Blind Painter John Bramblitt: Painting in the Dark

Joeita Gupta:
I am Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. Art is never just a representation of the world. Art is moreover an interpretation and a re-imagining of the world around us. This is why the idea of a blind visual artist isn't all that surprising. Granted, at first glance it seems a little odd. How can someone who can't see possibly represent the world on canvas?
Colour is not just seen. It can also be felt. Some artists see colour when they hear sound. The rigid lines between our senses and perceptions isn't so rigid after all. Although we most often look at art, that too from a distance, it's possible to experience art more fully by engaging other senses besides vision. Today we discuss art and perception. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm joining you from the Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. I'm wearing a shirt with a round neck and it has short sleeves and it's sort of a greenish turquoise colour, depending on the light.
In today's episode, we are talking to yet another blind painter. I had such a great conversation with Clark Reynolds that it left me wanting more. I'm really delighted to welcome John Bramblitt to the program. John is an award-winning blind visual artist. He is also the author of the book, Shouting in the Dark. John is joining us today from Denton, Texas where he lives with his family. Hello, again, John. It's so great to have you on the show. I'm really pumped that you could join us today.

John Bramblitt :
Well, hi there. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Joeita Gupta:
All right, I'm going to skip over the, "Oh my God, you are blind and you paint?" Bit, because I'm sure you get asked. There's a lot of surprise when that happens because I know there are a number of people. I've myself have talked to about three or four people who are blind and they do visual arts. So I've gotten over the surprise of it. I find that for each person that I talk to, their process is very different. So I'm going to start there. How do you go about painting as someone who is blind?

John Bramblitt :
Well, I started over 20 years ago. I lost my eyesight in college, but I had done art all my life. So before I lost the eyesight, I could do the blueprints for houses and I could draw portraits and all these different things. Then in college when I lost the eyesight, you start learning how to do everything in new ways and you learn how to eat, how to cook, how to read and write in new ways, just everything. One of the main things though is how to get around, how to navigate the world, how to get around your room or a city. I started learning how to use the white cane. Then later a guide dog, my guide dog, Eagle is snoring underneath me right now.
After about a year, I could leave my little college apartment and I could travel the short distance to the university and do it by myself. Up till then I would have a sighted guide. So I thought, well, good grief, if I can travel by myself and do this, then maybe I can travel across a canvas. When I first started, there wasn't really... Blind painters wasn't a thing. There was a guy in Turkey, there was me, there might've been a couple of others that we didn't know about. So I thought I was out of my mind. I thought this was just a crazy thing. This was 20-something years ago.
I started navigating across the canvas the same way that I navigate across the city, using lines that I can touch and feel. So I started coming up with techniques for people without vision to be able to draw and coming up with lots of them and in different ways to handle colour. I've trained hundreds, if not thousands of visually impaired people to paint over the years.

Joeita Gupta:
So what is your technique? You'd have to excuse me because I love asking these nitty-gritty questions. Would you put down paint or how exactly do you actually know where you're applying paint on the canvas?

John Bramblitt :
Through touch, really. So when I first started I would have paint that was really thick, so I would have giant thick lines. It's the same way if you're using a cane, you can fill the sidewalk, you could feel the cracks, you got all this texture. Well, it's the same with a painting. I could draw lines that I could touch and feel. Over the years though it's changed a little bit.
So I have different ways that I can draw. So I have some techniques now that I can use lines that aren't raised, but they just feel different. They might be tacky or they're slick or they just feel different than the area around them. That makes it where it's opened up lots of techniques. 2017, I became the world's first blind muralist and I started doing murals in New York, Dallas, painted a 737. With all these, I had to use different sorts of techniques.
Then I couldn't use the giant thick lines that I used to use, because you would fall off the building, it just wouldn't work. That was one of the things, I love that about art though, is that it's about what you can do. It doesn't matter what you can't do, it just doesn't even enter the equation. So you have a problem. Either there's something that you want accomplish or you want to do, and you just find different techniques to work in that problem. I'm just fascinated by art. It's just incredible. Every day is different with it.

Joeita Gupta:
So how much art do you do in a day? If you say that every day is different, how much time do you devote to art in a day and how can one day be different from the other?

John Bramblitt :
I'd paint at least eight hours a day, but usually it's more like 14. I have a gallery studio that I work in and I have a home studio, which I'm in right now. So I'm going to leave here in my home studio. I've been painting all night and I'm going to go up and paint in my gallery and I'll paint all day. So actually we'll probably be painting until about 2:00 AM tonight there because we're having some event. I invite people into my studio to paint. That's one of the things that makes it different.
In my studio, it's a space for people to come in and make art as well, and they can paint with me or we can do different things. So having other people come in and sharing their experiences and seeing how they make art. I learn every day that I'm talking to other artists and working with other artists and I'm always trying out new techniques. So every day is a little different. Every day is, it's just wonderful. With art, you're never an expert with it. There's always something that there is to learn. There's always something to try. It's something that just fail at, there's lots and lots of mistakes, lots of failures with it. That's the wonderful thing.

Joeita Gupta:
Wait, you said you want to fail at art? Because I know of a lot of artists who are really, I don't want to say that they're hard on themselves. No, wait, I do want to say that they're hard on themselves. They don't want to fail. They want the perfect masterpiece. Here you are saying failing is a good thing. What's going on there?

John Bramblitt :
Well, when I first started I didn't like failing at all. It's funny, if you're not failing from time to time, then you're probably not trying enough new things. You're in a rut. You're just sort of doing the same thing over and over. In art, my favourite part of my home studio, I have a big rack that's right in front of me, behind the camera, I call it the Rack of Shame because it's paintings that were so bad, I couldn't even use the canvas anymore. They're just the texture, it's too thick and it's all crazy. With every one of them though, I learned something.
I love art, I love learning about art and with every one of those I have a lesson that I learned. It pushed me to be better at something and it pushed me to try different techniques. The thing that I love about painting is actually the act of painting. My favourite painting, it's always the painting that I'm working on because it's the one that's taking me out of myself. When I'm painting, I'm not thinking about the future. I'm not worried about the past. I'm in the moment and I'm learning in the moment. Even when I have a failure, it's getting me a step closer to where I want to be. So if I do a painting and it works, then that's great. It's a success. If I don't, then I'm still a step closer to where I want to be. So either way I'm getting there.

Joeita Gupta:
They say about writers that if you want to be a good writer, you have to be a reader. So I would wonder if in order to be a good painter or to evolve as a painter, you need to be exposed to other people's artwork. Is that something that you struggle with as someone who delves with visual art, that while your art may be accessible to a sighted audience, you may not have the same level of access as a blind patron of the arts to the work of other artists that most of the audience is able to see? Is that something that you struggle with or do you take it in stride?

John Bramblitt :
I don't really struggle with this, but it's such a great point though that you made, because that's something that I've been working at for about 15 years. I work with museums, so I've worked with the Metropolitan, I work with the Guggenheim, the Kennedy Center, I'm on staff with the Kennedy Center. I work with museums all over the country and have for about 15 years helping them become more inclusive and making it so that anyone that comes into the museum can access the art.
I'm fortunate because I've been doing that since college really, I was still in college doing that. I get to touch a lot of artwork. I get to touch some van Gogh's and Monet's and have it verbally described to me. So I'm really lucky with that. It's something that I've worked really hard at making sure that there's access for everyone so that whenever you come in, there's things for people to engage all of the senses. Like the multimodal programs, multi-sensory, are something that I started coming up with and working with years and years ago. It's spread all over the country and people are teaching it all over the country.
So that wherever you go in, if you ever go to a workshop, to a museum and you're touching things, you're smelling things and you're going around, that's something that we started years ago and we just have been doing it and teaching it. We've been working with museums all over the world really to do this. The incredible thing about it is that you can go to a conference and you can teach a whole room full of museum curators, these techniques, and they're free. It's just information. It's like, oh, well, when you're doing a tour, you should have a really good verbal description. I mean, you should have some things for people to touch, things for people to smell.
I've done workshops in museums where maybe we're covering art and dance, and so I'll actually have dancers come in and dance so everybody can see them or hear them and they'll explain the movements. We'll try to incorporate sculpture into the artwork. So we'll find sculpture in the museum that mimics some of the paintings so that if you're visually impaired, you can feel the cubist designs or you can feel the different types of art. So then whenever it's described in the painting, you have that tactile memory, maybe not exactly what that painting looks like, but the style and just trying to make things more accessible.
So maybe a struggle is a good word, maybe, but that's been my favourite thing. I'm a studio artist. Mostly what I do is I get paid, I do work on commissions, I do murals. My absolute favourite thing, the icing on the cake, is actually travelling and going, giving talks and working with museums and working with schools and actually getting around and bringing art to people. The best experience I have is whenever I go in, in a room of people with disabilities or people without vision to bring art and they're painting for the first time or drawing for the first time. It's like this light bulb that's going off and it's just incredible. I don't know. It's my favourite thing.

Joeita Gupta:
Are people self-conscious? I'm thinking about sighted people who might take your workshops, and you'll forgive me if the assumption is wrong, that the majority of the people you work with, I mean I'm sure they're visually impaired people and people with disabilities, but a lot of people are actually sighted who might be introduced to your way of making art. Maybe they have a blindfold on or what have you.
Do people feel self-conscious about the idea that they're actually painting without seeing? Because that idea about staring at the canvas and painting is so deeply rooted in our imagination that I think of many... Again, I'm conjecturing here. I suspect many blind people wouldn't even take up painting because it's, or visual art because it's such a deeply entrenched idea that you have to be able to see in order to paint. Of course you're debunking it every day.

John Bramblitt :
Oh my goodness. Well, when I first started, I really thought I was out of my mind because there weren't blind painters. It wasn't a thing. Art had always been why I grew up and I had a lot of health problems. I was born with epilepsy, that developed to severe epilepsy and had kidney problems and had to have the kidney removed by the time I was seven and ended up getting Lyme's disease and these massive seizures where it was making my heart stop and my breathing stop. That's what I lost about 40% of my hearing and all of my vision and then some other little neurological problems. Art though, growing up, I think I could draw before I could walk. Art was just my way of dealing with all of that.
If I was having a bad day or if I was in the hospital, drawing was my way of dealing with that. It made a bad day better. Art is a great way to celebrate a good day. So bad day or good day, I drew every day. I think I could draw before I could walk. I drew every day all the way up until I lost my eyesight. Then I didn't think I'd ever be able to draw again until about a year later I started using those cane techniques and started figuring it out. I really thought I was out of my mind. I thought this was just crazy. I just had to do something. I was so angry and I was so depressed, and I just needed art. I never thought anybody would ever see a painting of mine. It wasn't even a thought. I needed to be able to get out of that depression.
I was so surprised whenever I did my first shows, I didn't tell people I was visually impaired. I would hang the shows. I just wanted to meet other artists. I wanted to meet other people that was just as obsessed with art as I am. I think about it all day. I dream about it at night. I did. I was able to meet other artists, but the shows actually did really well. Then it got out that I was visually impaired. Then some stories got written.
That's when the workshops started because when some stories started to be written in the newspapers and on TV, I started to be contacted by some different nonprofits and charities saying, "Oh, can you come and talk to our people? Can you do a workshop?" So I started doing that and I started meeting people that had all sorts of challenges, different types of disabilities, vision loss, but also hearing and autism and Alzheimer's and soldiers with PTSD.
I started realizing that everybody in their life has some sort of challenge that's bigger than they are. Sometimes you need help with it. So the blindness that didn't make me different than everyone else, it made me just like everybody. Everybody has something that they need help with. I think with the workshops, I think people get that. The workshops are always so much fun. I paint with tens of thousands of people now.
My favourite is the Blindfold Workshop. We came up with that about, gosh, I don't know, 17 years ago or something. I don't know when, but it's something I still teach. We're just laughing. Everybody's laughing. 99% of the people I do workshops with are sighted. They don't have a disability. My favourite are that 1%, but I mean, I'm not dissing anybody that's not the blind or doesn't have a disability, but I love that.
I find it to be really, really interesting. It seems like it opens people's eyes to what disability can be and what is vision loss. I travel with my guide dog, Eagle, and she's amazing. So I travel very well with her. Then we're in there and I tell people how I paint using touch and how I distinguish colour by using texture. I find line using line touch and people go, "Okay, that sounds weird, but that makes sense, I guess."
Then we blindfold them and in five or 10 minutes they're also painting. Then there's this aha moment where they go, "Oh," they get it. "Oh, I can feel where the lines are. I can feel what the paint is, and I can feel the red feels different than the blue," because we add these different additives to it. So it's just, it clicks to them and suddenly their idea, their vision of what it means to have a disability, of what it means to have vision loss completely changes.
I've done workshops where there was this one workshop in, gosh, I don't remember where actually, but it was in Idaho maybe. I went out in the hallway to get some water and a mom and her sisters were there. Their daughter was in the workshop too. They had a daughter that's about maybe 10 or 11 years old. The mom and the sister were out in the hall crying. I was like, "Oh my goodness, what's happened now?" [inaudible 00:17:39] I was like, "Is everything okay?" They said, "We're just so happy."
That her daughter, the niece of the others was painting, and they said that they had just been in mourning because she had lost her eyesight. They were in mourning because they just didn't see what kind of future she would be able to have. Now she's in the other room and she's actually painting. They said it just opened up a whole new future for them, what is possible. They just had to leave the room. It's just the power of art. It's incredible. It can draw you out of yourself.

Joeita Gupta:
Draw you out of yourself. That's very clever. I see what you did there. How do you decide on a subject? What are your sources of inspiration as an artist?

John Bramblitt :
Oh, my goodness. I meet the best people. I really do. I don't know what it is. I'm just so lucky that I meet amazing people and I love to incorporate them into my artwork. So in most of my artwork, it's people that I meet. I'll feel their faces, or my friends. So most of my friends will end up in my paintings, a lot of crowd scenes or just different friends and people that I meet or that are in the crowd. Even if it's the back of their head, it's the back of their head that I know. I know that's Paul, I know that's whoever.
I had a friend that, a new friend, that I felt his face the other day, and he has a swirly, twirly kind of mustache, one of those big, curly mustaches. I thought, "Oh, my goodness, he's going to have to end up in a painting." I did a painting of the Mad Hatter. So I used his face as the Mad Hatter's face. Music, whenever I hear music, I see colour.

Joeita Gupta:
Yes.

John Bramblitt :
That's led to when I painted the 737, that was actually because it was for the Rock in Rio concert, and they wanted me to paint a 737 to promote the concert. It was because when I hear music, I see colour. They were like, "Well, paint whatever you want. We'll give you all the music that's going to be at the concert and go crazy." I said, "Well, I can do that. I can go crazy."

Joeita Gupta:
There's a term for that condition where people can see colour when they hear sound. It's escaping my mind.

John Bramblitt :
Oh, it's synesthesia.

Joeita Gupta:
There you go. There you go. Thank you. Clearly one of us is in the know. You alluded to the possibility before of incorporating some dance into art. How involved are you with multimedia forms of art? Are you sticking more to the paint on canvas traditional route?

John Bramblitt :
I mostly paint traditionally on canvas, although tonight at my gallery, we have [inaudible 00:20:12] swing dancers that are coming in. So they're going to dance and they're going to pose and people can come in and sketch them and paint them and take photographs. I love that though because even though I use just paint on canvas, that's my jam and my one trick pony, it's the only thing that makes sense to my brain.
I love though to be able to incorporate the music and gesture and all the different experiences that you've had in life. When you're living life, you're using all of your senses. A lot of times with painting, we just think about it as the visual arts, but really they say art imitates life. In order to do that, you should use all the senses. The more of yourself you could put into your art, the more you get out of it.
So tonight I'm really interested in what costumes they're wearing, what sort of music's going to be playing. I have a DJ that's coming in that's going to play whatever they want. So I'm curious what they want. The other artists that are there, because they also add to the experience. They chose things.
So I'm not really a multimedia artist in that I don't put a lot of different things on my canvas, but I love to be exposed to a lot of different things. So tonight I'm hoping that we'll have lots and lots of artists with different ideas and doing things that I never would've thought of. I don't know. I'm very excited. So I don't know if that's a good answer.

Joeita Gupta:
Hey, it's an answer. No, listen, I only asked this because I just a few weeks ago had an interview with Clark Reynolds, who's also a blind artist, but he works with braille dots as his artistic medium. Have you ever thought about embracing braille in your artwork?

John Bramblitt :
I do. I've done some of that. I've done some sculptural braille dots where I did a show in Kansas last October that was benefiting a school for the blind. So I came up with a painting style where you can feel the painting, but if you're visually impaired, you can access the painting, but if you're sighted, you can access. Then it also had braille dots that I coloured and I painted and that I had all around the gallery.
I've done some paintings where I'll have braille dots coming out of it. I don't do that very often. Every once in a while I'll do that because if it serves the purpose, if it fits what I'm trying to say in the painting, I'll do that. A lot of times, the way that I paint, it's more realistic. The colours are crazy because the colours come from music, but the lines are realistic.
That stems from whenever I first lost my eyesight, it seems like when you're blind, a lot of times sighting people don't know what you understand. I mean, it's almost like they feel like you've been hit on the head. So a family member can walk into the room and they'll say, "Oh, it's your Aunt So-and-So." You're like, "I know it's you. I've heard your voice my entire life. I know it's you," but because you're blind, they just don't know what you understand.
So when I started painting, I wanted to paint in a realistic sort of way so people would see it. I didn't think anybody would ever see a painting, but my family, my friends that saw it would say, "Oh, you know what? John's still in there. He still understands. He still knows." The paintings were very simple at first, very rudimentary. It took years to learn how to come up with techniques to be able to shade, to be able to mix colours, to be able to do all of that. At least the drawings were rudimentary accurate in a way. So even today, I still draw in more of a realistic sort of way because I want to express what it is that I'm viewing in my mind, but the colours and all the emotions, and it's probably getting a little more abstract as time goes on.

Joeita Gupta:
My experience with painting is very limited compared to yours. I stopped painting around just about when I was a teenager because I lost my vision and I never really thought about taking it up again because I'd lost my vision. You used the word mourning and feeling a sense of loss around not being able to paint anymore. I think that really resonated with me.
One of the things I remember when I was painting is that what I was told was, "Your drawings are excellent. The sketches were excellent," but where I would get into trouble as someone who couldn't see is I couldn't colour within my own sketch. So what they started to do was they would take my sketch and have somebody else fill in the colours.
You could probably identify with this because my sketches were a lot more detailed because I was relying on touch. I would feel the human face. So I just didn't do the cartoon, two eyes, stick nose kind of face. I actually knew what a human face felt like, and that's what I put down on the sketch and people were really impressed with that.
I didn't like that somebody else was colouring my paintings. One of the ways in which I got around this was doing black and white paintings, which seemed to work a lot better for me as someone who couldn't see. Do you find black and white paintings attractive because there's just two colours and there's a degree of simplicity? Or do you find them challenging because with black and white paintings you inevitably have to do shadows and things like that? What's your take on that?

John Bramblitt :
Oh, my goodness. I love black and white paintings, and that's a wonderful technique, and that's so great that you did that. That's a really old technique that painters would use a hundreds of years ago, that if you can do a grayscale or black and white painting, you are only having to think about the grayscale. So you can add colours later to it. You can add thin colours over it, but it's a way where you're only having to think about the value. So the lightness and darkness of something.
When I first started painting, I couldn't blend colours. I couldn't do any of that either. So I didn't do any of that. I had black, white, and red. I started with those three colours. So all my colours are black, white, and red. Never did they ever blend. It was just black, white, or red. Then it went on from there.
So I would add other colours until I had about 12 or 14 colours, but my paintings looked more like stained-glass in the beginning. So I started working out ways where I could draw lines I could feel where I started blending. Pardon me. Gosh, I got real excited, I guess.
I started blending colours, but I would draw a line in the middle so I would know, well, I have the deepest blue here and the lightest blue's going to be over here. I would draw a line that I could fill in the middle knowing, well, the median blue needs to be right here with this line in is, so that I would start mixing the paint saying, oh, this much-mixed paint mixed with this much will do it. It's just little techniques. Yes, that is a wonderful way.
Actually, I have a black-and-white painting down here that I'm working on, and it's a technique that I use today even. PBS is coming to my studio on Monday and Tuesday to film, so I'm doing some paintings for them. I need to do the colour kind of quick. Doing the black and white and the gray is a wonderful way to be able to work out a composition and then later you can go in.
I think it's so wonderful that you mentioned that too, because I paint a certain way. I've come up with a lot of different ways for people to paint, but I paint a certain way. Every artist finds their own way. I think that's... The difference between that, between a sighted person and a non-visual person is that there is no difference. Every painter I've ever met always has their own way.
There's so little difference really between a sighted painter and a visually impaired painter. If you're a sighted painter, you're going to look at the canvas with your eyes and know where you are, and you can look and see where you've been. If you're visually impaired, you've probably used your sense of touch to be able to navigate, to get around the room. You're touching, you're trailing. So you're also going to use that on the canvas to be able to touch and feel and you can feel every line that you've made on your painting. The more lines that you put, the more information that's there.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, John, I'm just looking at the clock. Well, actually, I'm not looking at the clock. I have a screen reader and it's prompting me to say that it is time for us to go. I am very blue to let you go. Sorry, had to do that. It was great chatting with you. Thank you very much, and good luck on any future projects and exhibitions that you're working on.

John Bramblitt :
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate that so much and good luck with you and your art and everything.

Joeita Gupta:
Thank you very much. You've really inspired me. John Bramblitt is a blind visual artist who also paints murals. I'll have to have John back because I want to spend a whole episode talking just about murals and how he goes about doing that. That's a conversation for a future day. I do have to wrap it up today. We'll put the ways to contact us for your feedback in the description box down below. So I hope you will drop us an email or give us a call. You can find all of that in the description down below.
I'm going to say thank you to a couple of people who make the show possible. Matthew McGurk is our videographer for today. Marc Aflalo is our technical producer. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for AMI-audio podcast, and Andy Frank is the manager for AMI-audio. I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.