PAINTING THE EYE
By Philip Jeyaretnam
THEME: THE VALUE OF MAKING ART
During the pandemic, the question was raised whether the production of the arts should be considered an “essential service”. Only those whose work involved keeping us alive and in good health, such as doctors, nurses, cleaners and those who produced and supplied basic food items were allowed to go out to work. The rest had to work from home or be unemployed. Among those who lost income during this period were artists, writers, theatre workers and others in the entertainment industries as they weren’t considered to be providing essential services.
Although Philip Jeyaretnam’s story was published before the pandemic, it does make you think about the value of artists’ work and whether it is necessary to our life. Especially it conveys the way portrait painting is important to society.
ART HELPS YOU SEE PEOPLE BEYOND STEREOTYPES
Inspired by a mixed-media portrait he sees at an art gallery, Ah Leong scours the streets looking at strangers’ faces and goes home to paint them from memory. In the process, he makes the important discovery that people are all individuals, that it is silly to stereotype people. As the narrator says on p 103, “And he began to believe that all of the traditional classifications of faces (young or old, Chinese or Indian, happy or sad) helped not one bit in determining the true essence of faces, of people. Not that he could find new classifications to take their place. No pattern was discernible. Each face seemed to exist entirely unto itself, constituting its own universe. And in the course of a single observation, he would see a face transform itself a hundred times…”. Ah Leong’s discovery—we are all unique individuals.
ART CAN OPEN YOU UP TO NEW FRIENDSHIPS
His portrait painting also transforms Ah Leong from an introverted, lonely person to someone who has many friends. The story starts with Ah Leong missing a close friend who is studying abroad. This was one of his few friends. However his close scrutiny of people’s faces, searching their eyes and their expressions for their feelings and desires makes him feel sympathy for them. This encourages him to forget his own shyness and talk to people. As the narrator says on p 103, ‘And then the faces began to speak to him, and he would listen, rapt.”
ART-MAKING CAN BRING SUCCESS TO OTHER AREAS OF YOUR LIFE
In addition, this new ability to make friends makes him finally a success at his job as an insurance agent. As the text says, “Ah Leong was looking at his work differently, as something that brought him in contact with a thousand different unique individuals: people who talked to him, to whom he listened, people who sometimes helped him and whom sometimes he helped. And suddenly he was making a lot of money (from insurance that is, he had not yet sold a single painting)…”. Portrait painting made him less frightened of new people and also he stopped seeing them as mere digits but as having unique needs that he could help with. This made him a better insurance agent.
YES, ART CAN SAVE A LIFE—IF YOU LET IT
Ah Leong’s experience with painting portraits provides him with the opportunity to save a person’s life. Mr Wee’s behaviour, the fear in his eyes, juxtaposed with with his move to buy insurance that would benefit his mother in case of his death, helps Ah Leong realise that this man was in trouble. Unfortunately, the man himself chose not to accept Ah Leong’s help and ends up being murdered by loan sharks.
WHAT MAKES THE AESTHETIC PROCESS SO SPECIAL?
When you make art, you find yourself looking closely at the people around you. You learn how to look at life, to make meaning of the things around you, the colours, the sights, the sounds, the expressions of people, their behaviour. Your intuition develops as does your imagination. You make creative connections between things and events as Ah Leong does when he listens to a woman complain about her husband and son and notes the sky-blue walls of her flat, which leads him to speculate that she has a desire to escape her loneliness (because sky-blue is conventionally the colour of freedom). As this story suggests, making art also opens your heart to others.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE
The title “Painting the Eye” hints at the major themes of the story.
“EYE” AS HOMOPHONE
A homophone is a word that sounds like another word but is spelt differently. It thus carries dual meanings and is a type of pun. The “eye” in the title refers to Ah Leong’s painting of Mr Wee’s eye, which had peered at Ah Leong from behind the door of his flat on his first visit. But the word “eye” also sounds the same as “I”, the self, and brings together meanings of the way that “painting the eye” is also a QUEST FOR IDENTITY. But is Ah Leong painting Mr Wee’s eye or is he painting himself. This brings us to the question…
WHOSE PORTRAIT IS BEING PAINTED?
If you read p 109 carefully, you will realise that as Ah Leong paints Mr Wee’s eye, filling it with fear and suspicion, he also then goes on to fill the painting with “his own rage and helplessness…till it was saturated with the hues of his own emotions.” We are told Ah Leong couldn’t finish his painting “until his anger, channeled into this painting, left him.”
The word “channeled” is interesting. It suggests that somehow there is a bit of Ah Leong in his painting of Mr Wee’s portrait. So whose eye is it-- Mr Wee’s or Ah Leong’s? Is it portrait or self-portrait?
In fact, it is both, as most art tends to be. When we look at our external environment, we perceive it (or “channel” it) through our own inner mind or point-of-view, our expectations, our prejudices, our memory. It’s hard to recognize a quality in another person if we haven’t experienced it ourselves. When Ah Leong paints Mr Wee’s eyes from memory, he recalls it as being full of fear, yet Ah Leong himself was nervous then (p 105), so whose fear is he remembering?
There is another example in the story of how art involves the coming together of the self and the other. At the Substation (p 102), Ah Leong comes across a multi-media collage which features what appears to be the portrait of an Indian man. However, on looking closely at the female artist who was seated nearby, Ah Leong realizes that the portrait resembles the artist herself! Again the line between portrait and self-portrait dissolves.
THE EYE AS SYMBOL
They say the eyes are the WINDOWS OF THE SOUL in that a person can see another’s inner emotions and traits simply by looking into his eyes. Our eyes can reveal our secrets to a perceptive bystander. But of course we can, like Mr Wee, also learn how to keep our eyes “shuttered”, as if our eyes were a camera with a shutter mechanism, refusing others a chance to gaze into our soul.
But let’s not ignore an important fact about Mr. Wee’s eyes—there is only one of them, ONLY ONE EYE that Ah Leong sees peering through the door, and which he paints. This highlights the mystery of Mr. Wee’s life, and suggests that we can only ‘see’ and understand him partially. Ah Leong can only paint a HALF-PORTRAIT of this man.
Another significant detail about the eye is the way it is conjoined with the door. The original door is not “a HDB original but a sturdy, almost armoured-looking replacement” (104), which emphasizes Mr. Wee’s determination not to open up to others. However, when Ah Leong paints the eye, he changes it to a “standard HDB fitting”. The HDB often features in local literature as a symbol of Singaporean identity. Soon after, Ah Leong notes that it was “this city, this city that he loved so much that made men like that,” men who “turn in upon [themselves] and away from [their] neighbours” (109). Suddenly it becomes clear that in painting Mr Wee’s portrait, Ah Leong is depicting a typical Singaporean and criticizing a national trait of being secretive, unfriendly, fearful of others. So this is a portrait not just of Mr. Wee but of a typical Singaporean.
“PAINTING” AS METAPHOR
The verb “painting” itself highlights the personal process that Ah Leong goes as an artist where his quest to depict others and to capture their beauty turns out to be a journey of self-discovery.
But we can also read “painting the eye/I” as a metaphor for the literary genre of depicting VERBAL PORTRAITS, i.e. fictional biography. The narrator, like Ah Leong, is engaged in putting together a portrait of Ah Leong, insurance agent by day, artist by night, and also to capture the soul of a typical Singaporean—an aim however that he can only pursue partially.