The Blind Draw Right on the Edge

The Blind Draw Right on the Edge

John M. Kennedy

University of Toronto

Abstract

Drawings by the blind show edges, are edgy and bring us to the edge of our understanding. The edges are in 3-space, and make a point about our vantage point. They overlap what the sighted do, and show overlap. They use height in the plane to show depth, and so have stature in the best theories of our intuitions about space. Since they use projection, we need to think about pictures afresh, as if they were a new project.

Introduction
In the Fall of 2003, I heard from a German teacher of the blind. She has been having the devil of a time convincing her fellow teachers in Germany that blind people can draw using raised lines and can use raised pictures. Her experience is that her fellow teachers need to open their eyes, and see what the blind can do.

In August of 2003 Simon Hayhoe, of Birmingham UK, came to visit Toronto and told me that there have been revolutions in our thinking about the blind every 50 to 100 years in Europe, and I think we are in one of those now, as we realize blind people have intuitions about pictures we have never tapped before.

In January 2003 I met with Lora, a Canadian-Filipino who had been a student of mine, interested in working with people who are disabled. She had returned for a while to the Philippines and signed up for work in a school for the blind. The school taught the children some useful practical skills, but Lora saw they were not challenged. These blind children can draw, she told the staff, very much to their surprise. Totally congenitally blind children have many pictorial skills, she said, and she showed them drawing after drawing by the blind in my book Drawing and the Blind (1993). It reviews a number of studies on blind children and adults. The school set to with a will. The children drew all manner of things. The school swiftly became talked about, Lora told me. Pictures by the children became sought after. Lora was quite moved when she told me what she had accomplished, though the school insisted on keeping the book!

Drawing and the Blind and now Art Beyond Sight (Axel and Levant, 2003), like Ericsson (1998) from Sweden and Landerer (2001) from Austria, are texts that demand projection back to cave-art times to rethink our ideas about the origin and basis of pictures, and their connection to the sighted and the blind.

The practices of museums as well as schools are changing. The Museo Tiflogico, Madrid, Spain, now in its tenth year, is the first to be wholehearted about opening a museum of art and architecture for the blind. There have been similar innovations in Italy and South Africa. We still must cultivate interest in exhibitions of pictures by the blind, as with the exhibition The View From Here: Visual Art by Artists who are Visually Impaired and Blind organized by Christine Leahey at LA Artcore.

The blind have representational skills of a high order. We must study the skills and learn why they are so advanced. The crux of the matter is that, to a fair extent, blind people use outline and some aspects of perspective as do the sighted.

In December 2002, The New York Times called the idea that the blind have skills with perspective in pictures an idea that changed the way we think. The Times of London called it one of the top 10 ideas and inventions of the year. The perspective developed in picture making of the early Renaissance is, in fact, a system that makes sense via touch, not just vision.

We must be exact, however, in our claims and not just say the blind make deft use of outline and perspective. The ground for a demanding theory may be as simple as this: touch and vision rely on surfaces, perceived in either case from our own very personal vantage points.

Here is the consequence of that simple ground: When we draw outlines, lines stand for the borders of the surfaces we rely on in touch and vision. The borders are edges of foreground surfaces. To many people, pictures by the blind are doubly edgy, we might say, because they are unexpected and sustained by edges.

Let us step deeper into space. Foreground edges can overlap background surfaces, which overlap backgrounds still further back, and so on ad infinitum. An orderly arrangement of foregrounds and backgrounds upon backgrounds is a stage setting telling us the exact special location of the audience. Our seat in the audience is a special, unique, individual physical vantage point on the world.

From this ground, which is just a rather simple beginning, let us admit, ideas about complex pictures grow. To explore these ideas, we need an example. A wonderful girl can help us.
Gaia

Gaia, a totally blind girl living in Rome, Italy, had some peripheral vision to age 7, but never the luxury of detailed vision. She has never been able to view the thin lines in the drawings she creates confidently. Her drawings can show us how edges are the heart of outline.

Gaia, aged 12 in my first interview with her and 13 in the second, drew pictures at my request. In Figure 1 (from Kennedy 2003), two cars, one further down the road than the other, and a storefront are depicted. The lines and shapes are as convincing as any in a sighted child’s drawing. Most would assume that this was drawn by an adept sighted child.

What constitutes a picture like this? What is picture stuff and how do we know what it shows? There are no cars or solid sheets of metal or store windows here. But something on the flat picture surface speaks to us, and we understand it effortlessly.

Let us pick out the lines first. The lines stand for edges of surfaces, just as our grounding idea said they would. I have never met a blind person or sighted person who did not have this intuition. We are not taught it. It is so fundamental that until very recent decades no one thought to ask what outlines can and cannot do, and why. Diderot, in Enlightenment times, began to discuss the topic of the blind and lines, but never framed the question what can outline do. The answer, we now realize, has to do with tangible and visible edges.

Now let us turn to space. One car is shown as near. It is the lower car. The further car is the upper car and still back again is the store, with the store’s lines forming T-junctions with the top of the further car. Evidently, up means distant, in this street scene, and Ts show overlap. Why is “lower” nearer in space and why do Ts show space? Curiously, the answer in both cases is “direction.”

Up surely means away in the distance because as objects recede their contact with the ground elevates in direction. When we draw using up for away, we use a projection. We match the direction of objects in the world from us as observers in the world, with the directions of patches on the picture from us as observers of the picture.

Ts mean overlap because of direction too. If two surface edges are almost the same in direction, but one is more distant than the other and offset slightly, then the rear one can be the stem of a T and the fore one the crossbar of the T in direction. The offset allows the rear edge to protrude in direction from our vantage point.

The cars are shown from the side. Evidently, Gaia makes precise use of her vantage point to choose just those surfaces on one side of the car and just their edges. She gets the shapes and proportions right. Her scaling down is nicely done. As Diderot once said of a blind man, she can rescale shapes freely. Knowing a shape, the blind can scale up to the whole world, if need be.

The distinctive features of cars and a storefront are shown, sufficient to distinguish the scene and make it easy to recognize (Gibson 1969).

Gaia’s drawing was made with a simple, inexpensive, durable raised-line drawing kit from a Swedish organization from the blind. The kit is a plastic sheet and a rubber-faced stiff board. When an ordinary ballpoint pen writes on the sheet, the plastic sheet puckers, instantly, and the immediate result is a durable raised line.

What did we learn from the cars and the store?
We may be more optimistic about tactile pictures and the blind than the naysayers if we can develop a coherent theory. It can give us an anchor for further work, resisting shallow tides of fashion that superficially change our treatment of children and adults, blind and sighted, in education and art.

Here is my offer as the beginnings of a coherent thesis, briefly summarized. We perceive surfaces via the hands and eyes that our body carries from point to point. Gaia’s lines depict edges of surfaces. We appreciate their directions. Via practice, drawing develops, following a similar trajectory in the blind and sighted, progressively dealing with ever more sophisticated spatial principles.

Let me spell out a few implications of this rather condensed summary.

We deal only with a few kinds of surfaces so there readily can be universals of depiction. Specifically, surfaces are only flat or curved, and go together to make only a few kinds of boundaries. A single foreground surface has edges, and the direction of those edges from our vantage point is the main physical base for perception of any object. Once we can perceive a single surface, we can be sensitive to combinations, such as two surfaces revealing Ts in direction. Also, a single surface can meet another to be part of a fold, to jut out towards us like an external corner of a house, or be concave toward us, so from our vantage point it is like the internal corner of a room. A single surface can curve convexly like an apple, but it still has edges. It can still form Ts with background surfaces. Gaia’s cars are largely flat-surfaced objects, but she has no trouble drawing rounded convex objects, like two apples side by side, or people. Indeed, she loves designing clothes with drawings that suggest rounded forms, or drawing beach scenes full of people.

The key connection between vision and touch is that all these surface forms are tangible as well as visual. All are subject to the geometrical laws of direction from a point.

Development
Perception uses an affinity between line and edges of surfaces, spontaneously, at a very early age. The preschool child, deploying line, readily uses shapes similar to the shapes of surface borders. The shape similarity is quite relaxed initially and we make finer and more detailed fits with age and practice.

The use by children of devices for depth develops though many twists and turns for a very good reason: There are many devices and they are often independent. Some like Ts match the world by depicting one surface partly aligned in direction with another (in some cases even lying on top of it) and partially obscuring it. Others entail what may be developmentally more sophisticated notions of direction and projection, like away in distance on a ground being copied in direction by height in the picture plane. This can be a kind of parallel projection. Some devices come quite late in development, even if one draws frequently, as Gaia has done for years. For example, Gaia does not use perspective convergence, but some blind adults are quite comfortable drawing receding quadrilaterals as foreshortened, with converging obliques. Gaia will probably come to these perspective devices on her own, with practice, if the thesis here about development is correct.

Gaia, a young girl when I interviewed her, was still developing her pictorial skill, probably mostly by practice, though she is very much encouraged by her mother Lucia and many others. One reason I suggest her skill has self-taught features is that often her drawings in my interviews surprised her mother and her teacher, Dr. Vincenzo Bizzi, but fitted nicely with what I and others have observed sighted children do.

Blind adults in Turkey (Kennedy and Merkas, 2000), New York and Toronto have been found to have admirable pictorial abilities, provided they were interested in drawing and have tried it often, on their own initiative largely. In my experience, blind people with only very limited practice or none draw like sighted preschoolers at first. Characteristically they improve rapidly, sometimes covering two or more developmental stages of sighted children within minutes. What is deeply instructive, and deserves enormous attention, is that blind children and adults who have drawn a lot and largely on their own do so perfectly well, and much like competent sighted people.

Limits to be broken

When I asked Gaia to draw a wheel spinning, she commented drawings could not do this. It seems she thinks drawings show shape, not movement. This means Gaia has a theory of representation. She does not say “I do not know how” but rather “that cannot be done.”

Gaia’s thoughts about pictures are like a theory of literal language. Perhaps soon she will go beyond literal bounds. Perhaps, like some blind adults, she will realize pictures have limits that can be broken for good reason, much as “he has a heart of stone” breaks the limits of literal language and yet conveys a message. Esref, a totally congenitally blind man in Turkey (who has been invited to offer a workshop at an exhibition on alternative arts in Washington, DC, June 2003) devised ways to suggest the movements of wheels (Kennedy and Merkas, 2000). He omitted spokes to show “a wheel spinning”, he elongated the wheel to show “wobbly”, drew “speed lines” behind the wheel to show the direction of its motion, and lengthened them to show a faster wheel. Such motion indicators were only invented by the sighted likely after 1810.

My supposition at present is that as blind people practice drawing they discover for themselves the capabilities and limits of depiction. Once clear about a limit they can be tempted to transgress it with reason, and to good effect. Rules, they realize, are for guidance not obedience. The greats recognize rules, but use them in ways that befit a higher purpose. That way lies a foundation of literal representation and yet beyond it the world of the trope: the metaphorical picture, the ironic, the caricature, the understated, for example. The world of depiction becomes three dimensional raised to a power, one might say.
Conclusion

Solid research indicates the exponent that delivers literal picture making to the blind and the sighted is the surface, and especially its edges, tangible as well as visual. The research calls for careful interpretation of pictorial devices and ever-deepening theory, for analysis is still very much underway. In the literal vein, the use of the observer’s vantage point lets us know how to select surface borders efficiently. It structures the projection of a few suitable borders onto a picture surface. It governs picture stuff -- shape on the picture surface. To date, the evidence tells us drawings by the blind may well rest on the same vantage point and projective principles as those by the sighted.

Beyond the principles of literal depiction, a door to non-literal representation is opened when the system’s limits are recognized and deliberately violated aptly, for good reason. What has been established empirically, by Esref’s work, is that the devices that seem like solutions to a problem of limits to a blind person seem fitting also to the sighted.

References
Axel, E. S. & Levant, N. (2003) Art beyond sight AFB Press, New York.

Eriksson, Y. (1998) Tactile pictures: pictorial representations for the blind 1784-1940.

Doctoral dissertation, Gothenburg University.

Gibson, E. J. (1969) Principles of perceptual learning and development Appleton-Century

–Croft, New York.

Kennedy, J. M. (1993) Drawing and the blind. Yale Press, New Haven.

Kennedy, J. M. (2003) Drawings by Gaia, a blind girl. Perception

Kennedy, J. M. & Merkas, C. E. (2000) Depictions of motion devised by a blind person Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7, 700-706.

Landerer, C. (2001) Kunstsgeschichte als kognitiongeschichte: Ein beitrag zur genetischen kulturpsychologie (History of art as history of cognition: A contribution to genetic psychology) Doctoral dissertation. Salzburg University.


Figure captions

Figure 1 Cars and a store (from Kennedy, 2003, by permission of Pion Ltd.).

I was introduced to Gaia by Paola Di Giulio, a highly experienced pedagogue for children with perceptual difficulties. Ms. Di Guile’s work is astonishingly rewarding and diverse, I should add, and it has been an honor to be invited to meet her charges, Ms. Di Giulio recognized the importance of Gaia for modern research programs on tactile pictures, and I am deeply grateful to her for involving me. Vincenzo Bizzi, an educator from Rome, who encouraged Gaia’s family, and, most especially, Gaia’s mother Lucia, who has fostered Gaia’s interest in pictures from infancy, deserve recognition internationally.

John M. Kennedy completed his Ph.D. in perception at Cornell University and began his research on blindness shortly thereafter as an assistant professor at Harvard University. He currently lectures at the University of Toronto, Scarborough College, where he won his college’s teaching prize in 1994.