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Meet The Blind Man Who Creates Amazing Paintings

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9 years ago

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Apr 07, 2015 03:10am EDT

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Justine Chen

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Losing the sense of sight should be very devastating for an artist. I mean, how can you draw, let alone do paintings without seeing what you’re doing? Losing his eyesight due to severe epilepsy should have ended John Bramblitt’s career but instead, it actually jumpstarted his brilliant work.

He was just starting to paint in 2001 when he became functionally blind as a result of the epilepsy. His eyes were only capable of differentiating sunlight and darkness, nothing more. He plunged into deep despair for a year after he went blind but his talent and determination made him discover a way to create paintings despite his handicap – he used textured paint. He made use of the raised lines as guide to place stuff in the canvas.

John Bramblitt went blind in 2001 due to complications from epilepsy

Photo credit: dentonrc

“Basically what I do is replace everything that the eyes would do for a sighted artist with the sense of touch,” John wrote on his website. “The raised lines take care of finding your placement on the canvas.”

The results were absolutely mind-blowing.

Walking among the trees

Looks like boats in the middle of colorful waters

How does he differentiate one color from the other, you may ask.

John said:

“All of the bottles and paint tubes in my studio are Brailled, and when mixing colors I use recipes. In other words I will measure out different portions of each color that I need to produce the right hue. This is no different than using a recipe to bake a cake.”

Wide-eyed

Ducks in a pond

“The first art shows that I did, I never told anyone that I was blind,” John recalled. “I didn’t tell people that I was blind not because I was ashamed, but because I didn’t want it to affect the way they perceived the art.”