No Contours　

It started with an oil painting — my first ever, painted with no training and no prior knowledge of art. That painting was what first suggested to me that I might not see contours at all.

At the time, I didn't even know the word sfumato. But when I painted exactly what I saw, the result came out in that style — soft, without hard edges. Sfumato is a technique Leonardo da Vinci developed, in which forms are built up through subtle transitions of light and shadow rather than defined by outlines, so that edges seem to dissolve into the surrounding space. I later learned that this is something artists spend years training to achieve. For me, it wasn't a technique. It was simply how I painted what I saw.

The blue one is the first still life I ever painted, and the brown one is my second. I had no training, no knowledge of painting, and no practice at the time—I simply painted exactly what I saw. These paintings led me to realize that I do not perceive outlines and that the way I see the world may be fundamentally different from that of most people. Both paintings were completed in January 2020.

In my everyday vision, I don't see outlines or edges. Objects don't have hard boundaries and don't stand out from their background — everything looks the way it does in sfumato, soft, with light falling across the edges of things rather than lines marking them. I can still tell where one object curves around into shadow, and I can tell that something is physically farther away or closer. What I don't get is a crisp edge, or an object popping forward from what's behind it. The whole world looks soft, like sfumato.

There was another thing I didn't know: the idea of "local color" — an object's supposed "true" color, held constant regardless of the light falling on it. I simply mixed paint to match the color I actually saw in front of me, and it hadn't occurred to me that most people are taught to think in terms of a fixed, inherent color at all. That turned out to be part of a larger pattern in how I see color, which I've written about separately under Color Constancy.

It was only after I started noticing this that I began comparing notes — researching on my own, asking people around me how they actually see. That's when I found out, after living almost half a century, that what I'd always assumed was universal wasn't universal at all.

There's a smaller example of this that makes the difference easy to see: a nose.

For most people, the ridge of the nose reads as a defined line — a crisp edge running down the face, with the sides of the nose clearly bounded. But physically, there is no line there. A nose is just a smooth transition of light and shadow; the "edge" is something the visual system adds, drawing a contour onto a place where the real image only fades from bright to dark.

I don't get that line. What I see is exactly what's physically there: one side of the nose catching the light, the other side falling into shadow, and the sense of the nose's shape coming entirely from that gradient of light and dark. I register the bump as a bump because I can see where the light lands and where it doesn't — not because any ridge or outline stands out. As far as I can tell, this is closer to the raw image the eye actually receives, before the usual correction step that turns shading into a defined edge.

The same goes for the rest of the face. Most people seem to perceive the features as clearly bounded — the border between eye and cheek, the line of the lips — even though, again, those borders aren't drawn in the physical light. For me the features are all there, each one distinct enough that I know what it is, but nothing is outlined and nothing is cut away from the whole. It stays a single, soft, continuous face — held together by light and shadow rather than divided up by edges.