Loose, artistic “textures” for visualization

Through evolution, the human visual system has developed the ability to process natural textures. However, in addition to natural textures, humans also visually process man-made textures - some of the richest and most compelling of which are in works of art. Art goes beyond what perceptual psychologists understand about visual perception and there remain fundamental lessons that we can learn from art and art history that we can apply to our visualization problems. This article describes and illustrates some of the visualization lessons we have learned from studying art. I believe that these examples also illustrate some of the potential benefits of further study. While this approach is more open-ended than a perceptual psychology approach, both approaches are worthy of pursuit, and the potential benefits of using the less structured approach outweigh any risk of failure