Optical Illusions in Art

Hey dear Hiveans, I hope you have a week which is full of interesting experiences as well as a great month in general! In my new article I would like to combine art and psychology and go into more detail on a topic that is connected with human perception.

Sometimes the human brain is lured into a wrong direction and things are seen that are not there in reality and there are numerous different types of illusions that can trick the sense of sight and this can refer to certain colors, effects, geometric shapes, movements or other things that change the perception. The cause of this wrong perception can be traced back to the processing of information and after the eyes have seen something, this information has been sent to the brain and compared there with known events from the past and when the various information meets, people get confused and perceive things differently. There can also be optical illusions if a disease is present and the sensory organs no longer function as they should or overloads can also lead to it and if too much information acts on the brain, the perception also changes. Already in ancient civilizations, people were fascinated by optical illusions and knew that these are not only found in nature, but can also be created artificially and how deeply this is anchored can also be seen in the history of art and already in old temples traces of optical illusions can be seen which testify how intensively people already dealt with the phenomenon of perception.

In painting there were many artists who tried to represented objects as realistically as possible with the help of effects that should distort perception and painters noticed that the eye of the viewer can easily be deceived and it developed into a theme that has found more and more popularity in art and new possibilities were found to create illusions. Even when it comes to architectural works, the integration of optical illusions became increasingly popular and the goal in this case was to use certain effects or techniques such as painting ceilings or elements which had the consequence that the entire perspective changed and rooms that are otherwise small appeared much larger or simply produced a magnificent effect. Artists have begun to transfer this to other forms of art and so it was also in the focus when creating furniture, ceramics or other works of art to captivate the eye of the viewer with a change of perception and also in modern art epochs, illusions are indispensable. In the last few weeks I have had some good opportunities to photograph optical illusions which are a parade example of how it is possible to create such effects through various stylistic devices and when you look more closely, it becomes clear how much the brain is challenged.

Many thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about art! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.