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Sir Alfred J. Munnings, The
Red Prince Mare, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 40 x 60 in., Private Collection
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I seem to remember having discussions with fellow half-baked
artists who cited binocular vision as the reason painters have an advantage
over the monocular lens of the camera with respect to such things as depth
perception and field of vision. Binocular
or monocular, it makes no difference.
What makes a difference is the human eye to human brain neural connection. So
far, scientists haven’t implanted into the nervous systems of cameras and computers the
brain’s sensory capacity to interpret the visual world in the same way as we
wise and all-powerful sentient human beings do. But that day is coming, I’m sure. I get the feeling now that those discussions we
had in the pre-digital age were pathetically antediluvian.
But I thought it might be interesting to point out that
painters with sight in only one eye have painted just as well or better than
painters with two good eyes, with no apparent lack of depth perception or other
visual deficiencies. And it’s probably
inappropriate for me to point out that having only one eye eliminates the
double-vision painters with two eyes encounter when measuring angles or
checking symmetries with the handle of a brush held at arm’s length or when using
a viewfinder. With two eyes, one eye is
always dominant and you have to close the other eye to make such calculations. At least I do. But this so-called “binocular disparity” is
said to improve the brain’s perception of depth at a distance.
I’m by no means attempting to minimize the tragedy for a
painter of not having sight in one eye. Your
field of vision must be greatly reduced.
And the fear of losing the remaining good eye must be a constant and frightful
worry, especially as we age and have to deal with cataracts, retinal and
corneal problems, macular degeneration and all the other conditions that
threaten our sight. I’ve had successful
cataract surgery in both eyes and the improvement in sight is miraculous. Unfortunately there are no effective
treatments for certain other degenerative eye disorders as of yet.
At any rate, let me touch briefly on three painters I know
of who had successful careers even though they had vision in only one eye. One painter lost sight in one eye in
childhood, the other two as young men. Did that make a difference in the brain’s
ability to make sense of the visual world?
Is the brain hard-wired at birth to interpret such things as depth
perception? I personally don’t know of
any painters who have been blind in one eye since birth. But I suspect their visual experience would
be the same.
The most famous of the three painters is the outstanding
equestrian painter Alfred J. Munnings (1878-1959), who became one of the very
best realist painters of the 20th Century and had a fabulous and well-documented
career, even though he lost the sight in his right eye in an accident when he
was 20 years old. His dazzling brushwork
and drawing skills are on a par with the greatest bravura painters of the late
19th and early 20th Centuries. Munnings was made President of the Royal
Academy in 1944, the same year he was knighted, and served in that capacity
until his resignation in 1949, which coincided with his highly controversial Royal
Academy dinner speech denouncing all Modernist art. The 1921 painting by Munnings reproduced above
was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007 for $7,848,000, a record for one of his
works. That’s amazing, but so is the
painting, one of many masterpieces of equestrian art by Munnings, who also was
a wonderful landscape and figure painter.
The illustrator and portrait painter Frank C. Bensing
(1893-1983) was blind in one eye after being stricken with scarlet fever as a
child, but he had a long and successful art career. Early on he created covers for such magazines
as McCall’s, Redbook, and The Saturday
Evening Post; ads for high-profile consumer products, and movie posters for
RKO Studios. He later became a
sought-after portrait painter and created landscapes for his own pleasure. He continued to paint until the age of 88,
only two years before his death at the age of 90.
And the watercolorist Irwin Greenberg (1922-2009) exhibited his work widely and was a beloved painting teacher in New York City for many years, even though he lost the sight in one eye when he was hit by shrapnel just as he had parachuted into France with the U.S. Army during the Second World War. “Greeny” taught traditional painting skills at The High School of Art and Design, The School of Visual Arts and The Art Students League, all in New York City. I’ve met many of his former students and colleagues and they all speak of him with great affection and respect for his inspiring presence in their lives. Near the end of his life, I heard that he was, indeed, concerned that an age-related eye condition might rob him of sight in his one good eye.
As I’ve discovered in researching other artists without big reputations whose careers pre-date the Internet age, there aren’t many images of the work of Bensing and Greenberg on the Web. Both men were represented by Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City, one of the premier galleries for realist art in America from the 1920s until its demise in the early 1980s. They had other gallery connections as well. But most of their paintings were sold privately years ago and images are not readily available. Bensing was a very active and accomplished portrait painter, yet I could find no really good images of that important phase of his career.
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| Frank C. Bensing, Francis Trow Spaulding, 1955, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
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| Frank C. Bensing, World War II Couple |
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| Irwin Greenberg |
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| Irwin Greenberg |
It’s sad when one learns of painters who have been forced to give up painting when their eyesight fails before they do. They go to remarkable lengths to continue painting until there is no sight left at all. Here’s a link to a heartwarming video I saw recently about how one 97-year-old man continues to create art even though he is nearly blind: http://vimeo.com/70748579.
Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986) lost all but some peripheral
vision by 1971 because of macular degeneration.
She bluntly expressed what most artists think about at some point in
their lives when she declared, “When you get so that you can't see, you come to
it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill
yourself when you couldn't see.”
