Face Blindness

A recent article in the magazine Wired updated me on a subject that I first learned about in one of the wonderful books of neurologist Oliver Sacks. The topic is prosopagnosia, also known as "face blindness."

People who suffer certain kinds of cerebral injury can find themselves unable to recognize faces. Now we learn in Wired that a small percentage of people lack the ability to recognize faces from early in life. People with this kind of prosopagnosia do not loose the ability to see faces: they never develop this perceptual skill fully in the first place.

What this information means for me as an artist -- it sets me wondering how an artist drawing a portrait does something different from just recognizing a face. In drawing a face, one actually "takes the image apart" and "reassembles it." A certain amount of drawing is dependant upon convention, which is to say that one learns to notice certain features and depict them a certain way. But inventive artists discover new ways of seeing ordinary things, and the greatest artists apply this exploration of the familiar in even a subject as commonplace as a face.

Clicking on the word "face blindness" above will take you to the Wired article.