Throughout my childhood, I always found an interest in art and spent most of my free time doodling and painting until I started to take more serious and educational art classes in high school. I always gravitated toward artists like Van Gogh and Monet who created less realistic but more expressional works of art. In fact I almost always disregarded photo realistic art, because I never really found meaning to it other than envy towards the artist who could draw so well that it looked like a photo.
My taste in art has changed over the years, finding more interest in realistic art. I actually found such an interest in this one artist’s work that I found out she was an artist and not a photographer who specialized in black and white photography at all!
I stumbled upon her instagram which posted a lot about her progress and was amazed. I also found a new interest in figuring out how I initially couldn’t read the drawing as a drawing, but as an actual object.
After learning about how the eyes works and sends information to the brain, I gained a little bit more of respect and understanding for hyper realistic drawings, especially for those made of smaller parts, like artists who specialize in hatching or pointillism methods, which is basically making their drawing out of dots or small lines, rather than just blurring the graphite together on a piece of paper with a stump or tissue, which is one of the ways I was taught to draw. If you zoom into a black and white hyper realistic drawing, in this case one of Cj Hendry’s, you’ll see that it’s made up of several black lines on a white piece of paper. However when seen from a normal distance, the drawing looks like a realistic photo of boots, when it’s in fact a drawing.
(Hendry)
This can be related to the sine wave gratings that we learned about in class, which tests visual acuity by pairing a box made up of vertical lines and another box of horizontal lines together and requires you to step back until you can no longer read the orientation of the lines. 
(Wolfe)
This has to do with the spacing of the photoreceptors on our retina, which is what Hendry has the human body to thank for her success.
So, what we see is reflected onto our retina, this goes for both examples although the light intensity varies a little bit more irregularly in the drawing than it does in the sine wave gratings. If the photoreceptors are spaced so that the white and black parts of the drawing fall on different cones, we can make the two apart. However, if they fall on the same cone, we see a gray combination of the two, which is why we can’t tell that it’s made up of the hatching technique she uses. (Wolfe.)
Wolfe, Jeremy M., Keith R. Kleunder, and Dennis M. Levi. “Sensation & Perception: Eye Structure.” Sensation & Perception: Eye Structure. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Hendry, Cj. “Instagram.” Instagram. Cj Hendry, n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2014.
I actually recently discovered CJ Henry’s work on Instagram as well. At first I thought her works looked cool but they weren’t all that impressive to me until I realized that she uses only a series of patterns and dots to construct the entire piece and her videos showcased the painstaking amount of repetition the is needed for the whole image. I hadn’t made the connection to the sine wave gratings until you mentioned it thought and I definitely think she is successful in tricking our mind. If the human eye had a greater density of photoreceptors then her work would not have the same appeal to us and it would not be nearly as successful but since we don’t see the painstaking repetition she undergoes until we get closer the piece our mind is able to interpret it as a realistic looking object. She is able to get the shade and depth of her work based on the proximity of her strokes and the closer they get to each other then the more the photoreceptor has to average and the darker the texture becomes.
The artistic nature of your post caught my attention immediately. I am a graphic design major, and therefore, I work with many different styles of art on a daily basis; however, like yourself, I have recently taken a personal interest in realistic art. I’ve watched a few videos on the painstaking process of creating such a realistic work of art out of tiny dots or lines. I remember doing a project in one of my high school art classes where we used the technique of pointillism to create a simple figure. To say this process was time consuming is an extreme understatement. It nearly drove me crazy.
However, I enjoyed how you connected the wholesome perception of realistic art with the concept of sine wave gratings. I believe this does have an enormous effect on the way we perceive this type of art, and is the underlying reason we are able to see a picture, rather than a random grouping of small dots. I also believe the gestalt principles contribute to the wholesome perception of realistic art. Proximity plays a large role with deciphering the edges and shadows of objects in the this style of art. The close nature of the dots allow us to group them together, which creates forms against a background. Also, the slight difference in proximity of the dots within the object allow us to easily see highlights and shadows that form on each object. It is mind boggling how much our eyes are able to accomplish in order for us to perceive our environment in so many different ways.
I think your comment relating different drawing techniques, such as hatching and pointillism, to what we have learned about contrast and spatial frequency is really interesting. Furthermore, your depiction of the processes at work makes them seem practical, and I would like to think there is a benefit to having a limited contrast sensitivity and number of spatial frequency channels. I wonder, if you were to draw a three dimensional picture from several viewpoints, or look at a rotating three dimensional object, would the changes in depth rotation affect how we interpret different spatial frequency channels? I know we are not as good at detecting oblique objects as opposed to horizontal or vertical objects. Perhaps because, at certain angles, objects take up less of our visual field, whatever we are viewing will seem more scrunched, even though spatial frequency is not actually changing. Or maybe there will be no difference in how we perceive contrast from different viewpoints.