The above animation (from http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/E361/suppl/DCSupplemental) uses only nine points to evoke the figure walking.

Johansson’s ground breaking point light experiments have given rise to whole field of research into the perception of bio-dynamics, including this interactive sex-changing walker at BioMotionLabs.

Johansson in his work managed to evoke the movement of a human leg with just three dots.

I want to do something equivalent with a still figure. That is, I would like to explore the minimum marks required to draw a recognisable figure.

Of course, people have been seeing people, animals and objects in dots of light in the sky for thousands of years.

 

The Audrey Coffee Stains series walks the boundary between a deliberate depiction and a stain which looks like something (in this case Audrey Hepburn seated). The challenge is to  make it look accidental (which I have failed to do here). Keep watching the stains!

In my thesis Depiction and Recognition I developed a philosophical account, based on the work of Flint Schier, which demonstrates that we recognise content in pictures because pictures trigger a subset of the natural recognition abilities which we use when we encounter objects, animals and people in real life.

It is clear that the reason we see objects, animals and people in drawings, paintings and photographs is because the artist or photographers who created these depictions intended that people with natural recognition abilities would be able to recognise these things.

Recognition Triggers explores this idea from the perspective of the creator of the depictions and looks at how natural recognition triggers are built into pictures as they are created.

 

My painting “When Uccello Met Pollock” is an exploration of the limits of depiction. I was trying to evoke the figures from “The Hunt” but using only blobs and strokes of paint. The paint was mainly dripped onto the canvas, but I occasionally used a stencil to define the drips shape. The result is a painting that looks a little like “The Hunt” but dissolves into blobs as you get closer to it.