Sargy Mann at work in his studio. Photograph by Peter Mann
Even before he lost his sight, Sargy Mann was obsessed with ways of seeing. As a young painter he was tutored by singular realists – Frank Auerbach, Euan Uglow – who insisted that an individual artist must be exactly true to what he saw. For much of his working life Mann taught students at Camberwell School of Art all he knew about representing light and colour on canvas, with particular reference to Bonnard and Matisse, and he put all of that complex understanding into practice in his own, often gloriously sun-drenched landscapes and interiors. Like all painters, he suggests, he felt he knew instinctively what science was then in the process of discovering: that the eye was an entirely passive collector of visual stimuli, and that “seeing” was a learned activity that went on in different, discrete parts of the brain – the imaginative piecework of collating form, and colour, and light into an understandable vision of the world, one you constantly made up as you went along.
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November 28, 2010 at 4:03 am
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The matter is more commonly put as ‘the eye is a part of the brain’ – meaning, there is no convenient distinction between ‘data’ or some discrete units of light, registered and their ‘interpretation’ by the rest of the brain.
Traditionally, the argument is often made between the brain’s active searching for confirmation or refutation of visual data, and the ability to re-appraise in light of unexpected visual data. What is ‘unexpected’ in this respect, is usually held to be in matter of degree. Science has for some time been acquainted with this process, certainly through the bulk of the 20th century, in both optics and visual perception (see arguments over behaviourism versus cognitive psychology, in particular). Philosophy has argued about it for a great deal longer (see for instance, rationalism versus empiricism in 17th and 18th centuries).
For painters, the swing between the two is generally posted with the shift between Impressionism and Expressionism (which is to say, at the cusp of 19th-20th century). The former looking to primary units of ‘sensation’ – intuitions of colour, initially, even as colour then begs shape, and shape, plane and plane volume, and so on, until one’s ‘sensations’ start to look somewhat pre-emptive. While the committed Expressionist held with intuitive fundamentals, that start with line, which then invites, plane, tone or volume, and inevitably the particulars of instance and observation.
Neither side proves quite adequate or comprehensive. The world is made with a confounding mixture. The Impressionist thrives on reducing ‘nature’ to matters of light and light to only colour, yet colour must have some shape, and that shape some situation. So the argument there is for implicit iconography or its camoflage. And this is principally what the Symbolists in the late 19th century argue against Impressionism. They argue for much more loaded or metaphoric meaning to things (for ‘symbols’ in fact).
The trajectory for Expressionism is actually inward – to absolutes of abstraction – but that is for another comment. My dinner awaits!