Getting a Feel for Art

Leaning close, the small boy slowly ran his fingers over the thick tubes of white paint that meandered across the canvas on the wall. He smiled.

It marked the first moment that 14-year-old Alex Rivas of Lynwood was able to “see” art. Usually when he and others who are blind visit an art gallery, they must rely on a sighted person to tell them what a painting, sketch or sculpture looks like.

But Larry Volk, a 39-year-old artist from Van Nuys, may have changed that.

Inspired by his grandfather, who was born blind, Volk set out 15 years ago to develop a touch-sensitive medium that would allow the blind to feel art and directly grasp the meaning by themselves.

He came up with an art version of Braille: paintings--sometimes new versions of old masters--done in raised textures that can be felt with the fingertips. The “canvas” is made of a thin layer of asphalt on plywood. The paint, a mixture of acrylic paint and modeling compound, sticks to the asphalt like glue.

The paintings appear black and white to the sighted, but varied textures represent different colors to a blind observer. For the color red, Volk paints raised white stars. Blue is represented by wavy white lines, and yellow is a jumbled mix of thin white lines.

Braille messages are spelled out in Botts dots, the hemispheric highway lane separators that Volk purchased from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

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Last week at an art gallery in West Hollywood, Volk displayed for the first time about a dozen of his large-scale pieces, several of them renderings of works by such well-known artists as Matisse, Picasso and Christo.

Blind and visually impaired teenagers with the Foundation for the Junior Blind walked through the gallery, never once hearing the words “Don’t touch.”

“In a regular museum I wouldn’t be able to see it,” said Mark Hanohano, 16, of Bellflower. “I wouldn’t be able to see it because you can’t get close to it.”

“I’ve created a monster here,” Volk said. “People will get used to touching these.”

Volk signs his paintings in Braille, using pennies he finds on the street for the raised dots.

For blind and visually impaired students, the artworks become a kind of scavenger hunt, Volk said. By slowly feeling their way across the work, they start out with a blank canvas in their minds and fill in the outlines and colors as their fingers skim the textures.

Mark said it’s better even for sighted people to be able to touch art because doing so teaches them to use senses other than sight.

“I may skip some things, I may even imagine this differently by feeling it,” Mark said. “I may get it in a way people may not get it if they glance at it.”

He said the homage to Christo was his favorite.

The work, titled “Cloning,” contains two plastic foam casts of Volk’s face, painted in red glitter. Plastic and thick twine cover the work, to mimic the artistic technique of the Bulgarian-born Christo, who creates huge but temporary works, often wrapping prominent buildings or places. He wrapped the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris with 440,000 square feet of gold-colored fabric, and created the controversial “Running Fence,” white nylon that stretched 24 1/2 miles across Northern California fields into the Pacific Ocean.

Another favorite among the students was “Unsolved Mysteries/The Glove,” a black leather glove affixed on the asphalt background. The sign next to it in both print and Braille said: “The artist’s whimsical comment on the crime of the century.”

Volk said he uses asphalt because it is sturdy and withstands exposure to the oils and acids in the skin of the hands that constantly stroke it.

In the future, Volk said, he intends to broaden his palette, combining his textures representing yellow, blue and red to make new patterns representing green, orange and purple.

He plans to donate a percentage of proceeds from sales of the art to the Foundation for the Junior Blind, a nonsectarian, nonprofit agency that has helped visually impaired people in Los Angeles for 45 years.

Administrators of the foundation say Volk’s work is the only art they know of created to be directly experienced by the blind.

Bob Cabeza, director of recreation services for the Junior Foundation for the Blind, said the night his students saw the exhibit, they discussed and debated the artwork the entire ride home.

“It’s art the way art should be,” Cabeza said. “It fostered discussion, debate, emotion, pleasure. I think it does the same thing for visually impaired and blind teens and adults as it does for sighted teens and adults.”