Category: Haptic touch

A Feel for Art

tgraven/ / Art, Haptic touch, Posts, Uncategorised

There is more to touching art than merely using the hands and fingers to recognise depictions of landscapes and victorious kings on horses; ornate chairs and tables with carved and inlaid decorations; geometric shapes and stylised forms of flowers; figurative and abstract fruits and animals. (See our blog on Vision, haptic touch, and hearing.)

In this blog post, I have invited Professor Georgina Kleege, University of California, Berkeley to write about touching art: why she likes to do it, how she does it, and why she thinks others would get something out of the experience. Georgina Kleege has published numerous books and papers, and been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award twice. She is an art lover and is well known for advocating for more tactile opportunities for all museum visitors, including those who are fully sighted.

As a blind person, I enjoy the incredible privilege of touch access to art works at museums around the world who offer such opportunities. Over the years I have accumulated many observations and insights that inspire me to dispel common myths and misconceptions about touch perception, specifically in an artistic context. For one thing, I find that the notion of sensory translation or substitution can be misleading. People seem to want to make an analogy between the two eyes of the sighted and the two hands of the blind, as if simply laying a hand on the art object will summon a detailed image to the blind person’s mind’s eye. There’s a mistaken impression that the point of touching the art object is merely to determine what it’s representing visually—what it looks like to people who can see. This implies that sighted people don’t need to touch the art because they can see it, when in fact, determining what the art object might be depicting is not always, I’d say rarely, the most interesting thing about the experience.

When touch is merely an exercise to identify a shape, one uses a minimum of the tactile apparatus available. One traces the outline of the object in a manner analogous to the way the visual system separates the object from its background. One uses mainly the fingertips which also deliver some information about the surface texture and temperature. They can also discover fine details in carving, or the seams, joints and welds that hold the thing together, and even signs of past damage and repairs which may not be available to the eyes alone. But to grasp the objects three dimensionality one must grasp: wrap one’s fingers and palms around volumes, drape the whole hand around contours. The action of the hands and the skin of the palms delivers more information. The movement of the hands inspires other movement, of the whole arm, of the spine, as one reaches, stretches, bends and extends to take in the form in its entirety. There’s no point sticking to one place—the vantage point for sighted people. One is better off moving around doing what I have come to call dancing with the sculpture, circumnavigating the object while maintaining light contact with one hand. This action can convey a sense of composition, of symmetry and dynamism. These techniques work equally well whether the sculpture is figurative or abstract.

I used to avoid referencing my emotional response to touching art. English, like other languages, conflates touch sensation with the emotions. We find a work of art touching and it makes us feel happy or sad. This conflation is problematic for blind people who rely more on touch than our sighted peers because touch is often considered to be a lesser way of knowing the world, more animalistic or infantile. Babies rely on touch before their visual perception fully develops. But now I lean into this connection. I actively scan my emotions for a response to what I’m touching. Touch can be intuitional; the sculpture tells me how to touch it. It reveals aspects of itself sequentially, as I experiment with different methods and repeat or reject actions according to what feels most generative. It is an accretive process requiring attention, sensitivity sometimes even playfulness. And the emotions this touching summons in me may have something to do with what the artist hoped to convey. If nothing else, my hands and body replicate the artist’s own gestures and movements which in turn may link me to the ideas and emotions that went into the sculpture’s creation.

Recently, I’ve been advocating for more tactile opportunities for all museum visitors, including sighted people who are typically excluded from this form of access. For now, conservation and crowd management concerns make it unlikely that everyone will be allowed to get their hands on art. So instead, I endeavor to describe my experiences, as here, in the hope that sighted art lovers can profit, if only vicariously. (See also Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii.)

See our blog for Activities; especially 19-21.

Some suggestions for further listening, reading, and watching:

A Conversation about Blindness and Art

Art Beyond Sight

Best Things To Touch As A Blind Person

Do Touch The Artwork At Prado’s Exhibit For the Blind

Some Touching Thoughts and wishful Thinking

The Gravity, The Levity: Let Us Speak of Tactile Encounters

Touch and See

Worst Things To Touch As A Blind Person

 

Drawing pictures with and without vision

tgraven/ / Drawing, Haptic touch, Posts

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.

See our blog for Activities; especially 16-18.