I am a college professor and an artist.
I teach mainly two courses: sensation and perception, which is the core and original domain of psychology, and a seminar that addresses “big issues” in psychology. The biggest issue that I love to teach is the tripartite relationships involving the mind, the body, and the world.
As an experimental psychologist, I conduct researches on visual perception and have published several papers on visual illusions and how voluntary attention influences visibility, size, and shape of visual “stimuli”. Parallel to my renewed interests in drawing and painting, I seek to understand how artists depict things they see in a way compatible with contemporary vision science. This effort led to the publication of a comprehensive theoretical review titled "Artists' innocent eye as the extended proximal mode of vision" in the journal "Art & Perception" (Lou, 2018). In a nutshell, I suggest that the capacity for visually reducing a world into mere colors and shapes is an accomplishment of learnt strategies of attention rather than one achievable by simply relaxing into an intuitive and holistic mode of seeing.
As an artist I practice drawing and painting. I have tried various painting media and drawing tools, including pastels, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, oil, and oil pastel. I love painting and drawing from observations of people and objects. Importantly, drawing and painting from life also provide a playground for me to derive and test psychological theories of depiction.
I was born and raised in Shanghai. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of becoming an artist and spent quite a lot of time drawing and painting under the tutelage of art teachers who were influenced by the French and Russian academic traditions before the disastrous cultural revolution. However, I did not pick up paint brushes again until about ten years ago, when I felt the irrepressible urge to do what I love. I love to depict from life whatever that appeals me visually and somatically. I like to depict strong and intense forms of human faces and figures, trees and flowers, and landscapes. I love mood-suggesting colors. A unified self-aware theme has not emerged, but hopefully is just under the horizon.
I teach mainly two courses: sensation and perception, which is the core and original domain of psychology, and a seminar that addresses “big issues” in psychology. The biggest issue that I love to teach is the tripartite relationships involving the mind, the body, and the world.
As an experimental psychologist, I conduct researches on visual perception and have published several papers on visual illusions and how voluntary attention influences visibility, size, and shape of visual “stimuli”. Parallel to my renewed interests in drawing and painting, I seek to understand how artists depict things they see in a way compatible with contemporary vision science. This effort led to the publication of a comprehensive theoretical review titled "Artists' innocent eye as the extended proximal mode of vision" in the journal "Art & Perception" (Lou, 2018). In a nutshell, I suggest that the capacity for visually reducing a world into mere colors and shapes is an accomplishment of learnt strategies of attention rather than one achievable by simply relaxing into an intuitive and holistic mode of seeing.
As an artist I practice drawing and painting. I have tried various painting media and drawing tools, including pastels, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, oil, and oil pastel. I love painting and drawing from observations of people and objects. Importantly, drawing and painting from life also provide a playground for me to derive and test psychological theories of depiction.
I was born and raised in Shanghai. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of becoming an artist and spent quite a lot of time drawing and painting under the tutelage of art teachers who were influenced by the French and Russian academic traditions before the disastrous cultural revolution. However, I did not pick up paint brushes again until about ten years ago, when I felt the irrepressible urge to do what I love. I love to depict from life whatever that appeals me visually and somatically. I like to depict strong and intense forms of human faces and figures, trees and flowers, and landscapes. I love mood-suggesting colors. A unified self-aware theme has not emerged, but hopefully is just under the horizon.