New perspectives

When Michael LeVell draws, he lowers his face to within inches of the sketchpad and makes a series of quick, smooth, back-and-forth motions. The lines are of different colors, density and angles, and he does not stop until the page is filled with assorted shades of darkness.

He loves to draw buildings. His windows are dark splotches, evenly spaced, and appear not only on buildings but also on the ground and sky. One cannot see through them. They are the same shape and color as the mysterious pools of eyes that he paints on faces.

LeVell, who is autistic, cannot speak or hear and is nearly blind. His paintings are part of an exhibit at the LA Artcore Center that explores the nature of blindness and the relationship between sight and art. “The View From Here: Visual Art by Artists Who Are Visually Impaired and Blind” includes paintings, photographs, monoprints and sculpture created by six artists of diverse backgrounds. Only two have formal training.

Curator Christine Leahey, director of visitor services at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, says the show demonstrates how an inability to see does not mandate inferior art and that art is common ground for people of different circumstances. It is, she says, a celebration of the artists’ independence rather than an exhibition that induces pity.

“It’s an opportunity for them to illustrate how they see,” Leahey says. “I wanted the artists to be empowered to represent the nature of their vision because every single artist who’s visually impaired or blind has a different experience of vision.”

Art is LeVell’s primary means of expression and communication. When he was a child, his mother sat with him in front of his sister’s dollhouse and painted pictures of furniture. He soon started drawing furniture, developing an uncanny ability to look at a room, hold it in his memory and later paint it using precise foreshortening and his own color palette.

“He works with his face completely flush against the picture plane but is able to achieve accurate perspective,” Leahey says. “There’s no way to describe it.”

LeVell, 39, attends an art program at the First Street Gallery Art Center in Claremont for adults with developmental disabilities. He is the youngest of six children; his mother was an artist and his father a postal worker. His father died in 1989, and since his mother’s death last year, LeVell has lived with his sister in Pomona. Each month, when his Architectural Digest magazine arrives, he sits down, removes all the inserts and sets them aside, then systematically examines each page. His collection of Architectural Digests goes back to 1970.

He sometimes paints frames around his subject matter and often signs his work, indicating, Leahey says, that the paintings are created with artistic intent.

For Kurt Weston, another artist in the show, lights and shadows exist with fading definition; the world is like an Impressionist painting. He was a fashion photographer when, in 1993, he began losing eyesight because of an AIDS-related condition. All of his images are in black and white. Magnification instruments allow him to focus and print. Included in the show is a four-image series Weston created with the use of a copy machine and foaming glass cleaner in an attempt to portray the nature of his sight.

“I’m trying to express graphically my visual loss,” says Weston, 46. “And I wanted the viewer to have a sense of the emotional impact and an inward feeling of what it is like.”

His messages and emotions are conveyed through images of people, through their eyes. “There’s a whole landscape going on in a person’s face and their expression and what it is they’re feeling and conveying; and maybe even the spirit, the essence of that person, is somehow brought forth in that picture.”

Helen FUKUHARA, 55, has been blind since birth. To describe beauty, she speaks of a high school biology class and how she felt a duckling emerge from its shell.

“It was,” she says, “the best moment of my life.” She has created soft sculptures of a rainbow and butterfly, frog in a pond. The show will include monoprints she created in the art program at the Braille Institute.

That beauty is a feeling rather than a physical characteristic is a concept that drives the artwork of her father, Henry, 90, a prominent watercolorist.

“I’ll see something, then come home and make a drawing from memory to capture the feeling I had at that time. To me, that’s what painting is about,” he says. “So many people paint, but there’s no feeling in it. It’s all graphic art. I’m more concerned with the feeling in a painting.”

Growing up in Santa Monica, he enrolled in Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) after graduating from high school but had to give up classes in order to help his family. During World War II, he along with his wife, Fujiko, and their eldest daughter were locked up in the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Upon release he made his way east, ending up in New York. He didn’t paint seriously until age 60, after seeing four children through college and retiring from the wholesale flower business.

Since then, his work has drawn the attention of critics, galleries, museums and art students. He continues to participate in the art program at Emeritus College, going out on weekly painting expeditions. He typically makes sketches, then paints the scene later at home.

During the last two years, his work has changed as he, too, loses eyesight as the result of glaucoma. A representational landscape painter, he no longer is able to see details of his subject matter.

“My work has been simplified,” he says, “but when you simplify the painting, it becomes much stronger. Yesterday I was at Disney Concert Hall. I saw enough of it so that I can make a painting, whereas the others who have good vision see too much. There’s too much there to see.”

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‘The View From Here:

‘Visual Art by Artists Who Are Visually Impaired and Blind’

Where: LA Artcore Center, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles

When: Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.; closes Feb. 28.

Cost: Free

Info: (213) 617-3274