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03/03/2005: "Seing Through Deaf Eyes"
Silence is a strange phenomenon. Recently I discovered it's what I sometimes hear while in the act of painting. I normally have a radio or CD playing in my studio, but I never really hear them. I have tried and failed to remember what I was hearing or listening to while painting. Is this a common occurence among hearing artists ? Something seems to take over and other senses predominate.
Seeing Through Deaf Eyes is a virtual exhibiton on the internet www.geocities.com/deafeyes2001 The show has initiated for me yet another journey of questioning, learning and discovery. The show was originally held at Prince Street and Bluemountain Galleries 530 West 25th Street, New York, in 2001. A group of 14 artists of the deaf community were exhibiting their work. Both non-hearing artists and hearing artists are first and foremost artists, neither of us can hear the colour red or hear the subtle nuances
of slowly mixing alizarin crimson with cadmium orange. It seems to me that painting/creating emanates from a subjective emotion which does not require hearing. The silence that I hear or I am unable to hear, in my studio, is a type of white noise which I have grown accustomed to, I just don't hear backgroung sounds anymore on a conscious level. Something has blocked them. I do believe they are obviously picked up on a subconscious level. If I paint in a different location the same thing happens. Have any experiments been conducted in this field, vis a vis artists, specifically has the brain activity of the artist at work been monitored ?
Synaesthesia is a neurological condition - a union of the senses. The people who have been diagnosed with synaesthesia experience a fusion of their senses. They can hear and see odours, taste whatever they touch, and they experience coloured hearing. These experiences do not replace anything but instead they add to their existing senses. What type of dialogue would a synaesthete have with artwork ? It must be a wonderful experience, to actually enter the realm of feeling a painting, something which is beyond the reach of language. Which reminds me of Paul Valery ( 1871 - 1945) the French writer who once said in relation to Corot ( 1796 - 1875 ) that : " We should apologise for daring to speak about painting". Valery insisted that the mental process of creation was alone important - his poems were a by-product of the process ! It seems to me that the word creation demands an end result, Valery was over intellectualising the process. Later in his career he did acknowledge that there are important reasons for not keeping silent since all the arts live through words, each work of art demands its response.
The artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) the great grand father of Abstract Art - would he have agreed with Valery ? He devoted most of his life to writing about art. His writings on colour theory are the words of a synaesthete - Kandinsky could see colour as sound and vice versa. He once wrote regarding his painting, " I applied streaks and blobs of colour onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity
I could. " Another artist who would have most definitely disagreed with Valery and who was continually in a fever of work, whether painting or writing and who was possibly a synaesthete - was Vincent Van Gogh( 1853 - 1890). For Vincent, the written word and the painted image were inextricably linked, one could not exist without the other. I pose the above questions because the more I step back, look at and examine the process of painting/creating, the less I understand, and furthermore the less I understand the more questions I ask. Why is the artist never in complete control of the artistic process ? What motivates and guides the artist ? I never know what I am going to paint next, a frightening thought !
And yet, at the same time, in a strange way exciting, because I look forward to it with expectation like unwrapping a gift - waiting for the image to manifest. My deepest fear is not being able to create another painting. Does any of this make sense ? Should it make sense ? Only days before his death , Cezanne wrote to his son Paul, " I continue to work with difficulty, but in the end there is something. That is the important thing - I believe. As sensations from the basis of everything for me, I am, I believe, impervious". Creativity is a continual journey of learning and discovering. Thanks to the exhibition " Seeing Through Deaf Eyes ", which I happened across, I am endeavouring to learn and discover something new, I dont know the artists personally, but through their art they have transmitted a feeling. They have encouraged me to learn, discover and question the will-to-form which is a significant force within every artists' personality . Yet again the activity of art has opened my eyes.
www.vangoghgallery.com/letters/main.htm
psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v3psyche-3-06-vancampen.html
www.150xvincent.com
www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/jamie.ward/synaexthesia.htm
