The Spaces Between the Leaves
The Uncanny Valley, Psychological Interpolation and AI Art
My father once told me something he learned in art college as I struggled to draw a tree. I was unsatisfied with how it didn’t look real enough and how do you capture the detail of all those leaves? Dad said: the secret is, you don’t draw the leaves, you draw the gaps between the leaves. It made no sense to me at the time but over the years it has come to mean more and more, far beyond just a lesson in drawing.
As we all know these days, the world is interpretive. We watch others swear that the way they see the world is how it actually is and there’s never anything we can say to change their mind. And everyone’s view is different. The same goes for art, but not in a middle-school, art studies, “art is open to interpretation” way, but in a more nuanced psychological way. Because we interpret art, be it a novel, a painting, a movie or whatever, we project our understandings of life onto it, so, when making art, there must be room for that projection. The ‘gaps between the leaves’ that create the leaves, as my father put it. Drawing the those gaps and not the trees allows the mind to interpret what we see better, due to things like pattern recognition or pareidolia. This gestalt psychology of art means that, rather than more detail being necessary to create kinship with a…
