations due to inner necessities, arrangements, and divisions of parts in relationship. These new realizations are different from either or any of the parts. No knowledge of the parts alone will ever give practitioners awareness of the whole. Good parts don’t make a whole.

“Make a mark and watch what happens,” is a good rule of thumb for an artist to follow. Beyond that, STUDIO SEEING recommends the Great Law: Instead of focusing on the mark you just made, and trying to “correct” it, look for the next mark. That is the Great Law.

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For more about Gestalt principles, new realizations, and the Great Law, see STUDIO SEEING.