Summary

The premise of the field of vision and art is that studies of visual processing can inform an understanding of visual art and artistic practice, and a close reading of art, art history, and art practice can help generate hypotheses about how vision works. Paraphrasing David Hubel, visual neurobiology can enhance art just as knowledge of bones and muscles has for centuries informed artistic representations of the body. The umbrella of visual art encompasses a bewildering diversity of works. A focus on 2-dimensional artworks provides an introduction to the field. For each of the steps taken by the visual brain to turn retinal images into perception, one can ask how the biology informs one’s understanding of visual art, how visual artists have exploited aspects of how the brain processes visual information, and what the strategies deployed by visual artists reveal about neural mechanisms of vision.