10 contemporary blind artists who surprised the world with their art

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

It will not be a revelation to anyone that painting is an exclusively visual form of art, so the very phrase “blind artist” sounds like nonsense. But in fact, there are amazing people who are actually blind (they have vision, but not enough for certain activities), but at the same time they have written stunningly beautiful canvases that can compete with the work of sighted artists.

1. Michael Williams

Michael Williams was born in the American city of Memphis in 1964. For the first time, a boy became interested in art, watching his mother (who was an artist) draw a cowboy leaving for the sunset. Williams then began to learn to paint himself, but as a teenager he was diagnosed with Stargardt's disease, which is a degenerative disease that affects people under the age of 20 and affects their vision. Despite losing most of his eyesight, Williams continued to paint and won numerous awards in high school.

To draw, Williams uses a powerful magnifying glass and leans against the canvas. Since he has trouble identifying a range of shades and colors, the artist is forced to improvise most of the time. For each painting, Williams spends somewhere from two weeks to a year.

2. Hal Lasko

There are many ways to paint, but very few people think that someone who uses Microsoft Paint can be called an artist. But what can you call Hal Lasko, who made beautiful works of art using this particular program? But what makes Lasko's work even more impressive is another fact. When he created stunning paintings in Paint (late 80s - 90s), the artist was legally blind.

Lasko was born in 1915 and after World War II he started working as a graphic designer before taking up topography. In 2000, Lasko's grandson showed him Microsoft Paint on a computer that his family bought for his grandfather for his 85th birthday.

In 2005, Lasko partially lost his eyesight due to age-related macular degeneration, which leads to a deterioration in central vision. After that, he could see everything only with his peripheral vision, out of the corner of his eye. He said that Paint allowed him to magnify images so that he could see them, so he painted his masterpieces pixel by pixel.

3. Keith Salmon

Keith Salmon was born in Essex, UK and worked as a sculptor and painter for several years after graduating from university. In 1989, he was diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy and his vision began to deteriorate rapidly, eventually leading to legal blindness. This would be the end of a career for many other artists, but not for Salmon.

What is especially impressive is that the artist now paints landscapes that he cannot see. Salmon, who was an active climber and hiker before going blind, continues to hike the UK hills and then draws what he saw once, integrating that with what he is feeling now.

4. Arthur Ellis

In the late 1960s, Arthur Ellis was an art student with a degree in fine arts. He moved to London and tried to make a career there before returning to his hometown of Tunbridge Wells. There he worked full-time as a printer, and in his free time he painted and made sculptures, thinking that one day he would become a real artist. 26 years passed in this way. In 2006, Ellis went to the doctor complaining of ear pain. It was quickly revealed that Ellis had meningitis, and he was immediately hospitalized and fell into a coma.

The Ellis family was told that the worst was to be expected, including damage to the brain and vital functions. Ellis survived, but lost his sight and hearing. However, after returning home, he decided to continue painting. Through trial and error, he created a technique in which he uses a plasticine-like sticky mass to outline the lines of a painting. He then uses a tool similar to a barcode scanner that detects the color of the paint. Ellis also suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome, which is a condition in which blind people experience vivid and intermittent visual hallucinations. Curiously, the artist includes these hallucinations in his works.

5. Sergey Popolzin

Sergei Popolzin was born in Russia in 1964, grew up in Siberia and studied at an art school in his youth. Due to a number of personal problems and military service, he never completed his studies. After that, Popolzin had a tumultuous life, and in 1990 he tried to commit suicide. Sergei survived, but suffered a serious head injury, which led to blindness.

While he was on the mend, Popolzin began to learn to draw. For orientation, he sticks pins into the canvas. Popolzin says that the most difficult thing in painting is to keep the image in your head from the first brushstroke to the very end.

6. Binod Bihari Mukherjee

Binod Bihari Mukherjee was born in 1904 in India and from birth was blind in one eye and the other was myopic. Unable to go to a regular school due to impaired vision, Mukherjee became interested in painting. In 1919 he went to art school, and in 1925 he became a teacher there, where he worked until 1949.

Over the years, his already poor eyesight deteriorated further, and in 1954, Mukherjee underwent an unsuccessful cataract operation and became completely blind. But he continued to paint and sculpt, claiming to use his "inner vision" as well as his many years of experience. Mukherjee passed away in 1980 and is considered a legend in contemporary Indian art. He was one of the most visually impaired artists in history.

7. Jeff Hanson

When Jeff Hanson was born in 1993, he was quite healthy, but over time his parents noticed that something was wrong with his son's vision. Over time, the child's vision dropped so much that he could not even make out the stars in the sky through a telescope. It turns out that Jeff had neurofibromatosis, and a tumor formed in his brain, which led to loss of vision and growth retardation. During chemotherapy, to distract his son, Jeff's mother got interested in drawing cards with watercolors.

Subsequently, the boy began to do it so well that his mother began to give cards as a thank you to the people who helped the family during the chemotherapy process. Then Jeff started selling his paintings, and their popularity skyrocketed so much that Warren Buffett has one of his paintings, and Elton John has two.

Today, the average Jeff painting costs about $ 4,000. And what is most surprising is that for each painting he bought, he donates another one, selling it at an auction, and putting all the proceeds to charity. At these auctions, prices for his paintings often go up to $ 20,000. This strategy was so successful that Jeff raised $ 1 million and donated everything to charity before he turned 20.

8. Sarji Mann

In 1973, when the English artist and art teacher Sarji Mann was 35 years old, he underwent cataract surgery. This was followed by other operations, and the vision was getting worse. Mann found that after each operation, he saw the world differently, and tried to sketch this new vision.

In May 2005, Mann traveled to Spain for a few weeks to paint. He returned to his home in Suffolk, and the next day, when he turned 68, the artist woke up to find that he was completely blind. Nevertheless, he continued to paint, and it was the paintings painted during this time that became his most successful works. Prices go up to $ 75,000, and Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis bought a couple of paintings for themselves.

9. Eshref Armagan

Eshref Armagan, who was born in 1953 in Turkey, had one eye incredibly underdeveloped, and the other eye did not function at all. The boy grew up in a poor family, did not receive any formal education, but independently learned to read, write and even draw. By the age of eight, he completed his first painting - the image of a butterfly. When he was 18 years old, Armagan was already painting on full-size canvases.

Before painting a picture, Armagan initially creates an image in his imagination. In total, the artist uses five colors, plus white and black, and then mixes them. Armagan is also notable for the way he uses colors, shadows, composition, perspective and scale. He is able to draw things as if they disappear into the distance, and he can also draw objects in three dimensions, which, according to scientists, is impossible for a person who has never seen.

10. John Bramblitt

John Bramblitt began to lose his eyesight when he was still a teenager, and in 2001, when he turned 30, he went completely blind. Doctors believe it was caused by epilepsy and Lyme disease, which had not been diagnosed for three years. After that, Bramblitt, who had never studied painting before he went blind, invented a unique drawing method. What he creates is truly breathtaking bright and lively paintings.

To create his paintings, he touches objects and models, and then draws what he feels on paper with a marker that leaves a raised ink. Then he uses oil paints, distinguishing them by color, since they have different textures. Bramblet's work has become incredibly popular, and it takes an average of three weeks to create one picture.