[Blindmath] Perspective and the blind

[Susan Jolly]

OK, here's a sighted person's opinion after watching the video and reading some about this blind artist.  First, his art is not overwhelming--it's in what is sometimes called primitive or folk art style.  Second, there is no evidence that he can read and write.  Also, in the videos he was always helped by a sighted guide rather than using a cane.

The way he paints is to first emboss an outline of the objects in the picture.  My guess, although I've not read this anywhere, is that sighted people produced tactile drawings for him when he was quite small so he became familiar with them from a very early age.  He supposedly started painting by age 8. He paints by using his fingers to fill in outlined areas with dabs of viscous oil paint so his paintings are quite textural.  I read that he only uses 5 colors and lets each one dry before using another. It looks to me as though he uses one hand to feel for the embossed borders and the other hand to paint.  I assume that most blind people could learn to do this if they did it every day for 50 years.

One reason he's said to understand perspective is that when he paints something like a landscape, the items that are further away are made smaller.  He might have picked up this information from tactile drawings.  The main reason seems to be that he knows that to a sighted person lines that are receding appear to be angled. Again, I would guess that he could have picked this up from tactile drawings made by sighted people.

Watching this blind artist he seems to be a happy person who enjoys life.  

Sincerely, SusanJ