"The painter stands like a blind man in the darkness of the white canvas." (Clouzot, H. G.

Do Artists Have a Different kind Of Vision?

Georgina Kleege focuses her document on the pairing of blindness and visual art in a selection cultural theories and fictional texts. She finds that often blindness can be a metaphor for innocence or lack of agency. She states that blind people fascinate visual culture theorists for their reputed reliance on touch rather than vision. The reference to a different kind of vision within artists is of particular interest to my work.

In ‘The Object Stares Back’, James Elkins suggests that all drawing has something to do with blindness. Elkins asserts that the visual artist relies on touch at least as much as on sight, and that this reliance simulates an experience of blindness: “MAKING a drawing is a wonderful way to experience the varieties of blindness. Because it depends on touch, all picture making is in some degree blind. There is the light contact of the pencil on paper, the wet friction of the brush against canvas, the hard push of the engraving needle cutting into copper. When an artist is concentrating, trying to feel the exact pressure of the lead and even the texture of the paper as the pencil skips across its surface, then vision is occluded.” (p. 226)

In Henri-Georges Clouzot’s documentary, The Mystery of Picasso, the voiceover intones: “The painter stands like a blind man in the darkness of the white canvas. The light that slowly appears is paradoxically created by the painter who draws one black curve after another. For the first time, the daily, private drama by the blind genius will be experienced publicly.” The artist is understood to lack the mundane sight of ordinary people, and to be blessed instead with a special, otherworldly vision that gives him access to the true essence of things.

The narrator of John Banville’s ‘The Sea’ describes his late wife’s photography in this way: “She seemed not to be looking through the lens, at her subject, but rather to be peering inward, into herself, in search of some defining perspective, some essential point of view. She would hold the camera steady at eye-level and thrust her raptor’s head out sideways and stare for a second, sightlessly, it might be, as if one’s features were written in some form of braille that she was capable of reading at a distance.” The photographer here is not literally blind, but deemed to be temporarily sightless in the act of capturing the image. Banville draws on the metaphoric linkages between cameras and eyes, as well as ideas about vision as a kind of long-distance touching.

Works Cited in this summary or the Article

Banville, John. The Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Clouzot, Henri-Georges, dir. and prod. The Mystery of Picasso. 1956.

Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1996.

Read the complete text.....

Kleege, G.(2010) ‘Dialogues with the Blind.: Literary Descriptions of Blindness and Visual Art’. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. Vol 4 (1) pp. 1-15. Liverpool University Press. [Online] Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/results?searchtype=regular&search_term=Dialogues+with+the+Blind%3A+Literary+Depictions+of+Blindness+and+Visual+Art&filtered_content=content&x=11&y=14 . (Accesssed : 10/12/2016)