Exceptional Talents
As an art teacher who works with the visually impaired (I teach teenagers at the Lighthouse International in Midtown Manhattan), I have been interested to see several recent news stories about artists with visual and other impairments. Volvo has unveiled an ad campaign featuring the artwork of blind artist Eşref Armağan. CBS and the Huffington Post recently reported on the immense cityscapes of autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire.
Personally, I work with teens who are blind, teens with low vision, and teens who live with visual impairment in conjunction with other conditions including autism, albinism, and mental disability (I’ll share some of their work at the end of this post). We’ll be discussing these two news stories in class this week and I’m looking forward to hearing their perspectives.
Above: blind artist blind artist Eşref Armağan draws a Volvo (here is Mashable’s coverage of this Volvo campaign). I have mixed feelings about the use of a visually impaired artist as the central conceit in a marketing strategy about a car we’re not allowed to see (yet), but that’s another conversation, so I’ll concentrate on the artwork here, because it’s quite special.
As you might imagine, visual arts for the visually impaired means unique challenges and opportunities. The Volvo painting by Eşref Armağan is quite remarkable. He has rendered rather accurate representations of color, form and even perspective. The artist’s website includes an explanation of his painting process: “First, using a Braille stylus [a tool something like an awl], he etches an outline of his drawing. He needs to feel that he is ‘inside’ his painting… When he is satisfied with his drawing, he starts to apply the oils with his fingers. Because he applies only one color at a time (the colors would smear otherwise), he must wait two or three days for the color to dry before applying the next color… He also learned to draw perspective.” Mr. Armağan’s techniques are inspired (he developed this unique style himself) and I’m excited to share them with my classes. I’m especially impressed with his use of perspective.
The above video features autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire drawing vast, detailed cityscapes from memory. It’s pretty astounding to imagine Stephen’s capability to store all of that visual data (exact numbers of windows, floor levels, etc) in his mind. Last summer, I was fortunate to work with a very talented teen who was both blind and autistic. We actually discovered that he had a gift for drawing with a Brailler (looks like a typewriter but makes Braille impressions on the page). I’d never seen it done, but I saw this student render an accurate NYC map in less than an hour!
Here are some of the paper mache masks that my students worked on in my art class last year:
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