Daily Times

French impressionist Claude Monet’s paintings are world renowned for their dreamy depictions of nature.

As a new study has discovered, the transfixing qualities in Monet’s art may have something to do with science and the ways in which our brain interprets color.

The University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science studied a number of paintings from Monet’s Waterloo Bridge series to create an exhibit at the Rochester, NY-based Memorial Art Gallery, titled ‘Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process.’

‘With each of the paintings in the series, Monet manipulates viewer perception in a way that scientists at the time did not completely understand,’ the university explained.

The study ‘provides insight into the complexity of the visual system, illuminating Monet’s processes and the intricacies of his work,’ they added.

Monet’s series shows the Waterloo Bridge amid the landscape and atmosphere of its surroundings, including the swirling fog, soft light and mist.

The researchers noted that each painting uses a very limited color palette, yet, somehow it appears unique every time.

The answer to why each work of art appears different may lie in how our eyes take in wavelengths of light.

The retinas in our eyes are made up of three different types of cones, including blue, which picks up on short wavelengths of light, green, which is sensitive to medium-wavelength light and red, which is sensitive to long wavelengths of light, according to the University of Rochester.

Altogether, these signals help explain why we see so many different shades of color.

Once our retinas process this information, it then travels to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, which then transmits it to ‘higher-level parts of the brain,’ such as those that deal with memory and experience, the University of Rochester noted.

Monet manipulates our perception further by painting 3D scenes on a 2D surface.

The effect is similar to what our eyes do when they process a scene, according to researchers.

A 3D world is projected upside down to a flat retina, then our brain turns the image right side up to make sense of the image.

Monet ‘tricks’ a viewer’s brain by depicting elements of light, shadow, and contrast to paint the ‘illusion’ of a 3D bridge, the university said.

‘You may know it’s an illusion but your brain automatically groups things and lets you know that it is a three-dimensional scene,’ Duje Tadin, a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, explained.

‘…The goal of our visual perception is not to give us an accurate picture of the environment around us but to give us the most useful picture.

‘And the most useful and the most accurate are not always the same.’

Monet also manipulates light in his work to somewhat ‘trick’ our brains.

While the Waterloo Bridge never changes color in his paintings, it seems like it does, as a result of Monet using different hues and intensities.

This models the appearance of a sunrise, direct sunlight and dusk, i.e. a bluish hue looks like direct sunlight, while a reddish cast makes it seem like the sun is setting.

‘Monet’s work emphasizes how different the same scene can be, depending on how it is illuminated,’ David Williams, professor of optics at Rochester University, explained.

‘But any person with normal color vision looking at this series will know: the bridge is gray brick, no matter what time of day it is, because the brain has evolved clever tricks to estimate the true properties of objects despite the rich variety of illumination conditions we normally encounter.’

Furthermore, Monet uses different colored brushstrokes next to one another and doesn’t blend them in, resulting in a phenomenon called simultaneous contrast.

Simultaneous contrast occurs when the same color appears differently when placed alongside a different color.

As a result, the brushstrokes serve as ‘spots of light that stimulate our eyes, Woon Ju Park, a former postdoctoral researcher in Tadin’s lab, said in a statement.

‘Viewers can use their own reconstructive processes in the brain to integrate those patches into coherent objects that are meaningful to them,’ Park explained.

WHAT DID THEY FIND?

In his Waterloo Bridge series, Claude Monet depicted the bridge amid the landscape and atmosphere of its surroundings, including the swirling fog, soft light and mist.

The researchers noted that each painting uses a very limited color palette, yet, somehow it appears unique every time.

They discovered that he manipulated the ways in which our eyes and our brain interpret light and shapes.

Monet ‘tricks’ a viewer’s brain by depicting elements of light, shadow, and contrast to paint the ‘illusion’ of a 3D bridge, the university said.

What’s more, he uses contrasting brush strokes to confuse how our brains interpret each color.

Published in Daily Times, January 7^th 2019.