I decided at some point that, should a disaster befall the art museum, I would try to save the Cezannes first. The ones in question are very livable and reward any length of attention.

I could make a wise crack about “anything beyond Pop Art”. But Albers was considered in that fold and I have seen many mannerly works done by these people. But some of it screams so loudly that I can’t hear what it’s trying to say - if anything.

Cezanne’s landscapes are glorious. They are for ..living with. A naive question, considering your list above, where do you personally draw the line with respect to these pieces are for looking.. or living with ?

Steve has a point. Ed Henning, once curator of contemporary art at the CMA, would comment about this. some days he would find the art in his galleries engaging and, on others, dull. Same art, different Ed.

Op Art fits in here. People like Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley created canvases that engaged certain perceptual functions. For me, these pieces are for looking, but not for living with. Up the scale is another level where expectations based on memory are confounded The usual suspects would include M.C.Escher, Salvador Dali, that Baroque guy who made figures out of fruits and vegetables, among others. At the tippity top is Cubism, an epochal visual synthesis. Here one can find a firm and vibrant ambiguity of construction that engages everything you got. And a lot of it came from Cezanne.

Me, I can’t trust my own first impressions. So many times I have stepped back beaming only to consign the product to oblivion upon further review. Unusual only in the extent to which it has happened.

Ofcourse you have. These images you made are representations of something else (the actual world or another representation). However, there is not a one-to-one mapping between the representation and the thing that is represented. It is in the difference between the two that lies the meaning of the representation. When looking at your images this process doubles. The representation of the image in your head is not the image that is in front of you. How can you be conscious of the difference? How can you be conscious of something that is not represented? Something that has no representation we cannot perceive as ’something else’, but only as a difference of representation to earlier representations. We have to adjust our representations continually because our cognitive system expects differences. The breadroll that I had for breakfast this morning differs from my representation of it, because my representation does not coincide with my earlier representations of breadrolls. My representation of this breadroll this morning is changed, however slightly, and it is this very small difference that makes me conscious of the difference between representation and world. Even stronger, it is this difference that makes all of our consciousness. The real world we can only be conscious off by antagonism between our representations of it. So perception is continually trying to adjust representations to allow for the difference….thus part of perception is remembering earlier representations. Your changing subjective reaction to your images thus relates to the structure of the representational process. You consciously know that the actuality and your memory does not coincide. Therefore the images may seem strange to you. Because the actuality of an image always sligthly differs from your memory of it, the image can seem to be slightly changed. When you changed the context (order) of the images, you manipulated the amount of difference that your system had to resolve and therefore you changed their meaning. Might I point to Nelson Goodman’s study ‘Languages of Art (1968) that describes this process and to Umberto Eco’s ‘A Theory of Semiotics’ (1976) that formalizes the theory.
This theory also has some bearing on your “homunculus barrier”, wich, as I understand it, is commonly known as the “symbol grounding” problem (Harnad, Stevan (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D, 42, 335–346.). Can be found on Wikipedia.
Thinking about this kind of things you wonder why one would ever need drugs to give your head a twist.

You also wrote: ‘The part that I find most interesting to think about is, what domain or domains are traversed when I see my own drawings in different ways? The concept of figure and ground is essential to understanding what is happening with the face/vase example. What concept (perhaps it doesn’t yet have a name) would I need to classify the changes that I observe with my own drawings?’

I suggest that the domain you traversed is the narrative structure. By changing the order you changed the narrative structure that is part of the representation of viewing your images consecutively.
This alters their meaning and therefore their perception. And vice-versa.