the awakened eye - E H Gombrich

encounters with nondual awareness

artisans

If you ask me what the world looks like to me, it looks like a painting by Pissarro.
Ernst Gombrich

Art and Illusion
E H Gombrich

The Image And The Eye
E H Gombrich

The Sense of Order
E H Gombrich

e h gombrich

always, matching follows making

"Before we can attempt to 'match' the world with a representation we have to start with making some marks and then test those marks against what we think we see. Of course, what we think we see is modified by what we expect to see and what we think we know. However, in the process of making and matching and in the gradual recognition of discrepancies between what we make, what we expect to see and what seems 'in fact' to be the case, both our art and what we see can be changed."
Ernst Gombrich, in Peter Dormer's Interview with Ernst Gombrich, UK Craft Magazine, Sept 1995

When Picasso says, "I do not seek, I find," he means … that he has come to take as a matter of course that creation itself is exploration. He does not plan, he watches the weirdest beings rise under his hands. The films which show him at work, and his more playful creations … show that here is a man who has succumbed to the spell of making, unrestrained and unrestrainable by the mere descriptive functions of the image.

The Greeks said that to marvel is the beginning of knowledge and where we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to know.

I know of no better description to teach us the art of wonder again … to restore a sense of wonder at man's capacity to conjure up forms, lines, shades or colors – those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call 'pictures.'

We can never neatly separate what we see from what we know. A person who was born blind and who gains his eyesight later on, must learn to see.

The artist who wants to "represent" a real (or imagined) thing does not start by opening his eyes and looking about him but by taking colors and forms and building up the required image.

Nothing comes from nothing.
Ernst Gombrich Art and Illusion: