Blind artist creates a way through the challenge

Some of his photographic portraits appear distorted, with items floating around a scanned image of his face, but that’s Kurt Weston’s point. He wants others to see the world through his eyes.

With only peripheral vision in his right eye and no sight at all in his left, the 58-year-old Huntington Beach resident is legally blind.

Everything is a blur to him, and it’s hard to differentiate people. But instead of falling into the trap of thinking that a person without full eyesight can’t possibly be an artist, “I kind of incorporate that into my artwork,” he said.

“I try to represent different aspects of my vision, or lack of vision,” he added. “In a lot of my work, there are things like obstructions or things that float. They help to tell my story.”

His story goes far beyond this physical challenge. Weston’s battles with AIDS and a rare form of cancer left him doubtful that he would ever see 58.

In 1991, when Weston was 31, he was diagnosed with AIDS, not knowing that he had been HIV positive.

Over the course of three years, his immune system became impaired. He had pneumonia three times, developed lesions all over his body and, perhaps worst of all, suffered failing eyesight, which threatened his career as a fashion photographer.

“My life depended on my vision,” he said. “I loved my work. Being a fashion photographer was a really neat job. But I felt miserable. All I wanted to do was go off into the corner of the studio and take a nap because I felt so awful. But I couldn’t.”

“With my vision going, too, I was really at the end of my rope,” he said. “My doctors said I had less than six months to live. My brother invited me to live with him in California. I came out here from Chicago basically to die.”

But then things turned around. Researchers developed new medication, and Weston began having hope.

And he became determined to learn to navigate life as a blind person, including finding a way to continue his photographic work.

He started using a large scanner, against which he would press his face and other objects, like tinsel and foaming glass cleaner, to create images that would represent his distorted vision.

“I was looking for a medium that was photographic but that could show some of the things I was trying to represent regarding my vision,” he said.

Some of the works that represent the disability were on display in the recent Artist Council exhibition at the Huntington Beach Art Center, where Weston teaches photography classes.

Then in 2008, just after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a master of fine arts degree, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called pseudomixoma peritoneal. He was told, once again, that his chances of surviving were dismal.

Weston’s sister, after seeing a psychic, told him that he would survive if he surrounded himself in nature. So he took up landscape photography.

The work was featured in a solo show called “Seasons in a Prayer Garden” in 2010 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

Above all, Weston, who was declared to be in remission last year after a series of surgeries that took out abdominal tumors, said art is therapeutic for him.

He hopes that when people see his work, they become more open-minded about people with disabilities.

“One of the things I enjoy about art is the fact that it’s a really good way of communicating,” he said. “I think any good art is something that makes a person think outside the box. I want to expand people’s ideas and concepts of how they can think about certain thing, like disabilities, and really think about the fact that there are ways of still achieving and creating even when you have a disability. You’re not completely locked out from creativity.”