We often talk about the “visual arts”. But it is interesting to ask how visual the visual arts really are. One path forward is to ask both, how people who are blind since birth appreciate art and also create art.

This is a fascinating issue on its own but also can give us intriguing hints about why art is as it is. Certainly some aspect of art are just a matter of convention – just look at ancient Egypt where the convention was to show fee viewed from the side, bodies viewed head on and faces almost always in profile.  But some aspect of art may come from the way our brains (and that is ALL brains) are wired.

Some of the fabulous evidence comes from Canadian psychologist John Kennedy who has done various studies asking the blind to draw specific scenes, he finds, for example, that blind people with no art training spontaneously use many of the “visual” metaphors that the seeing use. As just one example, they draw lines streaking out behind someone  to indicate fast motion.

 

http://www.artbeyondsight.org/teach/how-blind-draw.shtml

Kennedy has also explored how people perceive line drawing including people in cultures with no history of representational art (e.g. Amazon tribes.) He showed people line drawings of parrots, with lines indicating changes in hue (which looks really strange to American or European eyes because we rarely use lines to indicate color boundaries. ) Turns out they also look strange to the indigenous people of the Amazon who looked at these drawing and wanted to know why the parrot was chopped up into pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is an abstract of a recommendable book for those interested in the topic: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/948

Apparently then at least some of the rules of art are essentially universal, even in people with neither training nor any history of vision, and other rules clearly are nothing but conventions.

 

PS: Why flamingos? How would you possible describe the colors, shapes, movements of these birds to someone who cannot see? The richness in our visual environment is just beyond belief – and something I am deeply grateful for.