Woman Who Lost Her Eyesight to Diabetes Molds Art From Her Visions : Sculpture: Lynette Denney’s prized bronze creations, which she makes by hand, depict human figures in grief, joy and celebration.

Lynette Denney spent her youth amid the tall trees, blue waters and Green Mountains of Vermont. “I grew up looking at gorgeous landscapes,” she says. “I sopped them up with my eyes.”

She is grateful for that above all --that and the anatomy class she once took in art school. “I remember having to draw every bone from every angle by memory. Our final exam was to draw a skeleton riding a bicycle with a balloon in one hand and the other hand on the handlebars, a three-quarter view. I thank God for that.”

Years would pass before Denney would use what she learned in that art class to sculpt figures from wire and wax. She works by hand and by heart; she has been blind for 20 years.

A gifted painter, Denney turned to sculpture after losing her sight to the diabetes she’s lived with since childhood.

She has produced 21 figures, most of them female, ranging in size from eight inches to a couple of feet. Cast in bronze by area foundries, they dance, grieve and celebrate life with such power and emotion they seem almost human. They’re prized by collectors and exhibited in galleries and museums.

“There’s something very real and very honest about them,” said Susan Farrow, director of the Frog Hollow Crafts Center, where Denney recently had a one-woman show.

“They’re not only visually exciting, I also feel them when I look at them. They actually do something to me physically in a very deep way. There’s an elegance about them, a quiet elegance.”

Denney considers them gifts from God.

She says the images that inspired her came during meditation, a technique she learned to help cope with the prospect of losing her sight and with it, her ability to create art.

“I had been losing vision, batting around the house,” she said. “I joined a group of women who taught me to meditate, to push everything out of my mind. The day went better. Everything seemed to go more smoothly on the days that I did it.”

She began rising before dawn to practice while the house was still quiet, before her husband, Ray, and her two stepdaughters got up.

“Images began to come into my head,” she said. “I began to see a woman walking along the beach, in the forest, always moving in some beautiful environment. I would come down and make coffee and sit and watch her, like watching a movie. I didn’t tell anyone for a long time. I thought they would think I was crazy.

“In one scene, there was an indoor pool that seemed lit from below the water. I looked at the other end, and there was a woman looking down with her hand on her hip. I saw her the next day, and the next. Finally, a friend said, ‘Don’t you think you should sculpt her?’ ”

“Standing Woman” looks much like the artist herself, long-limbed and graceful, with a calm, quiet air. “I like my figures to speak my inner voice,” Denney said.

Like most of her pieces, the emotion comes not from a facial expression--the face is smooth and featureless--but from its bearing and body language.

Denney works bathed in sunlight in a small upstairs studio. She first forms a strong, lightweight skeleton from aluminum wire and mounts it on wood. She then melts wax in a Crock-Pot and wraps it in layers around the wire. She uses no tools other than her fingers.

“Touch is the way that I see,” she said.

She prefers universal themes. “Praying Woman” depicts a female figure kneeling in prayer. “Defeat” consists of a woman’s body thrown backward over a log. Another piece represents a blind mother holding her baby. The baby is smooth as silk; the mother highly textured.

Denney encourages people to touch her work. Her long fingers slide gently along the bronze surfaces and a smile lights her face as she recognizes each piece by its feel.

“Some sculptors don’t want people to touch their work. They say it’s not good for the bronze, but in a thousand years, what difference will it make?”

Two pieces are tributes to Ginger, her first guide dog. “Dialogue” depicts a woman bending over a sleeping dog, a nightly ritual. “Ginger would sleep curled up in a ball at the foot of my bed, her nose tucked under her tail. Before I went to sleep, I would kneel down and thank her for her work, for being in my life.”

“Threshold” shows a woman with a dog under one arm, “a goddess carrying Ginger over the threshold into heaven.”

Her current dog is Flory, a yellow Lab who wiggles with delight as Denney straps on her harness for a walk. Nothing dampens Flory’s enthusiasm for these outings, despite an accident three years ago in which she and her mistress were run over by a car.

“I was walking home from work along the sidewalk, I was almost home, when I could feel something pressing against my thigh. I fell down, and thought someone must’ve parked too near the curb. Then I realized it was moving.”

The car rolled over Denney’s thighs. “I tried to crawl out and it dragged me 15 feet. Flory was underneath the car. Her harness was twisted like a pretzel. She had oil stains on her back. I had tire marks on my flesh and my leg was all shades of purple, red and green. An ambulance took us to the hospital. Flory cried all the way, she was so frightened for me.”

Though no bones were broken, Denney spent months on the sofa recuperating. She has yet to recover from her fear.

The accident marked a turning point in her life as an artist. She gave up her work as a job counselor to devote all her time to her sculpture. “I realized that if I went back to that job, this work would never get done.”

She also visited the elementary schools in Middlebury to educate coming generations of drivers about the need to watch out for disabled pedestrians.

“I’m athletic. I didn’t let blindness stop me. I got dogs and I ran. I was out there. This is different. You wouldn’t believe the fear that I know now and never knew before.” Not that it slows her down much; she and Flory still walk two miles a day.

It is easy to forget that Denney can’t see. She wears no dark glasses, carries no cane, and her conversation is that of a visual artist, full of the colors of everyday life: the yellow leaves falling from the oak trees behind her house, the purple dress she is wearing in the photo she had taken to record how she looked before disease stole her sight.

As a sighted artist, Denney never thought much about sculpting. At the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, where she studied in the ‘60s, she made just one piece, a female figure that turned out too heavy to lug home.

“I painted all the time. I would drive all around the backwoods sketching. It was always the primary thing about me and who I was.”

She was in her late 20s when she found she could no longer distinguish 3’s from 8’s. That was the beginning. At the time, she was engaged to Ray Denney, a good-humored, easygoing graphic designer from Maine.

She wanted Ray to hear her prognosis firsthand “to give him a chance to back out.” The doctor said she suffered from diabetic retinopathy, a progressive disease that could blind her within five or six years. “Afterward, we went to lunch and I said, ‘So what do you think?’ Ray said, ‘About what?’ ” With her marriage, she became an instant mother to Ray’s two young daughters. Two years later, in 1970, she was declared legally blind.

While she could still perceive shapes and colors, she asked Ray to take her to Maine for one last look at the ocean.

“I was so excited at the thought of seeing the flat horizon, the surf. I struggled to climb over all the rocks to get down to the water. Finally I sat down and looked out. The sea wasn’t flat. It was pulled into little peaks as if by fishhooks, distortion from my eyes. I cried for a long time.”

Among the last colors she saw were yellow and white, the primroses and apple blossoms behind an old house Ray had found in Middlebury. “I walked through the garden and thought ‘This is magic.’ ” Twenty years later, the Denneys are still here.

By 1980, when she had her first one-woman show, Denney could no longer see anything at all. Though she still meditates, “There’s no movie screen. The retina is gone. But if I sit very quietly, I feel directed. I seem to be told what to do.”

She also relies on memory, the vast storehouse of images captured and preserved for more than 20 years. For those, she need only look within.

“Our minds are a universe of color, light, forms and imagery,” she says, “whether we are sighted or blind.”