How do you look?

How Do You Look? (2003-2006) was a Wellcome Trust funded project carried out jointly with Imperial College Computing Department (IC) and St Mary’s Hospital London. The role of Imperial College was confined to providing eye tracking equipment for the surgical part of the project.

The project’s main thrust was to apply to laparoscopic surgery the research methodology we had developed over the years with artists. This consisted in observing the surgeon’s eye movements in order to understand his eye-hand strategies and, on this basis, devise ways of teaching surgery trainees.

A training DVD “General Eye Movement Catalogue (GEMC)” 2003 was produced and presented at 12th European Conference on Eye Movements, Dundee 2003 “Visual Search in Parallel Environments – eye-hand coordination in minimal access surgery”. The results were also presented in an invited lecture in Tampere University, Finland “A Painter’s Eye – observing an expert in Visual Perception” March 2004. During the course of the project, Sir Professor Ara Darzi was eye tracked and filmed performing laparoscopic cholysystectomy (gall bladder extraction) which, to our knowledge, constitutes a world first which, in all likelihood, will remain for some time the only available reference on the subject of eye-hand coordination in real-world keyhole surgery.

The U.K. touring exhibition, film, and dedicated website [www.howdoyoulook.co.uk], opened in an art gallery (Dulwich Picture Gallery London) and progressed to its final venue, a medical institute (Hunterian Museum London) where it was accompanied by a series of lectures including "Many look but few see – Leonardo da Vinci" by Francis Wells FRCS.

Humphrey Ocean was born in 1951 in Sussex. He studied at Canterbury Art School from 1970 to 1973, during which time he played bass with Kilburn and the Highroads, supporting The Who on their 1973 Christmas Tour. In 1982 he won the Imperial Tobacco Portrait Award, and in 1984 had his first major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Internationally known for his portraits of Paul McCartney and Philip Larkin at the NPG, his work has been shown extensively, including at the Tate Liverpool and Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. In 1999, the National Maritime Museum commissioned Ocean to paint a picture of modern maritime Britain.
His one-year artist residency in 2002 at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, culminated in a solo exhibition of his work, 'How's my Driving', inspired by the gallery's collection of 17th century Dutch genre paintings, as well as its South London suburban suroundings.

Many of his portrait commissions are represented in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Other collections include the British Council, National Maritime Museum, Imperial War Museum, London; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; University of Wales, Swansea; and Royal Library, Windsor Castle.

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