Art and pattern recognition

I went to Bilston Craft gallery this week. It’s not so much a craft gallery as a library and art gallery. The pieces exhibited in the photograph are by Jane Wilson from Shrewsbury and is called ‘Hitting the right notes’. When I am taking photographs, I look for interesting patterns and we definitely have patterns here.

Pattern recognition

We are born with pattern recognition hard wired into us. We use this ability to recognise each other and to find our way. Most artists know this and and even if the piece is a pile of bricks or as in this case wooden pieces recycled from an old piano; the pattern is important. Artists who don’t understand the basics of pattern recognition don’t really understand art. Art can be an image of a soup can or a pattern that tells us it’s Marilyn Monroe. It can be a portrait or landscape. The former we understand from recognising people, the latter we understand from recognising places and finding our way. We prefer symmetry, the faces that are more symmetrical are the ones we find  more attractive. I shot these photographs from a symmetrical angle and from the odd angle of this photo. I’ll use the symmetrical one for my art post. This picture isn’t to show off the art, it’s to show off the gallery and tease you into wondering if you might go and see for yourself! It is worth going, because those pieces have colour and texture, you want to touch them and feel the wood.

In the news

In the news this week has been more politics. The Tories have started name calling, calling Ed Miliband ‘red Ed’. That is a bit pathetic and so is are the attacks on his late father. It’s about as distasteful as the Tory attacks on benefit claimants and comes from the same privileged school of thought.

Midland Metro

The Birmingham Mail has a piece reporting that the Midland Metro hasn’t been the success that was originally planned. Surprise, surprise! The original trams were built with sweat labour, they appeared to be more successful and they were made in Britain; not Italy. There is a lesson to be learned from the Midland Metro with it’s fares that are nearly double taking the bus and it’s stations that are too far from the High street. Any sensible person can see the same thing happening with HS2, but that is a national nightmare rather than a local one.

Religious education

The BBC reports more than half of schools are failing in RE. It is a difficult subject. Physics is easier, because more kids believe in electricity than in God… They can’t see either, but the former seems to make their smart phones work; they’re still waiting for a text from the latter…

prosopagnosia

The BBC website has an interesting article about prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognise patterns. That condition affects around 2% of the population who have difficulty in recognising faces; others are affected because of brain injury.

I wrote a blog post earlier about politics and in particular I touched on the government policies affecting transport. Do you like the school run, the rush hour, traffic jams, accidents, traffic calming and centralisation? Me neither, is there a political solution? My blog post on a zillion ideas, looks at that. You can subscribe to either blog or you can follow me on Twitter and get updates. At the time of writing the sun is shining and so I think I’ll have an early lunch and go out taking more photos. I might even shoot some video today!

Related articles

• Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing (bbc.co.uk)
• Composition: Pattern (benseesdifferent.wordpress.com)
• Review: Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gallery One – Part One (exhibitdev.wordpress.com)
• Op Art (jayjacbibrownblogged.wordpress.com)
• Public views sought on Midland Metro extension (globalrailnews.com)