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When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit

When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess with only a splash of white giving definition to the (anatomical) left of the girl's mouth. In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.

userbinator 1y ago
Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess The analog equivalent of pixelation.
- cgriswald 1y ago
  It's like touching it with your eye, without the pain. I love the future.
  - HideousKojima 1y ago
    It's like the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Cameron is staring super intently at the painting
- jychang 1y ago
  More like the analog version of doing a FTT and looking at only the high frequency parts vs the low frequency parts.
drob518 1y ago
Yep, I noticed the same thing and came to a similar realization.
cmehdy 1y ago
We think that everything is made of things but we forget that everything is mostly made of nothing, and it's the gaps between things that make it all be. See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps. Nothing is quite something after all.
- markovs_gun 1y ago
  I hate this phrase because how do you even define "made of nothing" or "gaps between" when talking about objects as fuzzy as electrons, and how would you define where something "is" or "isn't " other than interactions? If an electron cloud is interacting with another electron cloud why do we say that space is empty? Because the measured radius of an electron is so much smaller than we observe?
  - monadINtop 1y ago
    Like you say, it's just a more intuitive classical analogy for people who don't want to waste good years of their life (like me) to understand the mathematical detail of theoretical physics. The electron doesn't actually have a measured radius (in our current theories). QFT describes it as point-like excitation of an underlying quantum field. The only connection between our quantum theories (that is really just slightly hand wavy math) and reality is that our theories can predict the statistics of observing a particle or interaction in a given state. So maybe a slightly more coherent explanation is that for a given region between atoms in solid matter, the probability of observing an electron (or any particle) is extremely small. Its like a quantum mechanical cat who's territory extends across mountains and forests, you're probably not gonna stumble across it on any given day, unlike a (quantum) house cat that lives in someones apartment. More generally there are no big "lumps" in the wave-functions, it's very thinly spread like too little butter on toast.
roughly 1y ago
If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks. From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.
- kylebenzle 1y ago
  I read a lot of sci-fi and because it's come up in recommendations I've tried two or three times to read that book, "This Is How You Lose the Time War". The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like. That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
  - fish_phrenology 1y ago
    It took a bit but by the end it had grown on me. I agree it's technically not great but maybe I'm just used to that from reading sci-fi, most of which feels technically bad. That said my reaction to the first quarter was mostly "uhh?". Big disagree on N.K. Jemisin though, I enjoyed reading those. Books 2 and 3 of the three body problem series feel like what you're describing to me. Never got why those were popular, the first one had the interesting cultural revolution flashback element but the sequels did almost nothing for me. Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
    - pests 1y ago
fcatalan 1y ago
You can also see that the hanging yellow part of the headscarf, he just winged it, effective as it might be. I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist. One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly". Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.
pcblues 1y ago
Not sure if anyone here saw the movie Clueless, but a great quote was, "That guy is such a Monet. From a distance he looks great, but up close he's a real mess."
pinoy420 1y ago
[dead]
amelius 1y ago
Yes from a distance the lips look moist/wet, but the cracks in the paint make them look dry, up close.
parrit 1y ago
Your brain is analysing the light in the "room" when zoomed out and compared to that it looks moist. When you zoom in there is no reference. I think then the brain switches from "real scene" analysis to "abstract". It is a bit like those illusions where one grey looks darker than the other, based on surrounding shadows in the image and what the brain assumes... but the RGB values are the same.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 1y ago
A bit like how CRT era video games are horrible when viewed on modern LCDs. Designers and programmers walked around the device limits to get impressions out of it.
hammock 1y ago
"Fill the gaps with your mind" is very broad, and applies to lighting, pointillism, etc a divers lot of things that are not obvious to a non-painter. But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
theSuda 1y ago
I zoomed in and zoomed out instantly as soon as I realized it was breaking the illusion for me. I just love how our brain actually fills in these gaps.
fennecbutt 1y ago
Perhaps for casual readers. But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring. Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html?m=1 https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible. Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...

userbinator 1y ago

Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess The analog equivalent of pixelation.

cgriswald 1y ago
It's like touching it with your eye, without the pain. I love the future.
- HideousKojima 1y ago
  It's like the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Cameron is staring super intently at the painting
jychang 1y ago
More like the analog version of doing a FTT and looking at only the high frequency parts vs the low frequency parts.

drob518 1y ago

Yep, I noticed the same thing and came to a similar realization.

cmehdy 1y ago

We think that everything is made of things but we forget that everything is mostly made of nothing, and it's the gaps between things that make it all be. See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps. Nothing is quite something after all.

markovs_gun 1y ago
I hate this phrase because how do you even define "made of nothing" or "gaps between" when talking about objects as fuzzy as electrons, and how would you define where something "is" or "isn't " other than interactions? If an electron cloud is interacting with another electron cloud why do we say that space is empty? Because the measured radius of an electron is so much smaller than we observe?
- monadINtop 1y ago
  Like you say, it's just a more intuitive classical analogy for people who don't want to waste good years of their life (like me) to understand the mathematical detail of theoretical physics. The electron doesn't actually have a measured radius (in our current theories). QFT describes it as point-like excitation of an underlying quantum field. The only connection between our quantum theories (that is really just slightly hand wavy math) and reality is that our theories can predict the statistics of observing a particle or interaction in a given state. So maybe a slightly more coherent explanation is that for a given region between atoms in solid matter, the probability of observing an electron (or any particle) is extremely small. Its like a quantum mechanical cat who's territory extends across mountains and forests, you're probably not gonna stumble across it on any given day, unlike a (quantum) house cat that lives in someones apartment. More generally there are no big "lumps" in the wave-functions, it's very thinly spread like too little butter on toast.

roughly 1y ago

If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks. From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.

kylebenzle 1y ago
I read a lot of sci-fi and because it's come up in recommendations I've tried two or three times to read that book, "This Is How You Lose the Time War". The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like. That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
- fish_phrenology 1y ago
  It took a bit but by the end it had grown on me. I agree it's technically not great but maybe I'm just used to that from reading sci-fi, most of which feels technically bad. That said my reaction to the first quarter was mostly "uhh?". Big disagree on N.K. Jemisin though, I enjoyed reading those. Books 2 and 3 of the three body problem series feel like what you're describing to me. Never got why those were popular, the first one had the interesting cultural revolution flashback element but the sequels did almost nothing for me. Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
  - pests 1y ago

fcatalan 1y ago

You can also see that the hanging yellow part of the headscarf, he just winged it, effective as it might be. I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist. One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly". Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.

pcblues 1y ago

Not sure if anyone here saw the movie Clueless, but a great quote was, "That guy is such a Monet. From a distance he looks great, but up close he's a real mess."

pinoy420 1y ago

[dead]

amelius 1y ago

Yes from a distance the lips look moist/wet, but the cracks in the paint make them look dry, up close.

parrit 1y ago

Your brain is analysing the light in the "room" when zoomed out and compared to that it looks moist. When you zoom in there is no reference. I think then the brain switches from "real scene" analysis to "abstract". It is a bit like those illusions where one grey looks darker than the other, based on surrounding shadows in the image and what the brain assumes... but the RGB values are the same.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

agumonkey 1y ago

A bit like how CRT era video games are horrible when viewed on modern LCDs. Designers and programmers walked around the device limits to get impressions out of it.

hammock 1y ago

"Fill the gaps with your mind" is very broad, and applies to lighting, pointillism, etc a divers lot of things that are not obvious to a non-painter. But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

theSuda 1y ago

I zoomed in and zoomed out instantly as soon as I realized it was breaking the illusion for me. I just love how our brain actually fills in these gaps.

fennecbutt 1y ago

Perhaps for casual readers. But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring. Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html?m=1 https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible. Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...