Teacher Draws Out Artist’s Inner Vision : Painting: Guli Karim, legally blind, gets lessons in confidence from mentor, 86.

Guli Karim leans close to the paper, dabbing dark green leaves atop the pale yellow watercolor wash to show the change of seasons.

Edwin Fourcher leans in close too, guiding the brush with his voice but never touching it.

“Don’t forget the shadows on the ground,” says Fourcher, 86, his eight decades as an artist emanating through his advice.

“That, I don’t forget,” quips Karim, 67, adding a swath of muddy green next to the trunk and pointing out where the imaginary sun is. “You’ve trained me.”

Just a typical art lesson, except Karim can barely see the paper she paints on, and cannot distinguish among the colors on her palette. She is legally blind, unable to read or drive or even recognize one of her finished works from more than a foot away.

Despite the handicap, though, Karim constructs intricate landscapes with graceful strokes and colorful detail. And earlier this month she won a special award for “courage and excellence” at the Coastline Community College art show.

“The best thing that’s happened to me is confidence,” Karim said, beaming when asked about the weekly art lessons that began in December, 1991. Fourcher “says I can see better than I used to, but it’s not through my eyes; it’s my mind is working. I thought I was rotten cabbage, but now look what I’m doing.”

Karim’s Spyglass Hill home is a showcase of her own art.

It starts on the refrigerator, where her sloppy first attempt at an array of fruit hangs next to her grandchildren’s scrawlings of rabbits and flowers. In the hallway is one of her first finished works-- a simple fluffy cat in front of a Christmas tree. It adorned her holiday cards last year.

The living room boasts the prized paintings: “Laguna,” a bright and beautiful corner of the coast that she redid three times until she was satisfied. A winter scene of a snow-topped cabin and a frozen stream that she modeled after a postcard. Autumn’s stark, bare trees surrounding a pond.

Scraps of paper with fruit and trees are scattered across her desk, which sits in a dark corner because the light bothers her eyes. She paints whenever possible, but waits for Fourcher’s approval before proceeding with each stage of a project.

“Now, if I have any problem, I don’t take it seriously, I just take my brush and start painting and the problem goes away,” said Karim, an Indian woman who moved to the United States from East Africa 15 years ago. “I feel so good. Whenever I have tension--and who doesn’t have tension?--I just take my brush and just scribble. It makes me feel better.”

The lessons began almost by accident.

Fourcher taught art next door to a Braille seminar at the Oasis Senior Center in Corona del Mar, and one day, he asked the class--including some whose vision is worse than Karim’s--if any of them would like to learn to paint.

At first, Karim, who “couldn’t even draw a straight line” before meeting Fourcher, was reluctant.

“But he convinced me,” she recalled. “Something happened to me. I got excited. I got hooked.”

Teaching the blind to paint, of course, was a challenge.

Fourcher placed bamboo strips on the color wheel to guide Karim in mixing paints. He marked her paper with elastic to show the horizon line and other key perspective points. Instead of copying images in front of her eyes, Karim memorizes pictures, creating a scene in her head, and then picks up her pencil.

“I want her to use her memory because it’s better than her eyesight,” Fourcher said. “If a person could see at any time, there’s storage there. If a person is blind from the time they’re born, there’s nothing there. Now, that’s a challenge--and that’s what I’m working on next.”

Since he began working with Karim, Fourcher said, several other blind people from the area have contacted him and asked for a special class. He is eager to try, but needs volunteers to sit between the students, picking up dropped pencils and mopping spilled water.

Fourcher is already plotting techniques to teach the totally blind.

When drawing trees, Fourcher would sketch one himself, then cut it out and let his students trace the shape. He would bring in bark, branches and leaves for them to touch and smell. Finally he would guide the students’ brushes around their palettes, leading them to the appropriate colors for each of nature’s creations.

“I’m using all their sense to go to their visual memory,” Fourcher said of his plans. “There is a visual memory there because God put it there--it’s latent, (but) the memory is there, waiting to be charged.”

Fourcher began drawing--on blackboards--when he was 7 years old.

Throughout school, he penned cartoons for student newspapers, and after graduation, he began a motion picture career. Fourcher was on the staff of Disney Studios during the 1930s, and helped create the classic characters Betty Boop and Popeye at Fleischer Studios. He names as close friends a virtual Who’s Who of famous animators.

These days “he is always drawing,” said his wife of 44 years, Anita. Watercolor and oil as well as pen and ink, landscapes and still lifes alongside cartoons.

Karim is not his first disabled student.

A dozen years ago, a quadriplegic enrolled in Fourcher’s art class. Though she could not move her arms or legs, the girl already knew how to write by holding a pen in her mouth.

“I said: ‘Great, we’re on the track here, we’ve got no problems,’ ” Fourcher recalled. “If you can see and you’ve got your mouth, you’ll be great.”

More recently, Fourcher--who last month won a golfing gold medal at the Senior Olympics in Palm Springs--led a group of blind seniors out to the putting green. He stood over the hole and clapped his hands; loudly near the target and more softly to the sides, as his students located the mark and swung.

“The thing I love is for someone to say: ‘You can’t do that,’ ” said Fourcher, a spry man whose tiny face is nearly hidden by his large glasses. “It’s a challenge. Then I can get in, and really make it.”