Oakland - Aerial View

Caricatures are sometimes "more real"...

The image to the left is some caricatures by Subway Surfer who can be found sketching New Yorkers on the Subway, to mention one place.

The picture below it is a background from some old, Tex Avery era cartoon.

I think both exemplify the emotional realness of the exaggerated, the caricatured, the stylized, the non-representative.

There is plenty of science out there that confirms that at times a cartoon can have more impact on our perception than a realistic drawing or photo. The mechanism behind this is supposed to be because when we perceive things, we actually give more emotionally weight to certain features of what we see, rather than absorbing all the details, so what we retain in our minds is actually an emotional caricature of the actual thing. Therefore, sometimes our recognition of the identity of a well-known face is quicker when we see a caricature than when we see a photo of the actual person. The caricature brings out all the salient features.

I think the same can be said for trees and mountains and rocks and buildings-- we retain a generalized image of them, but it's mostly the pointyness of conifers, the jaggedness of the rocks, the scrubbyness of bushes and the roundness of deciduous trees. Everything that we feel is "real" can be approximated with much less detail than we might suppose to be necessary, and it will have the same emotional impact on us as the "real" thing-- perhaps more.

Cartoonists have always used this quality of human perception to their advantage, and with the proliferation of images on the web today I think we can easily find countless examples of completely unrealistic images that excite us, provoke us, influence us, entertain us, titillate us, and convince us through their power to access the key elements of our perception without going to the trouble of simulating reality.

I like to draw, but am lazy with the detail, so I think I am going to use this insight as my guide as I put my visual ideas on paper. Just enough, and no more. Not that this kind of art is "easy" by a long shot, but certainly simpler than the Sistine Chapel.