Realistic painting is a visual illusion: a painting is a two-dimensional smears of motionless paint on a canvas, that looks to us like a real thing. Typically, a painting isn’t even the same color as a real thing, which most people don’t believe until they try taking a photo without automatic white balance. Part of becoming a good artist is to learn ways to fool the human visual system.
Typically, a painting isn’t even the same color as a real thing
Then you can start getting into the weeds about “colour as qualia” or “colour as RGB spectral activation” or “colour as exact spectral recreation”. But spectral activation in the eyes is also not consistent across a population—which we pathologise if their cones are “too close” as colourblindness, but in practice is slightly different for everyone anyway.
Also, visual art is often such adversarial examples, but it creates not visual illusions, but emotion. E.g. sad landscape or religious epiphany.
Realistic painting is a visual illusion: a painting is a two-dimensional smears of motionless paint on a canvas, that looks to us like a real thing. Typically, a painting isn’t even the same color as a real thing, which most people don’t believe until they try taking a photo without automatic white balance. Part of becoming a good artist is to learn ways to fool the human visual system.
Then you can start getting into the weeds about “colour as qualia” or “colour as RGB spectral activation” or “colour as exact spectral recreation”. But spectral activation in the eyes is also not consistent across a population—which we pathologise if their cones are “too close” as colourblindness, but in practice is slightly different for everyone anyway.
And that’s not even getting into this mess...