REPRESENTATIONAL TRUTH

“This is the entire history of Western painting, right here. The struggle to represent things accurately. And then, when we develop a language for rigorously rendering 3D shapes in two-dimensional space, what do we find?   We’re as far from the truth as ever.”

This quote was from the novel, City On Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg on page 215.  It is amazing.  You can be reading along in a book, and then, wham, you are hit with a basic principal of TD when you least expect it.  And this is from a novel, not an art treatise.

I guess this is nothing more than the basic human principal of seeing what you expect, or want, to see.  After you buy a car, you suddenly realize how many cars like yours are on the road.  Whereas before it did not seem like there were any.

Before I started TD, I guess I missed most or all references to the limitation of representational techniques on a 2D picture plane.  Now I see them everywhere.

We are not taught about the limitations of the rigorous 3D image construction techniques.  In Ching, there is not any sort of discussion of the inherent limitations of the one point perspective.  Rather, we are taught that the one and two point perspective techniques are gospel.

I guess what I really like about the above passage is the sentence that we are as far from the truth as ever.  That certainly hits it squarely on the head.