sundance

Blind artist paints by touch

Psychology Today has a fascinating read on blind artist John Bramblitt who didn’t start painting until after he had lost his sight in his twenties. While his “twenty-five years of visual experience provided him with mental images of what he wanted to paint,” an activity he picked up mainly as an outlet and act of angry defiance, Bramblitt still understandably struggled with the fundamental fact he couldn’t see the canvas. As a replacement, he began using his sense of touch, a process for the blind called “cross-modal plasticity” which theorizes that the parts of the brain typically used in sight is reassigned to enhance a blind individual’s tactile abilities. Research suggests that this process can occur in as fast as 90 minutes! Bramblitt explains the practical application of this phenomenon in his works:

While oil paint is messier, more pungent, and dries much slower than acrylics, it offers something that no other paint can: idiosyncratic viscosity. According to Bramblitt, “White feels thicker on my fingers, almost like toothpaste, and black feels slicker and thinner. To mix a gray, I’ll try to get the paint to have a feel of medium viscosity”. In fact, he has learned to recognize and mix all the colors he uses by his sense of touch. And the colors are the first thing one notices about Bramblitt’s work (www.Bramblitt.net). While the subjects of his paintings are immediately recognizable, proportioned, and smartly stylized, the colors are supremely vibrant, and nearly psychedelic in their rendering.

[Via]