Posted by Steve Price on November 19, 1998 at 05:42:56:
I've never before seen the kind of monochrome vs color comparisons of the sort Wendel has made on this rug, and think it is a most interesting (and novel) way of looking at things. On the other hand, if it's true that the three most important things about a rug (in order of importance) are
1. color
2. color
3. colour (a concession to those committed to the peculiar form of English used by the British)
we have to be very careful about how we use it. Like nuclear energy, there is great potential for both good and evil here.
Wendel's final aesthetic judgment, like mine, is that he likes this rug very much despite its demonstrable flaws. This reminded me that there seem to be two kinds of people in terms of how they perceive faces. Some see and pay attention to features. Others, of which I am one, seem not to pay attention to features but perceive a sort of gestalt image. I could never help a police artist prepare a sketch because I have no image of the individual features of faces, even those that I know very well. This makes me wonder whether this sort of gestalt perception vs feature perception applies to rugs as well. I suspect that it does.
Steve Pice