The Texture of Cyclops and Supernovas

I'm rereading a passage from James Elkins's chapter on blindness in The Object Stares Back. This piece was really important to me as an undergrad painter. It opens with this surprising observation.

Because we cannot see what we do not understand or use or identify with we see very little of the world- only the small pieces that are useful and harmless.

This statement had an odd impact on me at the time, perhaps it was the weight of 500 years of ocularcentricism lifting from my shoulders. Artists definitely pick and choose what themes will be central to their work though the single- mindedness of their choices aren't always harmless. In their own lifetimes, painterly obsessions are often treated as professional liabilites. I'm reminded of a 19th century critic's snippy comment about J. M. W. Turner's "cyclops-" those exuberant globs of yellow ochre and cadmium red suns stamped like a wax seal on his canvases.

When I was younger looking at reproductions of Turner's paintings I'd wonder, what's with all the seascapes? Turner's work isn't meant for remote viewing; standing in front of one of these paintings is the best way to explore physical evidence of the gestures that first ignited the chemical surf.

Painting has everything to do with residue, films, sheens, traces and other forms of pigmentary reffuse. Now that we're well into the second decade of digital imaging and with more than a century of photographic processes behind us, I'd argue that this textural alchemy is what makes painting great.

In Blindness Elkins' attention turns to the stars themselves when describing vision's remarkable exclusivity:

Perhaps ordinary vision is less like a brightly lit sky with one blinding spot in it than like the night sky filled with stars. He asserts that vision is immensely troubled. Sight is not merely partial blindness or selective seeing but a determinate trading of blindness and insights. I couldn't agree more, and I appreciate it when he positions blindness firmly in the physiological sense of the word. At least he recognizes that blindness exists on a continuum with vision; at one end is 20/20 vision, at the other, total blindness. Most of us (including most blind people) occupy a space on the bell curve falling somewhere between these two coordinates.