» Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing

Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Vision and Art by Margaret S. Livingstone
Comment: This is a most outstanding work on the anatomic and physiologic concepts underlying visual perception. It is aimed at any interested layman and should be required reading for visual artists, neuro-physiologists and any vision science practitioners. It requires attentive reading initially, but the extent of its insights are breathtakingly rewarding for those efforts. It is a visually stunning book that is the product of an inquiring and perceptive mind who is a senior member of the neuro-physiology faculty at Harvard. As an ophthalmologist and vision scientist-educator, I have strongly recommended it to trainees and older colleagues alike. Try it - you'll like it. MAH

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Reads like a college textbook
Comment: A very good book with great pictures that demonstrate key vision concepts. Near the end of the book, however, I started to skim the chapters because it became too tedious to read - very technical book overall.

I bought a used copy and noticed "student underling" in the first chapter, but an abrupt end to underlining in the second chapter. You know what that means: "This course is not what I expected; I'm dropping out!"
The student and I feel the same way, but I got a lot further.

Buy it, but I found Robert L. Solso's book The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain to be a far more exciting read. That one is a five star easily.

Another more engaging book covers many of the same things as Livingstone's but in a more readable style: Visual Intelligence by Donald D. Hoffman.

So, if your interested in vision, etc. I'd start with Solso, then move to Hoffman, and lastly to Livingstone.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Vision and Photography
Comment: This is a book that every teacher of photography and serious photographer should read and study and re-read. Although the book contains no photographic examples, there are plenty of examples in famous paintings to support the visual research Dr. Livingtson so clearly writes about. The examples in paintings are easily transferable
to a number of familiar and famous photographs.
Ever wonder what Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were so successful with the black-and-white photographs but not with their color photographs? I have, and her book has provided me with insights into this and other photographic practices.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Comment: After reading it, you'll want to keep it close to you. That way, you'll never forget how important art and science are in your life.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Shows you how you see and how you paint
Comment: Margaret Livingstone has produced a book so very useful to visual artists that it may, in its density of ideas, seem definitive rather than evocative. But evocative it is. As we learn from studying it, Livingstone's book offers implications that may be developed by any artist who reads it in almost any direction. One might take as an example the very rich Chapter 8, with its notions of luminance as a balance for the salience, or pushiness of certain colors - how Leonardo handled it, how Ingres handled it, and how today's painter or digital image maker might go even further. The size and shape of the book allow for illustrations that work on the eye at the right scale. And there is an overall visual loudness to the book that is jarring and satisfying.

The author gets to the structure of our visual systems, makes them very clear, and tells us things that are lasting and verifiable. Her spirit of personal experimentation shows in the book, and makes us think that looking inquisitively at the world will pay off.

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