Thanks SD for your thoughts. The strong negative/positive way of painting is called
notan, a Japanese term that literally means “dark-light”. It can be very suggestive because the brain always looks for patterns. I hadn't thought of it myself but now that you mention it, the "houses" might as well be heads in a crowd. It makes me want to experiment more with this ambiguity.
Why do we see and interpret certain figures often very similarly, but sometimes differently because of our life experiences? We could dive into a rabbit hole of Jung's archetypes and the collective unconscious, and maybe come out at the other end somewhere close to David Chalmers' latest theories of consciousness which are just three Wikipedia clicks away. It's way above my head, but the mysterious phenomena are plainly there for us to experience.
The inspiration for the "houses" you liked was in the background of the orange grove where I sat down to paint. Just for fun, here's a photo of the scene. I usually take a snap with my phone of whatever I sketch:
- grove01.jpg (77.72 KiB) Viewed 27 times
If we convert the photo to only two tones (either black or white), here's what the houses look like. It's half way to abstraction and with a bit of practice one can learn to "see" this without the help of a camera:
- grove02.jpg (18.81 KiB) Viewed 27 times
And if we zoom in only on the trees, other patterns appear. Maybe fish? Cars?
- grove03.jpg (15 KiB) Viewed 27 times
