Young Artist Relies on Inner Vision

Madeline Gomez may be nearly blind but that hasn’t kept the 6-year-old artist from drawing the images she sees with her mind’s eye.

The San Fernando youngster, who was diagnosed with congenital glaucoma when she was 2 months old, relies on memory, imagination and an abundance of paper and crayons to capture scenes from everyday life.

Sitting at a table in a spare bedroom with walls covered with her work, Madeline looks like a seasoned artist. Her petite frame is perched on the edge of a plastic chair and her light brown hair is pulled away from her face in two long braids.

Peering through thick eyeglasses, her face close to the paper and her tiny hand gripping a crayon, Madeline carefully colors a picture of a ballerina.

“I wish I didn’t have glaucoma, but I’m happy when I get to come home from the hospital,” she said. “I think I’m special in my eyes. Everyone is special in their own way.”

Madeline’s subjects include kids playing at the park, families sitting around the dinner table and farmers on tractors. Her artwork will be on display next month at the San Fernando Valley Fair and Dodger Stadium as part of a Los Angeles Unified School District art show.

The Glaucoma Research Foundation plans to auction one of Madeline’s drawings this summer to raise funds for the San Francisco-based nonprofit group.

“I’ve seen a lot of children’s artwork in the 30 years that I have been teaching and hers tops the list,” said Karen Gladstone, an LAUSD teacher-advisor who oversees Madeline’s home-school program.

“Most 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds are usually drawing stick figures and learning to color within the lines; they are not able to do what she does,” Gladstone said.

Madeline has displayed a passion for drawing from her earliest years, said her parents, Severo and Katherine Gomez.

At 18 months, the child was drawing stick figures. In preschool, she was sketching girls in fancy dresses. By the time she got to kindergarten, the other kids put down their crayons to watch her draw colorful scenes of family, school and the outdoors.

“We never realized how talented she was until we compared her work to other kids her own age,” Katerine Gomez, 29, said. “All she ever wants to do is draw.”

Severo Gomez, 35, said his daughter seems to store in her mind images of people and places and then reproduce them on paper.

Madeline came home from a church service and drew a picture of the sanctuary, including the pillars, altar, stained-glass windows and choir robes.

“She remembered all the details and then added things from her own imagination,” her father said. “My cousin looked at the picture and said, ‘Hey, that’s St. Ferdinand’s.’ ”

Madeline is extremely nearsighted--her vision with eyeglasses is 20/200, which is considered legally blind. Doctors have told her parents that it is likely Madeline will eventually lose her sight completely.

“Drawing is her way of bringing things to her,” her mother said. “It helps her to see things up close and clearly.”

Glaucoma is characterized by elevated pressure of the fluid inside the eyeball and damage to the optic nerve. Treatments involve medication and surgery. There is no known cure.

Within days of her diagnosis, Madeline’s left eye began to bulge and cloud over. Her parents took her to the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA where she was immediately taken into surgery.

“It was obviously really hard at the time,” her mother recalled. “My husband and I had waited four years to become parents. We thought we had planned everything right and then this was just thrown at us.”

Madeline has undergone 16 operations and 14 examinations that required general anesthesia. In October she had a cornea transplant.

The glaucoma resulted from a recessive gene both her parents carry. The couple were advised that any future children they had would also be at risk for the disease.

Madeline’s younger brother Gabriel, 4, and sister Julia, 2, have shown no signs of glaucoma.

“We probably would have been overprotective if Madeline had been an only child,” Katherinz Gomez said. “But with two more kids, we couldn’t be that way.”

Like any other 6-year-old, Madeline runs around the house, jumps on the sofa and watches TV. She likes to read, play outdoors and even ride her bike.

Still, Madeline said drawing is her first love.

“I feel good that I want to draw for other people,” she said. “I like drawing pictures to give to other people so they can feel happy.”