Rectangle or Triangle?

As I started reading Arnheim I was intrigued by figure number one. As I read his description of how we look at the square and the dot as a whole I started looking around trying to find other things that we see as a whole while figuring out the distance and symmetry. When he started going into how we are looking at his book but also seeing the room around us, I became disoriented. The book became harder to read as I became consciously aware of my environment while not trying to look around. My surroundings were out of focus and I started to have to focus on not seeing them to continue reading. His idea: " What a person or animal perceives is not only an arrangement of objects, of color and shapes, of movements and sizes. It is, perhaps first of all, an interplay of directed tensions" started to come into focus for me. He mentions that the black circle is "striving" towards the center, but for me it was moving more to the right side. I wonder what makes it different for different people? Maybe the first glance makes the difference? Maybe I am just weird? The two images reminded me of conversations I've have had with people about symmetrical verses unsymmetrical things. I have always favored non symmetrical artwork when it comes to paintings and sculptures but I seem to like architecture that is more symmetrical. I have friends who hate symmetry and friends that love it. I wonder if this is just plain preference or if it individual perception and vision that makes us like one or the other. He begins to answer my questions when he talks about whether the forces are physical or psychological. He states that there are physical molecular and gravitational forces that hold the objects and images together but none that would make the black dot appear to be drifting more or less towards the center of the square. This leads him to the conclusion that it is all psychological. Which then leads me to the conclusion that what I am seeing is not "weird" but just how I see it. This half answers my question though, according to Arnheim is is all psychological but still I want to know why do I see it that way? What makes my vision "weird" or "different"? After looking at the provided figures 1-5 and continuing to read I got to his description of balance. Balance enters into how we read and look at a painting. " Balance is a state of distribution in which all action has come to a standstill… In a balanced composition all such factors as shape, direction and location are mutually determined in such a way that no change seems possible… Under conditions of imbalance, the artistic statement becomes incomprehensible." This gave me a mission. I pulled out a old art history text book and started looking at the images. I was now conscious of my eyes and tried to figure out where I looked first, and if the image seemed balanced. I found most of the the images to be balanced and my sight focused first on center figures and then drifted outward to a landscape or other figures in the background. These easy images to look at made me want to search for an image lacking the balance that Arnheim deems necessary for the comprehension of a painting. I came across, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (see image at the end of my post), it stood out because of my immediate acknowledgment of how off center the figure of Susanna is but how you are immediately pulled back towards the right as the man in the red cloak comes into view. Even though he pulls you back the image was hard to look at and hard to focus on. I felt I could't focus on one section while also not able to look at the image as a whole. I think part of this is because of the man above her and his dark clothing, the strong detail on the stone behind her and her nude flesh tone that are all positioned on the left side of the painting, leaving the right side, a strain to view and somewhat lost and empty. Here I understood Arnheim but yet again started to wonder if other people would find this painting balanced or not ?

It was funny to me when Arnheim started talking about simplicity in his chapter about shapes. He states that simpler images are easier to look at because they are easier to break down and organize. I found this funny because I could only think about how simple the image of the black dot in a white square that he provided at the beginning of his book which became so complicated to me. Instead of breaking it down I seemed to be making it even more complicated. Not only did the image become complex but so did the thought processes and a black hole of questions emerged. Figure 42 stood out to me. It is a image of a black triangle combined with a black rectangle. At first I looked at it and saw the rectangle as a layer above the triangle. I then told myself this was impossible because they were both the same color black and sitting on the same plane (the page of the book). After I told myself this, the rectangle at second glance, still appeared on top of the triangle. I then decided to see if I could switch the two and see the image with the triangle above the rectangle. It definitely was a strain and my face got much closer to the book, but it did finally appear that I could switch the two and make the triangle been seen as a layer above the rectangle. Did some people see the triangle above the rectangle and some the rectangle above the triangle? Do some people see neither, and just a black strange shape? Can some people switch the triangle and the rectangle and some people not?

In the Wade's article I spent a good deal of time looking at figure 2 with the small black dots and white outlined dots that are arranged in a pattern. For some reason it took me a very long time to see that that two different groups of dots were the same just differently rotated. I saw how the below patterns fit but I didn't see at first that the groups were really the same. I liked the statement " Circles and squares are good figures in the Gestalt sense. That is, they are simple and symmetrical, and will tend to be completed if parts are missing." I liked this statement because I agreed with it and an image of a broken outline of a circle immediately popped into my mind's white board and then the lines joined like someone had drawn to fix the circle. I read on and became unsure if I agreed with his declaration that the Artists making the Roman mosaics were like scientists. I found them more the science project and his ideas and the ideas of other phycologists the scientists.

I must be Arnheim's way of writing and ideas that draw me in more than some of our other writers that we are discussing and reading. He seems to get my brain racking and sometimes even distracts me from his own book. The what Ifs, and why nots and whats!? sometimes become too much to keep reading until tested a few times.