When Australia led the UN multinational force to enforce the election result and drive out the militia in East Timor in 1999, war artists were taken along. This has been a long standing tradition of the Australian Army.
The artist captures the feeling of oppressed and frightened civilians, of Army personnel returning from duty showing the pressures of battle and so on.
As these people often work from photographs, why is it that the painting, having less detail, captures the emotion so much more effectively than the highly detailed photograph?
What is 'emotion' in this context? It is not the state of excitement or depression of the painting or the viewer of that painting.
Yet we stare at paintings more readily than photographs. We feel more of what it was like to be there. We understand the fear and other emotions of war better. From the perspective of consciousness, how can this be?
After all, isn't the image of the painting and photograph processed by the brain in the same way? Why is the lowering of detail an improvement? How can the emotion of a scene be 'enhanced' or 'highlighted' by a painting?
Clearly the painting captures qualia as-an-image. There are many emotions that the artist or anyone else present at the battle scene or who are viewing the photograph of the battle scene may feel, but the artist is capable of highlighting a particularly relevant 'feeling' by excluding the irrelevant-to-the-qualia detail.
It is reasonable to assume, especially considering visual distortions associated with feelings (eg the 'criminal' look, the 'aura' of a saintly Mother Theresa etc), that part of what we see is our own response to the scene - we 'see' the qualia that we generate in response to a scene - the artist is capable of enhancing this natural process.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2002