After reading this article in the Guardian about the glasses for the poor, it got me thinking about how vision affects so many fundamental things in our lives and shapes us into who we are, especially as artists.

I had always taken it for granted that I, as an “artistic type,” was simply wired differently from the rest of the world. But how much of my personality and even my artistic vision was rooted in my bad eyesight?

I inherited my mother’s myopia. For as long as I can remember, the details at a distance had always a blur, but colors and shapes have always fascinated me. As a young child, I used to punch the bottoms out of dixie cups, and walk around staring through it, fascinated at how the edges of the cup framed the world like a cool 60s-era rounded-cornered TV screen.

I once got a glass prism for Christmas, and spend the next week walking around in a rainbow funhouse world, with the prism in front of my eyes, bumping into furniture, pretending I was walking on the ceiling, until I dropped the prism so many times that it finally broke.

By the time I got to school, I became terribly self-conscious about the fact that I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the room, or recognize a classmate walking towards me from down the hall. To hide what I considered an embarrassing physical defect, I would pretend to be lost in thought so as not to have to acknowledge the blurred faces coming towards me in the hall, or doodle on the margins of my school papers to avoid squinting at the blackboard I couldn’t read. I got a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses at age 10, but in my mind, the social stigma of those glasses was almost worse than being seen an introverted eccentric with drawing skills.

In junior high, still refusing to wear my glasses full time, I discovered that if I made a tiny peephole of light with my hand, or pulled back the edge of my eyelid into a squint, it refracted the light in such a way that I could read the blackboard! It was a great discovery. Finally, a way to see things at a distance without looking like a 4-eyed nerd! That illusion came to a screeching halt when my 7th grade history teacher actually called me out in class for doing this… the kids all laughed and I died a thousand deaths.

When I was 15, I finally broke down and asked my parents to get me contacts. Although I felt that I was admitting defeat (I actually cried at the thought of having to depend on corrected vision for the rest of my life), I quickly got over it when I saw how dramatically my life improved. I felt so much more normal and in touch with the rest of the world after that, although some might argue that the damage was already done by then.

As it turns out, a huge number of artists, just like over half of the world’s population, suffer from vision disorders. Many of the impressionist painters were nearsighted, and exploited the blur of uncorrected myopia in their work. (Note: I am not comparing myself to the impressionist painters in any way other than my poor eyesight!) It’s rumored that Van Gogh suffered from (among other things) xanthopsia, which causes the world to look more yellowed and makes glare and halos appear. Degas had retinopathy, which forced him to work indoors to avoid the painful glare… the controlled lights in the theatre were where he found his relief. Monet had cataracts, and Rembrandt’s visual aging is reportedly what made his later paintings lack the detail and color clarity of earlier work.

I once read a fascinating story from Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars called “The Case of the Colorblind Painter.” It’s a case study of a painter who suffers brain damage in a car accident and loses his ability to see colors– a condition know as cerebral achromatopsia. His eyes were fine, but his brain couldn’t interpret the signals from his eyes, so everything appeared black and white. Human skin looked “rat-colored” to him (which caused quite a bit of marital distress), and food was all gray and disgusting. He would close his eyes when he ate to avoid looking at “black” tomatoes.) He started painting things in greyscale and with weird colors, which actually helped his career by taking it in a startling new direction. Over time, he got used to seeing the world that way, and when doctors eventually discovered a way to restore his color vision, he opted not to have the operation, saying he was afraid he couldn’t handle the “visual distraction” of color.

Jay Lonewolf Morales is a painter who suffers from congenital monochromacy, complete colorblindness… but he has used that disability to his advantage. He paints very vivid colors that he only sees as shades of grey. Jay turns the lights off and sets candles alight on either side of his canvas, using the reflections and movement of the shadows from the candlelight, painting through texture to create his artworks with blobs of paint, melted wax and pieces of wire mesh. Interestingly, he says he cries every time he paints because he can’t see the bright colors. (I always figured that if you never knew it, how could you miss it?)

Our eyes are our windows to the world. I guess it is logical that if your eyes don’t work like everyone else’s, you’re going to have a very different view on it. Thank goodness for the weirdos, making this world a much more interesting place.