Painting with Macular Degeneration

While learning more about print disabilities during this fellowship with Benetech I am also being exposed to some wonderful art:

A famous local artist, Virginia Doyle, has graciously lent her work to Benetech/Bookshare for display on conference room and hall walls.

The unique aspect of this display is that in 2002, Virginia was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a medical condition of the eye that makes it difficult or impossible to read or recognize faces.  This disease is a leading cause of blindness among older citizens due to the loss of light sensing cells in the retina.

Many view her work as representations of the world through the eyes and lens of a person with macular degeneration.  Viewers glimpse the world she sees and the gentle places she builds that represent love, nature, peace, and family.

Spring Field

A painting Virginia created while losing her vision of a photograph of her retina.

Virginia says, "Painting is a wonderful pastime!  A day will go by and I don't know it because I'm so happily involved."

Virginia painted as a young child in oil and acrylic and then moved on to watercolor, the most difficult of paint mediums, she laughingly declares.  "Watercolor is unforgiving.  You can't paint over your mistakes!"

Today her artwork climbs over boundaries for a more abstract point of view, as she borrows ideas and images from life as a sighted artist.  A self-taught artist, Virginia took lessons in all types of mediums from print making to silk screening, color theory, drawing, and to etching.  Her free-style art combines the brilliance of Latin America, a place she has lived and the subtle light reflections of French Impressionists, a style she admires. Her artwork is a mixture of colors, shapes, shadows, and form reflections that weave and dance off the canvas.

http://blog.bookshare.org/2010/06/23/through-virginia%E2%80%99s-eyes-%E2%80%93-painting-with-macular-degeneration/