She tells me to draw the sunset and says ‘it’ll be easy’. Everyone around me begins to work away at their easels I however am left with a blank canvas and what I can only assume to be an orange charcoal in my hand.
A sunset. She tells me it’s simple, just a circle with a straight line underneath it. But it’s not like that for me, or at least it wasn’t the last and only time I have seen it. It was at least six months ago that my husband took me to our favourite beach down at the Great Ocean Road. He blindfolded me until we got there. I remember the birds chattering their final words for the day, the smell of the eucalyptus trees around us before my feet touched the soft sand, and then my nose was swamped by the thick smell of the sea. I remember opening my eyes and being bombarded with an overexposure of light burning through to the back of my eyes. I don’t remember much of the sunset because it was too painful to look at. I only remember that all the colours seemed to mush into each other to create one huge patch of bleeding bright light. It was only when the sun had left the horizon that I could appreciate its beauty. A performance of lights and reflections shone onto the clouds to create a playful dance of colourful illusions, shades that I can now properly identify as purple, pink and orange. Though I still think our language is too limiting to give justice to the colour spectrum. So when this lady tells me to draw a sunset, I ask her if it has to be real. “What do you mean by real?” she asks. I contemplate telling her my story but instead I ask if I can make it a little more impressionistic... less true to life. She tells me “that’s fine” and walks to assist other pupils. My husband convinced me to go to this class; he said it would help develop a relationship between my eyes and my mind. I suppose theoretically it sounds great, taking art classes as a practical way of learning to distinguish form, depth and other three-dimensional elements. But it’s just been a very frustrating process for me. People expected me to be doing miracles by now, like driving, writing or walking without my cane. But no, it’s not like that.
It was over nine months now when I had the operation, I lost my vision when I was five and only regained it at thirty-four years of age. Vision to me has been like learning a new language. Or no, more like learning a language that has more exceptions than Cantonese. Especially with the advancement of technology in this generation, and the reliance of it, I am left clueless on many accounts. I still cannot tell the difference between photographs and reality until I touch it. So seeing phones with a cat inside of it always freaks me out, even though I always realise after touching it that it’s only a photo, and cats can’t possibly be that small. It seems to me that our culture tries to condense their lives into a snapshot, and social media sites like Instagram and Facebook really promote a movement of visual compression. This, to me, makes no sense at all. How can you explain a moment by a single shot? It’s like now, how is this lady asking me to draw a sunset? A sunset lasts around twenty minutes or so, and I’m supposed to draw that on the one canvas? But even still, how can I capture the smell of the eucalyptus or the chatter of the birds or the warmth of the soft sand with a piece of orange charcoal in my hand? So here I sit, left with a blank canvas.
The art teacher approaches me again and draws an orange line that connects again, creating something between a sphere and circle. She tells me to use the red charcoal to shade around it. I don’t like red. Red used to be my favourite colour. That was until I regained my vision. People would always describe it to me as the colour of love, passion and fire. But the first time I encountered red was when I was only starting to use my eyes to cut vegetables, a clean slice on my pointer finger let the blood ooze out of the cut skin. I think I projected some of the pain onto the colour red because now I can only associate it with pain and suffering.
I leave the art class with nothing but an orange line on white sketch paper, and a pair of useless eyes that can’t seem to make friends with my mind. My husband sees my face and decides to take me somewhere for a surprise. We arrive at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square and enter Screen Worlds where we find a number of elaborate visual illusions. We first stumble upon a flip book creation where we move our arms and bodies in different ways towards the camera. In response the screen shows us an animation of us two, merging the frames into motion. It reminds me of the moving photographs in Harry Potter, I really enjoy this remarkably playful art. It plays on the sense of motion and makes me think about ways we can break down the visual system, into still frames. My husband tells me that this is how all animations are made, frame by frame. Next we notice a dome where Michael moves inside and is captured by thirty-six different cameras, afterwards we watch a sequence of his movements, similar to the flip book but from different angles. He tells me that they used this in the film The Matrix (I haven’t quite gotten around to watching a full movie yet) where the guy dodged three or four bullets. He tells me he’ll show it to me when we get home.
We then come across a strange wheel that looks like a wedding cake with tiers of wonderful creatures. The lights begin to flicker. Mice jump into puddles, emus are running, platypuses dive into barrels and Tasmanian devils march with a boomerang in hand. The strobe light stops, the animals return to a single pose and spin counter-clockwise. It reminds me of a Ferris wheel as it begins to gain speed again. My husband tells me about how they are using the lights to exploit our visual system to create the illusion of motion but the thing that I focus on the most is the sound that fastens to an irritable rate when the lights begin to flicker again. It gives me a headache to stay in the room and watch this the second time round so I start to leave. I try to watch my footsteps it’s difficult to decipher their movements in the strobe lights. When I was reading about visual impairments I came across one where a person only sees frames, it made me think about what I was seeing now. Only snapshots of my feet, no motion. I wonder how those people would find crossing the road, or pouring a glass of water – it must be a tedious task. I decide that my mind needs a rest from all this visual stimuli so I take a seat.
After a moments rest we realise that it’s enough for the day so my husband takes my hand and guides me to the exit. I open my eyes for a moment to see a white building in front of us and ask him if it’s a real building, he tells me it is just another illusion. I still don’t know when my eyes are lying to me. As we walk past the building I see on its side that it has sort of triangular shapes moving out from the image, I still don’t get it. Michael tells me that the shape of the composition gives the illusion of a 3D object, when it is only partly so. I feel like such a child always asking him to translate the visual world for me, he must get bored of explaining all these things that would be obvious to even a seven year old.
Three months later of attending those classes, which I had eventually begun to enjoy and develop a good relationship with the art teacher, I decide to venture into the forest to meet the setting sun the second time round. I sit on lush green grass, the earth is still warm. The sweet smell of eucalyptus relaxes me so I close my eyes and lie down. It’s weird that I can still see colours even when my eyes are closed. White fluffy clouds in the sea blue sky is all that enters my vision, they remind me of chunks of flour-sprinkled dough. I slowly feel the warmth escaping from my body; the sun is like a magnet pulling the heat away from this side of the world. I sit up and see that the ball of fire is hidden behind the milky white flowers in the sky. The sunset makes no sound, has no smell and only touches you with a gentle heat that without eyes one would underestimate the beauty that it beholds. I never noticed this before, but it’s like there’s a dance between the sun and the moon. The sun kisses the trees goodnight with an array of golden yellows. For me the sun is still too loud and boisterous, but beautiful nonetheless, I much prefer the delicacy of the moon – especially when it’s a full moon. Here the wind becomes still, the air a little thinner and the stars come to dance and play in the night sky.
I guess it is fair to say that a degree of conditioning, association and memory play roles in the way we see the world. But this isn’t stagnant or limited in any way, one day you could see a mush of colours that make you feel uncomfortable, and a year later you can look at the same landscape to find that the intricacies of nature are now visible and instead of making you feel uneasy, give you a feeling of hope. Through this journey of regaining my vision, which is still not and never will be a completed process, I am realising that I can choose to see things as I want to as there is interplay of external stimuli and mental processing. No one could ever see the same thing in a single rose, or a sunset. Art is one way of expressing this subjectivity, as my final drawing of the sunset looked nothing like anyone else’s in the room, but not one looked exactly the same. We shared some traits, like a circle for the sun or a line for the horizon but then others went to cover up the horizon with trees in the background, or others focused purely on the sun and the surrounding clouds. In a strange way what we see in the world is determined by our emotions towards the stimuli, the associations made with it and our sense of self. We can choose to see things as incomplete and ugly, if we ourselves feel that way however, if we have a sense of joy and hope then we may see the world in this way.
