London Recordings by David Sylvester

Author:David Sylvester [David Sylvester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

II

Seeing the world grey

Colour is such an emotional thing. One of Piaget’s tests on children’s perception of colour showed that children whose parents were divorced saw less colour. They literally saw things greyer, and children who came from a happy family literally perceived colour as being brighter. And I remember myself seeing the world grey. I could not see colour in the world for many years as a young painter.

Showing the view to a blind man

I’ve been writing a film script for ten years. It’s the story of Thomas, Thomas the painter. And it’s a saga from World War II to the present time, a sort of cultural War and Peace with the social history of New York thrown in, with a complete reconstruction of the Cedar Bar.

It has a lovely metaphor on seeing for the modern artist. When I was a little boy my grandmother took me to the seaside at Folkestone and we were walking along the boardwalk and it was the most beautiful day, with sailboats sailing by, billowing white clouds, stuff like that. I must have been about six or seven. And I went up to a man sitting on a bench and tugged at his coat and said, Oh! Look at the ships, look at the ships, aren’t they nice! And he said to me, Can you read, sonny? And I said, Yes, I can read. And he said, Can you read what’s on this button? And it said, BLIND. And at that moment my grandmother came up and grabbed my hand and said, Can’t you see he’s blind? I wanted to disappear completely.

And that’s a metaphor of myself as an artist, to show the view to a blind man. I have that in the film script. Thomas is in a sailor suit. I’ve got that indelibly in my mind. The man is wearing black glasses and the reflection of the boats is on his glasses, but he’s not able to see them. Black Rainbow over Oedipus at Thebes is a metaphor for blindness.

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