Impressionist landscapes attempt to remove the artist from the act of painting, to recover Gombrich’s “innocent eye” by imparting to the canvas the variations in brightness that are the raw materials for perceptual inference, rather than the output of this process. To do this, the artist must develop and deploy a sophisticated understanding of how the subjective, phenomenological aspects of vision come about. Each work can be understood as an exercise in reverse engineering the human visual system, from sensory input all the way to a coherent subjective experience. The paintings become
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