A Story with an 'And' has a Before
An exercise in seeing through the eyes of those who do not see how I do.
I’m drowning in images. My mind is swamped in them. I store memories in vivid color. My imagination recounts these stories through the movement of image on image on image. A scene. My eyes ping from left to right, up and down as if scanning the world to record all of its visual properties. I store them in a bank deep within the folds of tissue that encompass my brain and come back to them when I feel a sense of nostalgia. I understand the places I inhabit and the people I meet through what I see and, despite using words as my tool for recreating what I observe, the act of creating, too, is inherently tied with my eye.
This afternoon, the afternoon of writing this, I assisted a friend of mine with his workshop. He’s building a framework for the audio descriptions that The National Gallery will use for attendees. He is partially sighted and is working on a PHD that challenges the way audio descriptions are created and what they describe. Moving away from the cold and clinical descriptions of what is physically there to a more poetic approach that captures the deeper feeling of a work of art which aims to communicate the emotional impact an image creates. He makes me wonder how can we embed an image into the body of those who cannot see it?
He asked me to assist him by guiding him through the space, overflowing with tourists and absent minded attendees, and to participate in this task of image reconstruction. We visited 5 oil paintings in total over the course of four hours. We, consisting of 5 people—me and another woman with full visibility, my friend J and another gentleman with partial visibility (who we’ll call S), and one man with no visibility at all (who’ll go by Y)—got to work on this task.
The first painting was a depiction of ‘Samson and Delilah’ by Peter Paul Rubens from the early 17th century. From the moment I saw it I could tell it was a Rubens, the body of the woman and her diffused, soft edges, the corporality to his colours and the wispiness of the hair which, at the time, must have been revolutionary. All tale-tell signs I remembered from my art history class in high school. I also held the idea that perhaps the man whose hair was being cut was, in fact, Samson—recounting the biblical story from my childhood as a Mormon without looking at the title of the piece off to the side of it.
With his back towards the painting J asked us for a snapshot of what we saw. I knew what I was seeing and yet that question surprised me, what elements would communicate everything that I captured in an instant? How would I be able to give them the same experience of discovering the story underlying in the painting without bluntly stating this was Samson and Delilah. Spoiling it. S was the first to speak; describing a man and a woman with the hair of the man as the focal point.
S prior to starting this activity mentioned he knew nothing about art, a common phrase I hear from people who believe art to be another language that requires years of training in order to be understood. This made me smile, because I unconsciously understood that the hair was the focus without being able to pin-point it as such. He knew just as much about art as anyone. I looked closer, what was it that I saw as significant? Why did this seem so? Samson’s hair was at the point between thirds, the image putting emphasis on this through the framing of people, with the paint used on his hair, thick and overlapping. Rubens gave it a three dimensional element.
As I looked deeper into the painting I could see men at the door, vocalizing this, I received clarifying questions from Y. He asked what their expressions were, if they were outside the door to the outside world or simply outside the room? He asked what they wore and if the door was ajar? I explained that the men seemed to be waiting for something because one man, who was not wearing armor, held his nose to the door as if peeking from behind it. The expression of another was curious and cautious. Something would soon happen and we, as viewers, were witnesses to the just about. In the hands of a man who appeared to be a servant, was Samson’s hair, the scissors he held were open and full of tension around the greasy locks. Saying these things out loud made me realize the layers of story telling involved in a single static image.
Before this activity I would have called Rubens’ paintings beautiful but outdated, albeit outstanding. Standing in front of this now, looking through the eyes of men who could not see like I could, I realized there was so much information that I missed by choice. I would have spent less than one minute with this painting before and here I was uncovering layer, after layer, after standing in front of it for 40 minutes. There is so much we miss when overwhelmed by images. Eyes flittering everywhere, tied to the endless scroll of visual data held inside our pockets.
As we walked through the gallery we visited a Vermeer and a Michelangelo, both sparse paintings in their composition. The Michelangelo was unfinished and therefore had gaps which we all filled with our imagination on equal footing. The Vermeer, ‘A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal’, was particularly minimalist for a 16th century painting and yet Y, after being told the elements within the painting, called it incredibly complex. He stated he was unsure where the chair was in relation to the woman and how the window and the two paintings could all fit behind the woman with us still being able to see them clearly. The perspective of all the items lost in the space of his mind.
We attended to his queries by guiding him physically. We placed his body in the position of the woman, hand on the virginal which we described as a keyboard with deep wooden panels, and took his hand along the pathway of light towards the glass of the window. Seeing too, seemed to be a spatial concern.
The hardest piece to describe was one whose visual elements were not rooted in reality. ‘The Origin of the Milky Way’ by Jacopo Tintoretto, whose name made me smile — a painter and his tinto — was replete with energy. I communicated this but struggled to say what exactly gave me this sense. The clouds, the cherubs, the dynamic poses of the angels or the wild sight of milk shooting out of the breasts of a floating woman topped with stars like sparks on the tip. It was all vivid, all happening, complete kineticism in stasis.
Afterwards I sat with S and asked him how he found the experience. He said, ‘…because blindness is on a spectrum, we all have different challenges’. He mentioned how a lot of audio descriptions currently in use do not take this into consideration and therefore those who see partially will be left frustrated by contradictions to what they experience, while those who do not see at all will be left confused by an onslaught of details that do not structure the image into their minds. Some may want everything, some may want only the emotion. It dawned on me that I had taken a great gift for granted. The experience of seeing was multiplicitous.
In the instant of seeing you capture the elements of the image, such as a man and woman, or a chair and window. You capture the mood, expressed in the use of colour, the brushstrokes, the expressions in the faces of those portrayed or in their body language. You capture spatial elements that tell you if this is a small room, or a courtyard, or the desert through the lighting, the perspective and the contextual clues in the clothing of those within it. But most importantly and perhaps the reason for visiting works of art, is that you capture the emotional elements that are shown in the symbolism of images, such as angels and clouds, and in their connection to imagery that already exists within your body, such as biblical stories or memories. All images are connected to one another.
I feel a renewed relationship with imagery after assisting J. I am drowning in them, yes, but I now know I can take a moment to rest my body against their flow and float uncovering stories as I go deeper. Visiting layer after layer, connecting them to everything that’s come before.