Visions of the Eye--and the Heart

The most dramatic piece was a 24-inch-tall glazed urn called Baboon Babies.

The urn is covered with pictures of animals and tropical flowers and trees. When I saw it, it was in a glass-doored display case at Braille Institute Desert Center, part of a 51-piece show called “Art of the Eye: An Exhibition on Vision.”

The exhibit had sculpture, paintings, ceramics and photography. Scott Nelson, a Minneapolis sculptor whose vision is impaired, assembled the exhibit of art created by people with a wide range of visual impairments, including total blindness.

The Delta Gamma Foundation worked with Nelson to assemble the exhibit and arrange for it to tour. Delta Gamma sorority has sponsored events for people with vision limitations for years. The exhibit has been across the United States and is now on its way to Denver.

Fortune Zuckerman, the director of the Braille Institute of the Desert in Rancho Mirage, said, “We are honored that our Braille Institute was included in the venues. I do wish that everyone could see this.”

The photographs done by the visually impaired seemed to grab the essence of what the artist sees. One of the artists, who produced a series of pictures by photographing the same street corner over and over, said he feels that he knows when something interesting is happening there.

There are dozens of ways vision can be impaired, Zuckerman told me. The artists paint the object or the scene the way they see it. Some of them see two objects where there is really one, so they paint two of everything.

Arlene Innmon is an artist who was born with glaucoma and has had a great deal of surgery.

She says: “Because of all my eye surgery, light goes through more holes than just my pupils, so I see several images with both eyes. My right eye also sees distorted images of shape, color and light that are not in the same place as the other eye. When I was little, I thought that everyone had double images.”

She has painted two pictures of a little boy kneeling on a window seat. One was after using eye drops in one eye. The second is after drops in both eyes. The one painted with drops in just one eye is a softer image. Not blurred, just softer.

With the exhibit there is an article about the artist Monet’s shifting of color in his later period, the period of the Japanese bridges and water lilies. The writer, James J. Ravin, points out how little is known, even by doctors, about most artists’ perceptions and their function in the creative process.