Colour is frequently discussed in the humanities. It is everywhere, like time is everywhere, and the role it plays in looking is hard to overstate. We will revisit it in this book, but for now let’s zoom in on one moment: 4 p.m. one November day on the North Sea.
These two photographs were taken six minutes apart. There is not much blue in either. The bronze-orange in the first is the complementary colour of the green-slate in the second. The first is blurred, because of the rain. We see the horizon – there is plenty of z-axis here. The early stages of looking are all in these images.
Is it a push to say that this is how Homer might have seen the sea? He could have recognised the dark wine colour of the water on the right of the first image, or the silver on the second. Whether it is him looking, or Cleopatra or Goethe or Yves Klein or Ian Hamilton Finlay or us, we can say that seeing the unexpected colours here gives pleasure. Our eyes skim the churning sea, into the long distance, longing.
By seeing shadows, blurs, space and colour, our baby’s eyes have started to come alive. They have laid down impressions, spaces, and contrasts on her blank pages which will be overlaid. They will always be formative, these first images. Shadows, expanses of blue and softness of focus will resonate for her throughout her life as archetypes resonate within stories. Soon, new elements will be added to such ancient, primitive looking. Movements, places and emotions will register for our baby and, as they do, she will begin to learn about the visual world.
CHAPTER 2
DEVELOPING LOOKING: EYE CONTACT, MOVEMENT, LANDSCAPE AND EMOTION
‘Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion . . . Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.’
– E.M. Forster, Howards End
WE began by looking through the eyes of an early African Homo sapiens baby, then we imagined an ancient Egyptian infant. The first visual impressions of each were new, fast and impactful. Though such impressions are only traces and glances, their freshness and lack of precedent give them ballast. It is not long in our looking lives, however, before something more complicated than shadows or skies begins to draw our attention.
That thing is connection. We begin to see, in simple ways at first, how things relate to us and to each other.
Moving forward in history, let’s imagine a baby in, say, Australia in 1050 BCE. If she covers her eyes with her hands, she will see the world or a person disappear then appear again. She is disconnecting, then connecting. Connection will be a key theme throughout the story of looking, seeing, studying, staring, viewing and watching, but in this chapter we will consider four specific aspects of connected looking: how our eyes lock with the eyes of another; how we see something that has been in one place move to another, the two places becoming connected; how we look at landscape and, in doing so, see something of ourselves in it; and how we connect to others’ emotions. Each of these associations extends looking outwards. It creates an affinity.
Eyelines first. One of the artist René Magritte’s most revealing paintings is a close-up of an eye in which is reflected a blue sky with white clouds. It could be the eye of Yves Klein on that day on the beach when he looked upwards to sign the sky. But the title of Magritte’s painting – The False Mirror – sounds an alert.
As neuroscience can now show, there is something false in our understanding of how looking works. When we look, we do not objectively see what is out in the world. The art historian E.H. Gombrich tells a story to illustrate this. During the Second World War he was employed to listen to German radio frequencies to try to discover the Nazis’ military plans and tactics. The signals were crackly and weak, so he was not able to hear all the words in a sentence. From the ones he could hear, however, he was able to infer the rest. The sense allowed him to fill in the gaps, to make connections. It is now clear that from childhood onwards, we look in a similar way. Our eyes provide pieces of visual information to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, but we infer the rest from our experience of seeing. We learn how to complete the picture with the other seeing we have done. In fact, as neuroscientist David Eagleman describes, the amount of information flowing out of the visual cortex when we see is ten times the amount that goes in. So we are not just filling in small gaps, we are filling in most of the picture. We are projectors as much as absorbers. We see through knowing. People who have been blind for a long time, and then have surgery to make them see, report that although their eyes are now fully functioning, it takes a long time before their brain is able to make sense of all the visual data with which it is suddenly flooded. Looking really is a story, the story we tell ourselves based on what we see in one moment combined with what we know from all the looking we have done.
Our Australian Aboriginal baby, who saw the blurs, then space, then colour, very quickly starts making eye contact. She stares into the eyes of other people. In the faces of those she looks at most, she bonds. Recognising their eyes reduces uncertainty for the child, and in their smiles she intuits safety and, eventually, joy. She comes to delight in them. Novelist George Eliot called this ‘the meeting eyes of love’. In this Mexican clay sculpture, also from 1050 BCE, a much older child leans towards the adult, turns his head and looks up into his eyes. The man mirrors the gestures.
© Bruce M. White, Princeton University Art Mueum / Art Resource NY / Scala, Florence
The youth perhaps once held something in his left hand, but whatever it was, it did not distract either from looking directly at the other. We are drawn to their eye-lock. It is as if there is a line between their eyes. The line was made three thousand years ago, yet it is still alive with inquisition, with example. The man’s hand on the youth’s shoulder adds to the feeling that the latter is being guided into some sort of understanding. The boy is learning through the connection his eyes make.
The 1962 Soviet film Ivan’s Childhood is about a twelve-year-old boy looking at, and learning about, the brutal world of war. It starts with Ivan looking through a cobweb; then he goes into a field, turns his head, and the director, Andrei Tarkovsky, has his film cut to this image: square-on, symmetrical, filling the frame, no sideways glance.
It lasts only a moment, but startles. The boy looks into the eyes of a goat; the film-makers put the camera where the boy’s eyes are so that we look into the eyes of the goat too. We are the boy’s surrogate. It is often a shock to lock eyes. Children play a game to see how long they can look into each other’s eyes before one looks away, breaks the spell. Tarkovsky did not want his films to take place only in social realms. He wanted his characters to connect with nature and something eternal or metaphysical. The boy – and the film – looking at the goat immediately opens a portal into the natural world, and another type of subjectivity unexpected