Filtering the situations I find myself facing in the real world through the lens of the magical realist and the surrealist has been crucial in recovering from the sense of paralysis and defeat I felt after my visual impairment took hold in my everyday life. I needed to feel that there was more to this world. What I once thought were the most important things that I just could not live without were being taken away from me.
Reanalyzing my life through my artwork helped me see that I still had cause to be grateful. I still had enough eyesight to do my art. Of course, I had to change the way I worked.
My visual limitations caused me to use the surface of my canvases as a study in expanding the world both inside and outside my head. Looking at it magically, as Remedios Varo and Odilon Redon did, gave me the feeling that I was now on an adventure into new undiscovered worlds. And in the smooth sweep of Dali’s surrealistic dreamscapes, I found a new expanse of space where I could juxtapose opposing thoughts and feelings to cast a different sort of light upon my situation, to bring about new harmonies that had been invisible to me as a fully sighted person.
This helped me change and grow my perceptions. What could be more magical, and more real, than to find and kick up the sparks of the divine expanse within my illusions of devastation?
