Do artists give up at losing natural ability?

Does deficiency in physical ability prevent Artists from creating art? Experiences have proven that losing something, someone or certain ability are never reasons for giving up when motivation and passion exist.

Deaf and music: Many experiences have proven that Deaf people can feel the Music. In Health News, Nov. 28, 2001, Heather Whitestone won the Miss America pageant in 1995. Many people were amazed at how graceful she moved to the music while she was deaf. A study explained how she and so many hearing-impaired people could enjoy music. Dean Shibata, MD, found that deaf people can sense vibrations in the same part of the brain that others use for hearing. Shibata studied 10 students with profound hearing loss from birth and compared them to 11 hearing people. His study was completed at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York. Each person was asked to tell the researchers when they could detect a vibrating pipe in their hands. At the same time, brain scans were done to pick up signals being transmitted to the brain. Shibata found that when the deaf people felt the vibrations, some areas in the brain were responsible for hearing and showed activity.

Shibata presented his findings at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. "These findings suggest that the experience, deaf people have, when 'feeling' music is like the experience other people have when hearing music, and the perception of the musical vibrations by the deaf is likely every bit as real as the equivalent sounds, since they are ultimately processed in the same part of the brain," he says. Shibata believes that surgeons should be careful when performing brain surgery on a deaf person since the "hearing" area of the brain clearly has a function. He also says that this study suggests it may be helpful to expose deaf children to music early in life so that the "music centers" in their brain may be stimulated to develop.

Visual Artists: The above deficiency is no different from blind artists. We have long list of known blind Artists such as: Giovanni Gonnelli, a blind Italian sculptor of the 1600s, Michael A. Williams is a painter living in Memphis, Tennessee. The artist has an eye disorder called Stargardt's Disease and Eşref Armağan is a Turkish artist born without eyes.

Arthur Ellis is a totally blind artist in the UK who lost his sight due to meningitis. He tries to represent the visual hallucinations he experiences as a result of Charles Bonnet Syndrome - a consequence of his sightless. Keith Salmon is a visually impaired artist working in Ayrshire, Scotland. Michael Naranjo a blind Native American sculptor lost eyesight in battlefield in Vietnam. John Dugdale is a photographer who has lost most of his eyesight to CMV retinitis. Sergej Popolsin is a Russian painter who after he had studied at the College of Arts in Irkutsk, Russia - lost in 1990 his eyesight to the full extent as a cause of serious head injury. The artist is now living and working in Vienna, Austria and showing his paintings at successful exhibitions in a various of European countries. Pranav Lal is an Indian photographer who is blind since birth.John Bramblitt is a painter working in Denton, Texas who lost his sight due to epilepsy.

No wonder why there are some organizations support blind artists! Some of those organizations are the “Blind Artists Society”, USA, Ann Roughton is a landscape artist suffering from Macular Degeneration. Her paintings not only include what she sees with her partial vision, but also includes the grey haze that she sees in the center of her vision because of her Macular Degeneration. In doing so, she is literally painting sight and giving a new perspective on sight loss. Impressively enough, that blind people can perceive a level of light and form by applying this limited vision and create intelligible art. A woman who is not completely blind but severely impaired, when sculpting something, finds it easier to close her eyes to feels the material and the shape rather than seeing them with her imperfect vision. Isn’t what most artists, with normal visions, do? They realize that the importance of touch and feeling, when doing so, can create lively art on empty lifeless canvas.

There are also, artists color blind or color deficient, such as the famous painter Vincent van Gogh, Charles Meyron, Mark Zuckerberg as well Claude Monet who had cataracts and was losing the ability to tell his color apart. Such artists have opened a world of black and white art and photos.

There are artists who can turn black to white and negative to positive to make life meaningful and enjoyable. I hope that you are one of them and hope you have found this research inspiring.