Face Off

I recently painted a "beret series"--a group of oil sketches featuring French men, women and children wearing berets. Working on this series has enhanced my already great respect for artists who paint figures and portraits. The slightest little angle can change an expression completely--or make the subject go from handsome to ugly. I spent hours  adjusting and re-adjusting eyes and mouths my French folks. And these are just "sketches"!

"Red Beret I"
10 x 10, Oil on Canvas
(c) Lesley Powell 2020

Why are faces so hard to get right? It's largely because the human eye and brain are exquisitely sensitive to very slight changes in human facial expressions. In fact, we have a specialized brain module that is devoted exclusively to processing faces. Because of this specialized module, we have very fine "within-face discrimination". An image that presents as a face is automatically processed by the specialized module. Thus, whenever we see a face, we are geared up to make very fine judgments of very slight differences.

"Boy in Beret"
10 x 10, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2010

For proof, consider the top photo in this post. In it, the faces are shown upside down. They probably look fairly similar to you. Because they are upside down, they don't present to our brains as faces. And because they are viewed as something other than faces, we don't use the specialized "face" module in our brains to interpret them. As a result, we don't make ultra fine distinctions between the images. They look rather similar. But. But! Just look at the photo below. 

When the faces are rightside up, our brains read them as faces, which triggers use of our special module. One glance tells us that things are quite amiss with the woman on the right. Yikes! I can study the top photo at length and not discern these differences. Yet one split second glance at the real photo, and I realize that things are horribly off. What an amazing illustration of the heightened sensitivity with which we view human faces. 

The illustrations of the "face inversion effect" are from Margaret Livingstone's book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing. Can't wait to learn more from this book!