Soon after S.B. had regained vision, after more than five decades of blindness, his wife gave him his first ballpoint pen. He wrote his name and drew a cobbler’s chipping hammer. Whether drawing his own house from memory, a bus he had just seen, or a farmhouse from imagination; S.B. incorporated features that he knew from haptic touch. For example, cartwheels on the bus instead of hub wheels: S.B. knew the feel of cartwheels, not of hub wheels. However, six months later, and with gained visual experience, S.B. replaced his cartwheels. (See Gregory & Wallace, 1969, Figures 9-14.) Surely, S.B. transferred information from haptic touch to vision when he was drawing pictures: combining circles, rectangles, and squares in different sizes. (See our blog for the scientific approach and the crossmodal correspondences between the senses).
I have invited Professor John M. Kennedy, University of Toronto to write this blog post. John M. Kennedy has written numerous books and articles on pictures in vision and touch: he argues that lines are the “nuts and bolts of universals in perception”.
But first, John challenges and inspires us to try drawing without vision.
Try this in touch: Drawing
– Perhaps the ice age people who made the very first drawings said “We didn’t know we could do this!”
– For sure, some blind people I asked to draw for me said “I don’t think I can do this.”
– I said, in effect, “Take up thy pen and draw.” And they did. And said “I didn’t know I could do this!”
They were drawing on plastic sheets with ball point pens. The sheets rested on rubber-coated pads, like mouse pads. The pens made rough lines they could feel.
They drew hands, cups, wine glasses and chairs. All were tactile pictures, made of raised lines.
Ambitious people drew a man from in front, an insect from above and a dog from the side. Just to be clear – these were tactile pictures.
Let’s consider a challenge. Imagine taking up the ball-point and the pad, and, without any vision whatsoever, try this just purely from your mind’s own vantage point.
– Draw a singer pouring out love and radiating glory.
– Draw a monster that has emerged from a lake, horns and claws and spiny backbone dripping wet.
– Draw a cup so filled with memories it bubbles and pops and spills out irrepressibly.
– Draw a car with its brakes pulling it screeching to a halt so abruptly the tyres deform.
If your imagination succeeds at some or all of these drawing topics, then know this. Blind adults and children who grew up without drawing and took to sketching later in life, and sometimes only shortly before tackling these imaginary scenes, invented pictures – tactile pictures — that fit the bill. (See Kennedy, 2014, Figure 2 – singer pouring out love and radiating glory – and Figure 1 – cups so filled with memories it bobbles and pops and spills out irrepressibly.)
It is only recently that we realized pictures are not just for vision and the people who are fully sighted, as tactile pictures they are also for touch and for those who were born totally blind. Drawing is for the eye and the hand.
Learning lines: Shape and outline
Skill at line drawing develops in pretty similar ways in people who are sighted and people who are blind. Lines are tangible as well as visual of course, but so too are the blocks and creatures we like to draw. We can feel a cat or a dog or a hamster. At first, we have to tell people what we have sketched, but clear unmistakeable shapes do emerge eventually if we keep at it. Consider the path drawing development usually takes for the hand and the eye alike.
At first, drawing novices, feeling their work or looking at it, often learn to make tactile and optical marks by scribbling, and then they may very shortly begin controlling straight and curved lines and enclosures such as circles. Perhaps soon after, scenes with flat objects like hands or knives, or long slim sticks like bananas and bulky objects like oranges and heads and houses become favoured topics. The timeline between scribbles and recognizable forms for young children – a year or two or three — is highly compressed for older beginners – sometimes mere minutes or an hour perhaps.
Soon after mastering the basics of scribbling, blind and sighted novices put to work some lines actually representing something. A complete beginner may simply make a random mark and announce what it stands for: “It’s Grandpa!”
According to John Willats, circles are drawn to mean solid objects three-dimensional like balls and boxes, roughly symmetrically extended in space. Snakes and rods and branches that are long and slim are what fairly straight lines mean to this novice.
Next in development, once the shape of objects like books and chocolate bars can be shown, things mostly extended in two dimensions, squares and rectangles and triangles and the like are used. A cube would be shown as a square, a single face, by these early artists.
Faces on the sides of objects begin to be added next. Learning to pick a side that faces the observer brings the issue of the vantage point on the object to mind. This means perspective, and questions of many kinds, solved in lots of ways by eager minds.
Outline drawing is a skill that ice-age artists manifested. We usually think of these as visual works. But lines in outline drawings mean the same thing to the blind as they do to the sighted. Drawings made in the flickering half-light of caves may have meant a great deal to the hands of the ancient art workers, not just to the eyes. Lines are tools to make shapes. The toolkit of outlines is tiny. Ice age artists discovered the kit. Its results are infinite. Its combinations picture the many, many objects of our world.
Ice-age artists drew lines standing for borders of surfaces. They showed occlusion and foreground surfaces ending with a background. Aboriginal artists in Australia used lines similarly. Outline is universally understood. It is a birthright of our species, and others besides.
The birthright of humanity is outline in vision, but it is also outline in touch. Lines in outline drawings mean the same edges to the eye and the hand, the psychology of vision and the psychology of touch. We discovered their powers and capabilities in ice-age times for vision, it may be, but in this generation we are uncovering their functions are also just as deliberate in the psychology of touch.
John has also very kindly suggested some useful readings for us:
Carboni, S., & Kennedy, J. M. (2020). Eyes outside a boundary line: an example of the Willats region-drawing theory? Perception, 49(7), 793-795, https://doi.org/10.1177/0301006620929473
Eriksson, Y. (1998). Tactile pictures. Lund: Lund University Press.
Fabris, M., Lange-Kuettner, C., Shiakou, M., & Longobardi, C. (2023). Editorial: Children’s drawings: evidence-based research and practice. Frontiers of Psychology. Section Educational Psychology, 14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1250556
Kennedy, J. M. (1993). Drawing and the blind: Pictures to touch. New Haven: Yale Press.
Rubin, E. (1915). Visually experienced figures [Synsoplevede figurer]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, Nordisk Forlag.
Willats, J. (2005). Making sense of children’s drawings. London: Erlbaum.
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