How Dega’s Paintings Changed After He Lost His Eyesight | The Disordered Eye | Perspective

paper was light gold in medieval times i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong [Music] vision we take the things we see for granted that what we look at is actually what it is we see something and we decide it's real and that photos and tv and so on give us a realistic picture of the world colours are real cameras don't lie but none of this is in fact accurate the truth is that we see much more with our brains than we see with our eyes [Music] so what is it we're seeing if vision is all just electrical impulses sent to our brains and then turned into images of reality by our minds there is of course an objective reality outside of ourselves it's just that humans could perceive very little of it if we could see it all the world would look very different i see this as my art the art of creating a new sense the art of creating a new organ so do you even need good eyesight to make great art it's okay to be a painter because it doesn't have to be in focus artists like dagora monet use their disabilities in a positive and clever way as frustrating as they might have found them degas could still see the human form some of his roughness was probably smoothed over by the blur of his own poor vision now that i can't actually see what i'm doing i might dare to do things which i wouldn't dare to do when i could see it as an artist and filmmaker i've always been interested in the impact of disability on art and what if anything it contributes to an artist's work the work gains another layer of significance perhaps it's unintended but it's certainly downplayed by the art establishment which just sees disability as tragic in this film i'm going to explore how changed vision affects an artist's work and whether it makes it better or worse you'd think painting 101 is the ability to see what you're painting not necessarily so artist sagi man started losing his sight in 1973 and was registered blind in 1989 he was determined to carry on painting i've come to the attenborough centre in leicester to look at an exhibition of sergey's paintings he made after he became a visually impaired artist one of the things i particularly like about this gallery is they provide sensory suitcases which is pretty awesome right because it's a blind person's exhibition and these are for people who are nd neurodivergent like myself and inside it's got loads of really cool stuff that helps you look at paintings like weird sunglasses and stuff and a card landscape but the serious point is that not everyone can look at art in the standard way and providing stuff to help people experience the art is like a really good thing to do and it's fun i'm off to look at some paintings [Music] my [Music] saggy man's paintings are a tour de force and i'm really intrigued about his methods so i've traveled down to suffolk to talk to his widow francis to find out how he managed to paint [Music] blind i keep the same habits we had i think oh he's not there he really is not there that's horrible but his paintings are here yeah yeah and there's loads that i don't actually even know so i can look through a pile of paintings and and see things i've never seen before just before i met sergey he had cataracts removed very young to have cataracts and before that he'd been very short-sighted and that's connected i think but i met him afterwards he was and probably he said is maybe at that time his sight was better than it had ever been and then um he noticed something wrong and then he said oh no i'm you know i can't see right it turned out he had a detached retina and then the dreadful thing was sagi said to me my other eye has gone so his other eye had detached and he knew on the blindness was on the cards then there were two things which went in parallel which was how he could see in relation to day-to-day life where from 1988 onwards he really couldn't do normal things but in relation to his painting he could always it it changed the way he paint it but it never it never certainly never stopped him painting his site was jolly bad he went to spain longing for new subjects to paint somewhere because he loved bright bright sun now what's that's a wall it's a curve i think this is probably a very sort of wonderful motif but i'll have to come back another day when i'm seeing differently he came back home and the next morning sagi woke up it was daylight and he he went to the bathroom and said turn the light on turn the light on um and i oh no the light it's light um he said his retina had detached well his eye had sort of imploded to me that was such a like a bereavement it's awful um because i couldn't bear looking at the world and knowing sagi couldn't see it anymore i've never cried like this would you like to stop and that's all right um so you know because the light coming into his eye and gone oh this is daft um anyway sagi being sagi thought well i've got all these paints and i've got loads of canvases i'll just see what happens he he thought one day i'll i'll just try because i have him you know nothing to lose and what he realized is that in a way he could still see i know what i've been doing i've been using green when i thought i was using black gosh well that's in a way i'm quite pleased because it means this would explain why things weren't okay quite as long as i'd hoped uh it certainly indicates to people the sort of problems i'm up against now where's the black is that black yeah i'm fat screen the action of brushing on the canvas he'd done that so many times he had an image in his head of a white rectangle with blue marks appearing on it every single mark he made on it he was able to mentally recreate that in an image in his head but how did he verify that what he'd made on the canvas was what he had in his head the only way he could do that was by asking people whoever it who he asks he'd ask his family is there us is it much lighter like her white dress in the shade totally oh really yeah oh [ __ ] hell that's much too dark yeah the reason he he always wanted to ask us is because he'd asked us you know for years but what about the light i certainly like that white sky what's worrying me at the moment the new oh magenta he'd run out of things that he could remember and he started painting you in this red chair and the paintings are fascinating what was his process how did he go about doing them he used all sorts of devices how can i explain you might put a stick on my foot and a stick somewhere else and then hold a drumstick at k long canes to be like rays of light coming to the eye okay and he'd balance them on his nose i think if i could see i'd kind of lose my nerve and start falling back on ways of well it's testing the light now that i can't actually see what i'm doing i might dare to do things which i wouldn't dare to do when i could see it one thing that's really interesting and i find this a lot is that when you see paintings and reproductions of books and on television like this you don't really understand what they're really like either the scale of them or in saggy man's case the incredible beautiful use of color i mean he painted this picture when he was almost completely blind as he did with a lot of the paintings in this room and whilst he says he would never have chosen to be a blind painter he certainly made the most of it and i think it's a testament to to an artist's skills both with memory and understanding spatial technique and palettes and color and so on that he actually turned out some of his best work after he completely lost his vision we know without doubt what happened with sagi man's vision but there's been a lot of dispute around whether historical artists had vision issues rembrandt constable turner and van gogh have at some time or another been said to have had eye problems it's difficult to be sure but one artist we do know had serious eye problems was dagar an expert in degas eye issues and his art is professor michael marma a well-known ophthalmologist at stanford university in california we know from many historical records that de guy had failing vision beginning as a young man what is so fascinating about degas is that as his vision got progressively worse his art got progressively less precise i'm being careful not to say worse because what is better or worse his late pastels are still marvelous works of art but they don't have the precision the accuracy of drawing the accuracy of shading of his earlier work the fact that he couldn't paint with the precision which he did when he was younger i mean you may disagree that it adds something but it gives a different feeling to the paintings there's a certain sort of ethereal quality because of that blurriness that makes them beautiful they're beautiful because you were no longer concentrating so much on the careful outlining of the face or the shading of the shading of the muscles you're looking at the form which is really what he was also concentrating on so there yes there is great beauty in these late pictures they would have looked to him still somewhat subtly shaded because he wasn't able to see the degree of uh coarseness and overlaying multiple lines the outlining which is very coarse in his late work but it's not clear that that's what he would have done had he had sharp vision some of degas friends late in his life were saying hang it up old man you don't have it anymore but he he said no i'm i'm still trying to trying to work and that's that's a characteristic of the greatest artists they are they are never entirely content with what they do this painting by dagar was painted when his eyesight was definitely failing i think what they got did perhaps inadvertently was add another layer of meaning to his work that inspired later artists because he couldn't paint like he used to and he just kept piling on the color maybe until he could see it either way it doesn't really matter his damaged eyesight changed his work and in my opinion for the better dagar said only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things question is can people with impaired vision make good art and i i think the answer to that is well but of course anyone can make good art you can ask what art what kind of art poor vision doesn't mean you can't paint or paint well it means you can't do certain things that you can no longer see it doesn't prevent them from making art it it means there are constraints on what their art can do and then what they do with those constraints versus their own drive to paint or to do art this can happen in many different ways i suppose the professor's point is that it isn't possible to paint fine detail with intricacy if an artist has vision loss but he's talking about painters a blind sculpture would be unusual oh no wouldn't meet aaron mcpeak in 2011 he won the prestigious cass sculptor prize for his work in cast bronze [Music] aaron had to abandon a flourishing career as a lighting designer in 2002 because of increasing sight loss imagine the retina being like a photograph a shiny photograph and you crumple it up and put it in water you can't make it flat again so the a lot of the cells get killed off in that inflammatory episode so what happens is basically i've got a big hole in the center of my vision so if i look straight at somebody their head [Music] disappears this is the snellen chart which pretty much everyone's familiar with um so that's printed proper full resolution so then what i did was took the same image and then manipulated it to uh kind of be a representation of what what what i see what excited you about the idea of starting to work with metal for me it was the the real interest wasn't so much about sculptural objects or about um it was about the sound and now a lot of assumptions about that immediately come oh you're interested in sound because you've lost a lot of vision and we know i'm not interested in sound because of lost vision i'm interested in sound because i'm really interested in listening we're taught to look um but we're not taught to listen aaron's interest in sound means he encourages people to both touch and hit his sculptures which are often inspired by buddhists and other religious objects in a gallery situation it's novel to be able to touch things never mind hit them so i think that provides somebody with a with an opportunity to experience something that's that they're doing so they've got agency here and they can reflect on not just the sound but the fact that they made they made that noise happen do you get any of that idea that people think it's impossible for you to be doing cast bronze and the stuff that you do yes a lot of that yeah is there are a lot of assumptions made about uh particularly in the use of uh what would be considered dangerous tools but my argument is that uh in fact i'm much more safety conscious than i would have been when i could see perfectly yeah i think it's interesting though because it kind of underlines the sort of idea that people with disabilities of whatever kind are somehow going to be unable to manage to do stuff that other people who are perfectly everybody also can't do yeah there are a lot of assumptions made by by the able-bodied uh for want of a better word but um yeah there are a lot of assumptions made by them but obviously you can't do that and it's a case of the lack of imagination on their part to be able to put themselves in another position i mean i always turn around people say well yeah you can't do it either so what's your problem here so you can't possibly you know hold a camera and focus the camera make a film because you've only got one working arm and you're mad and i'm like well you've got two working arms and you're sane and you can't do it either so what's your point aaron makes personal objects into bronze sculptures that are also bells and gongs he's made bells out of ceramics wood and even ice so this was um personal history objects like this is a little boot that i buried as a kid that my mother dug up in the 90s and again it's a little tiny bell this is a my mother's painting palette um this is my lit partner's radiation mask having vision restored would be [Music] really scary by having to look at himself in the mirror and see what i haven't seen for um that would be probably the first thing that would be noticeable but uh also to be able to see the nuances and the non-visual communications that that that i've that i've kind of done without uh that would be horrifying as well um to find out things that would be pretty uh that would be really challenging to say the least um so no i wouldn't have a back i think it would be a would be a mental health catastrophe aaron talking about how he's familiar with his vision loss and it would be terrible to have it back points me to the work of professor georgina cliege who went blind as a child she's forensic in her analysis about sighted people's ideas of blindness blindness is always understood as a tragedy as a loss as a deficit a flaw it's never understood as simply a different way of being in the world which i think is is maybe how most people who live with blindness and visual visual impairment perceive it well i think most people when they hear the word blind they imagine somebody who was born totally blind with absolutely no visual perception whatsoever complete darkness even people who were totally congenitally blind in the industrialized world tend to grow up amongst sighted people go to school with sighted people uh receive the education of a sighted person um and so you know they they develop some understanding of the visual world just by hearing about it all the time i mean i believe that you know your average blind person knows infinitely more about what it means to be cited than the average site a person knows about what it means to be blind the blind have fascinated philosophers and artists for hundreds of years there's been a tradition of the blind man gifted within a vision homer the blind poet for example it fascinated locke and diderot and many others but there are deep cultural misunderstandings about blindness and vision disorders perhaps one of the best ever examples of the abject failure by an artist to understand disability and in particular blindness is the work of robert morris morris was one of the most important american artists of the post-war generation and he created ground-breaking minimalist sculptures in the 1960s in the 70s he started a project he called blind time where he drew pictures with his eyes shut a simple experiment and drawing with his eyes closed turned into something altogether less wholesome when he recruited as a collaborator an actual blind woman known only as aa because he anonymized her a real blind person eventually he fell out with a a and banished her from the project of course morris's experiment was nothing like sight loss at all he wouldn't have experienced any practical realities or nuances of disability and in that sense it becomes a parody and morris himself said i am always reduced in the blind time drawings to my lowest levels groping and pathetic absent the illusion of sight fragmented and [ __ ] absent the illusion of wholeness maurice carried on making these drawings until 2009. what i also find interesting is that maurice's drawings are considered much more important than say the work of an actual blind artist and that's exactly because morris isn't disabled and therefore the work is deemed to have more validity i'm left feeling angered by this exploitative and thoughtless attitude to disability are you aware of the work of robert morris in his blind time drawing yes i am i've got a particular bm upon it about the second or so series where he co-opted a blind woman who he then anonymized and then argued with her about a variety of things including perspective where he would say things get smaller as they go further away and she'd be like well no they don't i mean how do you feel about his work and what he did there this is a little hard for me to talk about because i know that the woman and the woman has died she was not at liberty to discuss the work she had basically signed a contract with him okay i think that morris went into the project with a kind of stereotypical idea about blindness and perception and what blind people can and cannot perceive i think he had an opportunity to break up those stereotypical ideas um i don't think that happened i mean i thought with robert morris that he comes nowhere close to the experience of being blind just shutting your eyes or wearing a blindfold is nothing like being blind there's no emotional nuance there's no reality um he's doing an interesting experiment in drawing with your eyes shut yeah yeah i i agree completely and i you know i'm troubled by the the way that her her identity was erased from that work she was in collaboration with him she was a co-artist on those projects and um it's unfortunate that her her name is erased from art history so what was her name adrian [Music] ashe i want to respond to maurice's hijacking of a disability why is it okay to use the disabled subjects yet they are rarely taken seriously as artistic protagonists so i thought i'd organize a drawing session of my own but i discovered that the blind artist david johnson runs classes for the visually impaired here at the royal academy so i'm going to model for them which will be like the disabled drawing the disabled in order to assist the artists i'm 3d scanned at the royal college of art they turn me into a small statue so the artists are able to use touch as well as their other senses to draw me i used to have some sight but now i'm totally blind welcome to the royal academy of arts my name's harry and i'm david johnson i'm a blind artist and a researcher so you've just arrived um could you possibly introduce yourself to everyone my name is paul gibson i've traveled from healing my name's chris and i popped down from oxford to see if i can't learn something to put people into my paintings we can't see but we can learn how to see yeah by drawing but i'm once sitting there dressing down the small statues are given out to people so they can get a bit over familiar with my body my name is richard i'm making a documentary about the effect of visual impairment on art and as part of it i decided to model for this class i've disabled and that's it really try different materials out yeah don't do it to the table with a fixed idea of what you want to um use there's lots to choose from yeah oh my god it's exactly the same here i have noticed that they're all just drawing away without me actually modeling which is quite interesting so really i feel like i'm superfluous to the uh occasion they don't need me to take my clothes off which is a relief but i will anyway i'm not no i'm not seeing the line please you're not so you're just feeling your way yeah good keep going because are you looking yes most of richard's weight appears to be on his left leg which is on the right as i'm looking at it so i'm as i'm looking at his leg on the right hand side of him it is more tense it has the weight running down it his arm on the right hand side as i'm looking at it is slightly more slender than the arm on the other side he has quite a straight nose and quite um it's not it's not a big nose it's not a small nose it's kind of average in the middle i've been described as cross between a goblin and a 40 year old bottle of sauerkraut that might help you with a mental vision i am a middle-aged white man who is not fat i've got two legs two arms one of my arms is well withered permanently dislocated at the shoulder and very thin waisted waisted and no muscles the other arm's just a normal arm i mean it's a fairly average body standing in front of you put my hands on my hips i'm really hating this standing with no clothes on a middle of a room full of people nerve-wracking different pose yeah yeah come and have a look yeah i wanted to view his own uh closely because i can't see it okay so may i have got very bad outside may get closer yeah thank you that's very interesting thank you do you want me to organize a bit of wire for you could do yeah yeah maybe just a length of what couple of feet [Music] [Applause] i'm interested in this that you're doing in theory one could have some talent once again part of this what's the thought here i realized that i couldn't capture because i get very little um detail so i can't see your face i can't just about this i can just about get something but at the distance of the pose i can't so i realize if i can then work on the shape and the form of the body and try and bring it out you know relief so i'm getting the shadows because i'm not getting shadows with the lighting right in the room i can hardly see you and i can hardly see the drawing but somewhere deep down i'm absolutely imperiled to keep drawing why's that then because that's possible it looks like you don't look it's quite accurate then there's another one of me here yes i've drawn them painted all my life so your vision when your vision changed you just carried on drawing anyway yes and only in the last few years have i not been able to see the model and the drawing at the same time is that frustrating or is there a sense of freedom absolutely frustrating so so frustrating and actually that's it's a pretty good life drawing yeah but you don't know you can't see it [Laughter] because it seems people are here to enjoy the process of making something in an environment catering for their specific needs it's a relief not to have to fit into the role the able bodies think we should play so they feel comfortable with our disabilities this was a nerve-wracking experience for me but i kind of felt that having a disabled body to draw was a challenge to the conventions around disability i mean we're surrounded by fabulous great show roman bodies i mean art has been about the perfect human form since forever if these artists were sighted they would deliberately impair their vision to draw me closing one eye to measure me squinting to see the shade but for these artists they don't need to see me to draw me it's all about touch and feel and thought and what's going on in their minds how do we construct what we see it's something that's so efficient neuroscientists have only really recently started to understand it and things are strange in the realm of the senses it's natural to think that we see with our eyes and we hear with our ears and we smile with our nose and that all the work of seeing is done through these sensory interfaces we have with the world as if the the eyes open our brains to this external objective reality but the truth is that we see much more with our brains than we see with our eyes there's a world out there it's full of stuff light comes into our eyes from the world and it activates cells in the back of our eyes in the retina and then these signals course into the visual part of the brain but really at that point there's nothing that's meaningful in these signals these have to be interpreted in very very rich and complicated ways the brain is generating predictions about what's out there in the world and these are predictions that try to account for the sensory data that comes in and what we experience what we perceive is the content of these predictions in your opinion how does the way we see things using our brains and eyes impact on on arm you've had some thoughts about that a painter like suzanne or monet in order to create the art that they created they have to have had a pretty deep understanding of how the visual system works what they were able to do is is paint not just the output of the visual system the objects that we see but they're almost painting the raw materials fascinating isn't it to think whether in fact the loss of some sensory ability can actually enhance one's artistic ability i'm off to the national gallery to look at paintings by perhaps the most famous artist known to have had vision issues claude monet he was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes in 1912 when he was 72. he held off surgery for as long as possible but in 1922 in a letter he wrote went yesterday for a consultation in paris result one eye absolutely gone an operation will be essential and even unavoidable this painting by monet was done in 1907 when he really did have quite serious cataracts and as a result the colors are haywire he's accidentally created a more interesting painting than perhaps he intended he was advised to have surgery in that one eye but he was not eager he was leery of cataract surgery he was worried that it would alter his his color perception and he put it off and gradually his good eye began to fail nowadays cataract surgery is a straightforward procedure but back then it was far more risky and gruesome i've come to the royal college of ophthalmology to talk to richard keeler their curator hi richard hello hi nice to meet you to find out just how gory a cataract operation was in the 1920s so you've got a cabinet up here with instruments where they stabbed people in the eye well sort of i mean surgical stabbing still stabbing isn't it i believe that this is the instrument that would have been used on monet it's called a gravy knife this was was put through the eye and came out the other side and and it was cut so you get a flap right cut and then they take the cataract and then the next stage so that's that's the cataract knife well then basically the the person's got rid of the opacity right so you had spectacles to compensate for not no longer something like that um these are very high high plus lenses uh which are in fact um whoa yeah wow i mean you can't even begin to get any idea no but we'll show you if you show you're using the magic if you look into the camera with those on you'll see how they magnify your eyes what they do he was a terrible patient he said i wish never had the operation they tried him with green glasses with slit glasses he said everything is too yellow everything is too blue uh and of course after the operation in those days you had to lie still in sandbags for a week it was it was much more of a recovery process but he didn't like it he wrote one of his letters i can see colors well again and i'm back at work and he finished the great paintings in the orangery that he had promised to be to the people of france the impressionists did away with using the central accurate part of our vision and painted everything as if it was seen in our peripheral field of sight blurred glimpses and moments of light coincidentally or not a lot of them are myopic monet renoir suzanne pizarro and dagar all had near-sightedness and several other indeterminate vision issues their paintings are like all great paintings a question a moment and a narrative with the viewer providing the rest of the story but i also like to think of them in the way that they represent the world as like the most disabled paintings ever following in the luminous tradition of the impressionists is keith salmon a world recognised landscape artist he's had diabetic retinopathy for over 30 years and is now registered blind in 2009 keith won the coveted jalomo scottish landscape award by a unanimous vote i've always had a great love of wild places landscape of walking and hills i might as well use all the experiences that i have when we're on the hill as the source for for the work i do in the studio and so i now sort of call myself yeah a scottish landscape painter it's definitely darker than i thought it was going to be when we came out this morning this is actually looking pretty good today despite it being gloomy all the light coming through the trees so when you started i'm assuming you had what we would call normal vision is that right yeah yeah yeah so when did your vision start to change in the late 80s i finally went to see a doctor i lost all the sights by the early 90s in my left eye he managed to save a little bit of sight in the upper part my right eye and i've been working ever since i'm so passionate about landscape and about a natural environment that when i'm out i'm kind of drawing more from the the overall experience not just the visual and so my paintings are more about experience than just a view of the scottish landscape now richard can i can i co do you mind walking on my right because i can i've got a better idea where you are then it's very easy when you've got good sight to just take everything for granted i maybe used to do that now having much more limited vision i do have to sort of look and think about my surroundings and and sound in a strange way it's made me look sort of more i do absorb the experience of these places the change in light the weather the the temperature the sounds the smells everything and so when i'm i come to create my paintings i'm drawing not on just the the immediate memories from a particular day's walk but i'm drawing on all the memories i have of all the walks that we've done in similar conditions right i use sound recordings um when i'm out uh just take a simple recorder and try and again capture something about the the space i guess in the hills and that has in a way it has a sound of its own it's almost a sound of silence but it's this very subtle sound you know sound is is something that really brings back memories the sound of a space is quite i think possibly a kind of little bit of a neglected thing that most people wouldn't pay attention to really when they're out and about so for you it becomes a very important part of the painting process yeah when i've got headphones on and i'm just listening to the landscape through them i feel i can see a lot more so how do you go about creating the actual canvases i generally use quite large brushes that's that's one of the brushes which i've i've been using on these paintings looks like a sort of decorator's bruh yeah but with the thick oil paint they leave these lovely trails in the paint and then once the paint is solid enough for me to work on then i i start putting other colors down again using the texture the ridges that i create in the paint to then drag other paint across let's say um you know i'm doing a picture based on on a walk above lock moment you know the painting isn't meant to be a nice view of loch lomond the paintings are about an experience of being on a hill above loch lomond so you've been freed oh yes from the prison of vision in a way yeah you're not captive to the view that you're looking at yeah to actually be in these places and and to have the the weather changing from minute to minute and the light changing from minute to minute the sounds suddenly open up and that's what for me the landscape's about that's why i love going into the hills into the mountains into the wild places i find keith's work thought-provoking and atmospheric it leads me to ask when an artist's site changes does it make their work less good is there a loss of quality and does it really matter if there is it's not just about painting there's interesting work going on in a field called sensory photography with artists like sally booth i could see badly out of both eyes badly in what's you know what does that mean well yeah what does that mean um when people say how you know how much can you see or what can you see i think they that sometimes they mean what can't you see that you decided to use a camera why i suppose i just see it as part of thinking it's a bit like using a sketchbook right it's a bit like drawing you're thinking as you're going along and it's so it literally is a moment you're just trying to catch a moment or a series of moments so i use it as an aid really notebook yeah like a notebook you know i don't have settings and no of course can't see the menu yeah but so it is like a notebook i don't see myself as a photographer i just take snaps and but photography is quite an important part of my practice i don't make paintings from photographs but i use photography as an aid memoir i was doing residency in liverpool and i was given a studio as part of the residency at the blue coat gallery and upstairs they the windows are all these beautiful round queen and shape and the most beautiful room i've ever had um and they would make these amazing shadows do you feel that your changed vision has impeded your work has it helped your work has it improved your work or has it just changed your work i'm continually having to adapt how i work i'm not interested in touching things i'm interested in looking at things if i pick up the pencil i can't quite see where to put it so i've had to change the way i draw by changing from pencil to ink and also not taking the pen off the paper yeah i don't think that an artist having to adapt their work to compensate for some physical change sensory change it necessarily results in worse work no that's my point yeah yes that's kind of the point of this film i went to monet's house when i was at 18. one in paris and there are those pictures of the bridge at gioverne but the ones when his cataract was really bad there is a couple that are really florid and crude they're all sort of red and fiery yeah and at the time when i was sort of 18 and looking at them i was thinking well he couldn't see what he's doing i didn't just stop later on when i got my own cataract at 25 26 i thought oh no this is really interesting what he's been doing because he's painting what it was like also there was that kind of sense of you could see the distress in them in the paintings you saw your own distress in the painting well probably yes yeah probably for me if there hadn't been money if everyone was painting really sharp i there's something about those works like him and rembrandt that you think think it's okay to be a painter because it doesn't have to be in focus sally's own experience of cataracts means she sees monet's art in much the same way as mona himself would have done [Music] one of the effects of cataracts is to change the perception of color but then we assume color like seeing itself is done with the eyes a red rose is red but wait how do you really see color it turns out it's all in the mind most of us who see in color we experience the visual world around us as being full of colors but what does this mean colors don't really exist out there in the world we don't need neuroscience to tell us this we've known this since newton that that colors are just mixtures of different wavelengths of light and the brain is generating colors from mixtures of these of these wavelengths it's not just that the brain is is taking into account and compensating for ambient light it's that colors themselves are constructions of the brain all the time there's there's no physical truth to the fact that the tomato is red redness is a property of our conscious experience it's a property of our perception it's not a property in that's inherent to the tomato if you have someone who's of course colorblind they're not going to tell the difference between a ripe tomato that's red and one that's this green if they have red green color blindness i could see that immediately becoming problematic for people watching a program to be told that a red tomato the property of the redness is created inside our brain the reason the brain has invented the ability to perceive colors is precisely so that we can keep track of objects as ambient lighting conditions change so colors are a very very useful trick they they show that what we perceive is in one sense less than what's out there and we know it's less than because we our eyes are only sensitive to three specific wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum the brain brings something fundamental to the active perception it's not just reading out what's already there but it is entirely dependent on what's out there too we take colour for granted and it's hard to imagine a world without it but for some people it's the norm and perhaps surprisingly not all vision issues are eye-related british-born artist neil harperson has a form of colour blindness called a chromatopsia it means his eyes work fine but his brain doesn't process colour at all this means he sees the world entirely in black and white his solution to this was to put an implant in his head that converts colors to sound he hears color would you like to tell me a little bit about your own changed vision i don't know what i'm not seeing yeah but i know that i but i know that i can't differentiate things that other people can differentiate through the eyes explain to me how it works so the antenna basically picks up or detects the dominant color in front of me it sends the frequency of the dominant color back at the back of my head and inside my head there's a chip that vibrates depending on the dominant color so if it's red which is a low frequency i hear a very low note a note between f and f sharp if it's orange the note is a bit higher so this allows me to actually feel and hear the vibrations of color inside my head and is it permanently switched on yes there's no switch so it's basically always on in the same way that we don't switch off our sense of touch or a sense of smell or a sense of hearing we sleep with our sense of hearing on i sleep with my sense of color on it's part of my skeleton yeah it's osteo-integrated so it took two months for the bone to grow over it the new sense can also allow me to express artistically through traditional art forms like painting i see this as my art the art of creating a new sense the art of creating a new organ the art of designing your perception of reality that is an art itself i say the cyborg art as genre boundaries blur is becoming harder and harder to discern what is and is an art we just have to accept people's word for it even now i don't really understand what color is visually it's difficult to understand why it affects so much people that see it and have you got any plans to go further with your cyborg technology yeah i'm interested in adding more senses because i see this as an art so i've added a new sense in my knee that allows me to sense whether north is for example it's magnetic north and also i'm developing another sense that will allow me to feel the passage of time so it's a point of heat that will take 24 hours to the complete circle around my head and it will allow me to feel time i think you're very brave i wouldn't want to have a antenna on my head but i i think it's really interesting and i might be interested if they were slightly less obvious like i like the idea of having a compass in my knee i think that's really exciting i'd never i'd never get lost neil is at the extreme end of the human obsession with technology but we're all devoted to it and the merging of human and tech is only going to increase but perhaps a little caution is called for before we start cyborging ourselves just yet in this film i only look at the effect of visual impairment on art but any disability changes your perception of the world whether you want it to or not and the general feeling is it does this for the worse and not the better this isn't true as we've seen in this film a disability can add a fresh dimension to an artist's work so perhaps it's time we reassessed our perspective on vision loss and disability in general

Channel: Perspective

Views: 31,516

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, art documentary, disabled artists, disabled artists painting, blind artist, blind artist painting, blind artist story, the disordered eye, bbc documentary, bbc art documentary, richard butchins, degas blind, edgar degas, impressionist painting, impressionism art

Id: o2rPa_eKo18

Length: 56min 8sec (3368 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021