Experience in Shaping what we See

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Rama & Sita
India is a destination that I would love to travel to. Its rich culture and religious diversity shape much of the country’s ideals, customs, architecture, music, art, etc. Diana Eck, author of “Darsan: Seeing the Divine Images in India” describes India best when she says, “India presents to the visitor an overwhelmingly visual impression. It is beautiful, colorful, sensuous. It is captivating and intriguing, repugnant, and puzzling. It combines the intimacy and familiarity of English four o’clock tea with the dazzling foreignness of caparisoned elephants or vast crowds bathing in the Ganga during an eclipse. India’s display of multi-armed images, its processions and pilgrimages, its beggars and kings, its street life and markets, its diversity of peoples- all appear to the eye in a kaleidoscope of images” (10). 
One of Frida Kahlo's Self Portraits
I remember being mind blown about our vision when a challenge having to do with the color of a dress was going viral. Some people saw the dress as gold and white, while others saw it as black and blue. What we see differs in everyone as a result of visual acuity and perception. Aside from the process our brain experiences when we see, I think it’s interesting that our past visual experiences are also a factor when we make sense of the world around us through vision. This means that I might be more predisposed to see certain things compared to other people due to the fact that I’m more attuned to those things or interpreting them differently as a result of my experiences. When I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I got a chance to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit. I had done a presentation on her life in fifth grade and I think her art really resonated with me not only because of her use of vibrant colors, but also because I knew her life story. 

In Indian images, Eck says that “two principle attitudes may be discerned in the treatment of images. The first is that the image is primarily a focus for concentration, and the second is that the image is the embodiment of the divine” (45). The latter really stood out to me because I did not know that images can literally be the real embodiment of a deity. This could be the reason why so many Indian homes have images of deities on their wall.

Comments

  1. Oskar MattesMay 8, 2020 at 8:27 PM

    It's interesting to me how vision, a sense often equated with the ability to determine objective truths about the world around us, is so clearly subjective at the end of the day. Is there some underlying quality of Kahlo's art that simply makes it more beautiful than that of other painters? Likely no, but that doesn't stop us from believing that it really is more beautiful.

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