(light music)
Welcome to "Hadley Presents."
I'm your host, Ricky Enger, inviting you to sit back,
relax, and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, artist John Bramblitt joins us
to share his story.
Welcome to the show, John.
Thank you so much for having me.
I've been looking forward to this.
Yes, me too. I've been really, really excited.
It's so great to have you on the show,
and you have this incredible list of accomplishments.
It's really impressive.
You know, you've gotten Presidential Service Awards.
You've written a book
and all sorts of really, really cool stuff.
But, you know, I always think it's more fascinating to,
rather than do this big introduction myself,
just to see what people like to highlight about themselves
when they introduce themselves.
So why don't you just tell us a little bit
about who you are?
I'm an artist and I'm a father,
and I'm a husband, and I'm totally blown away
about how life can go completely different
than how you would ever plan. (chuckles)
Oh my goodness.
I lost my eyesight when I was in college,
and I was fortunate because I had done art all my life.
Like I had drawn, I think I could draw before I could walk,
and, you know, in art was a way for me to deal
with bad times and good times.
And I was sick a lot as a child.
So, art was just my way of dealing with that.
And then whenever I lost my eyesight,
I thought art was gone.
You know, it left me forever, but life is so strange.
It just, you know, it comes back and you just,
you know, it's hard to make long-term plans. (chuckles)
You just never know what life's going to give you
but it's better I think to stick it,
to call some audibles and roll with it. (laughs)
You got that right.
So, you mentioned that you could draw before you could walk,
that was like your thing is drawing.
And then when you lost your vision,
you switched to painting.
So, can you talk about like what made painting appeal
to you more so than drawing after you lost your vision?
Or what was the transition like?
Whenever I started this, it was in 2001,
and there weren't really blind painters out there.
So, first off, I thought I was out of my mind.
I thought I had lost my mind.
You know, because I was a blind person,
I was learning how to use a cane.
I was going to classes at school,
but I would've to have someone guide me to the classes.
And, you know, in the idea that,
you know, there were no books, there were no classes
or anything on how to paint for a visually impaired person.
And I didn't know of any other blind painters.
I was pretty sure that whenever I let people know
that I was starting to paint that they would come after me
with a butterfly net or something, you know, they thought,
"Oh, John's finally lost it now..."
But, so I didn't really tell anybody,
it's was my little secret.
But the wonderful thing about paint though
is that you can touch and feel it.
And I'd always been such a visual person,
you know, I can look at something and I could draw it,
either with paint though, you can actually feel the lines
of the paint and the old way that I used to draw
with charcoal, and pencils, and pens and things,
that was wonderful but you couldn't feel the lines anymore.
So, I started experimenting with paint,
mixing different mediums in with the paint.
So that I could draw lines that were actually raised up
from the canvas so that I could touch and feel them.
And you know, one of the things that starts happening
whenever you lose your eyesight, is that you start learning
how to use your other senses to replace the work
that your eyes used to do.
And a big one for me, were my hands, you know,
and even like with a white cane or a guide dog,
like, I have a guide dog named Eagle
that's asleep right now down by my feet.
(chuckles) But the way that you use, you know a guide dog
or a white cane is through your sense of touch,
and there's different ways to be able to use your touch
to know where you are, to orient yourself, you know,
to know like where the door is, where a couch is,
where the curve is, and be able to navigate,
you know, a room, a city.
But I started learning this and I thought,
"Good grief, if I can use my sense of touch
to be able to leave my apartment and find the campus,
surely, I would be able to find my way
across a canvas again."
And during this time, you know, I'd always used art
to be able to deal with bad feelings.
You know, growing up, I had kidney problems.
I had to have a kidney removed by the time I was seven.
I had a severe epilepsy that just got worse
and had some neurological problems
and ended up getting white Lyme disease.
And I was just in and out of hospitals
all throughout my childhood,
but I don't know, I never felt disabled.
I never felt different or anything.
And a big part of that was my family.
But the other part was art.
'Cause, you know, if I had a bad day,
art made that day better,
that a good day, art was a great way to celebrate that day.
And that worked all the way up until college
until I lost my eyesight.
And I thought that I couldn't have art anymore.
But then when I started learning
how to use my sense of touch to replace what my eyes did.
It was just, you know, I don't want to say
that it was like a dramatic sort of thing, like, "Uh-huh,"
'cause it wasn't really that it sort of snuck in.
It was really slow.
It took a long time to learn how to draw again.
But I started getting hope back in my life.
I was so depressed, and I was incredibly angry.
I didn't even realize how angry and depressed I was,
but, you know, it was just what it was more
than I'd ever been.
I never experienced that much anger, depression.
And on the surface, I don't think I really seem that angry.
You know, my family, my friends,
everybody thought I was adjusting really well.
You know, I was learning braille,
I was learning screen readers, how to use computers.
Sewing on buttons without sticking yourself
with a needle too many times, (laughs)
you know, how to eat food without getting it all over you
and how to cook food.
Oh my goodness. I loved to cook.
But I had no idea as a sighted person,
how many sharp, pointy hot things there were
in the kitchen, you know?
So, you're learning how to redo everything in your life.
And also, I was an English major at school at the time,
and I was functionally illiterate then,
you know, because I couldn't see the paper
and I couldn't see to write.
So, I had to relearn how to do all that.
And I was just angry. Oh my goodness.
I would imagine, I mean,
there's a lot going on there
and for the main outlet that you usually had
to take out or let out those feelings
and express those feelings, was initially you didn't have
that anymore because it was such a visual thing, right?
So, there was a lot for you to learn and to go through
at the same time as you were learning
just to live daily life.
Were there things that you learned something
kind of in a daily living sort of way,
and then that transmitted itself to a way
that you handled getting art onto the canvas?
Or maybe vice versa, maybe you had a canvas technique
and you're like, "Oh, I could use that
to identify other stuff in my house as well."
You know, I did have an aha moment.
It had been about a year since I lost the last bit
of my vision and I was still a student at the university,
but I had finally learned how to use a white cane
and travel independently.
You know, I could leave my apartment
and I didn't need to have a sighted guide anymore.
I could just do it by myself. And I wasn't that good at it.
I was still kind of break out in a cold sweat
every time I crossed the street
'cause you're listening for engine sounds
and trying to listen if the car's going left or right,
all this weird stuff that I wasn't used to then,
but I was walking down the street and I was using my cane
to feel the sidewalk.
And with the cane, you can feel the smoothness
and roughness of the concrete.
You can feel the cracks in the concrete.
You can feel the grass on the side
or anything that's a little bit different.
And then when you come across a fire hydrant
or a tree, then that's a big marker, you know,
because there's only one place that particular tree is.
Or when you come to a cross streets,
there's only one place in the whole city
that those two streets cross.
So, when you hit that, you know exactly where you are
in the entire city and you're doing it through touch.
Now, you're holding onto the cane,
but the cane is just like an extension of your fingers.
So, you're just feeling around,
and use these different techniques to do it.
And I happened to think while I was walking one day,
you know, I thought, "Well, this curve is just like a line
running down through the city
and it's just hitting another line that's crossing it,
you know, another curve."
Now, I thought, "Well, my goodness
if I can touch these curves
and walk through this 3D sort of environment,"
you know, where there's people, there's cars,
there's motorcycles, all this stuff going on.
Surely, I could reproduce this on a canvas
and a much simpler way where there's no people or cars
(laughs) or motorcycles whizzing by.
And so that was sort of an aha moment for that.
And then it's funny, like, the more that
because I use what are called orientation
and mobility techniques and my painting,
that's the techniques you use for with a white cane
and with a guide dog.
Since I use those with my painting,
it means that whenever I'm walking around
or whatever I'm eating, or anything that I'm using,
I'm needing to use my sense of touch to orient myself.
It explodes. It's so much better.
The more I paint, the easier it is for me
to get around in the actual world.
And the more that I get around
in the actual world, the more it helps my painting.
And this is something that we've started teaching children
in schools for the blind all over the country.
And actually the US is sending us outside of the country
to go to other places.
And it's incredible because these children
will learn how to paint.
You know, this is first time in history,
you have non-visual, visual artists.
You have children who are visually impaired
actually learning how to paint
and it's affecting their life.
It's making it where they can get up from their chair.
They can walk around the room, they can do,
you know, whatever they want,
and they can do it independently.
And it's all because of art.
And I'm such a nerd.
I'm such a fan of art that it just,
every time I think about that,
it just gives me a warm feeling.
It's such an amazing connection
and one that doesn't immediately seem obvious,
but when you point it out, it certainly is
that if you're orienting yourself in space
within the world, or if you're using those same kind
of spatial techniques to orient yourself on the paper,
now you're starting to think about things
in relation to other things,
and this beautiful connection is born.
That's really, really cool.
It does make sense when you say it like that.
I wish I could say I was so smart
that I knew that would happen.
But I just thought I was crazy just doing some weird stuff,
you know, but life is kind of wonderful in a way
because it gave me what I needed,
you know, to be able to heal and feel better.
Can you talk about the techniques that you use
'cause you've kind of touched on this a little bit,
in that you are using your sense of touch
to determine what you've painted.
Can you talk a little about, I know that you mix colors
in certain ways and you do a few other things
just to enhance that tactile experience as your painting?
So how do you do that as a non-visual person?
And one thing a lot of people say when they look
at your paintings, "Oh, they're so vibrant and colorful."
So just talk about how you do that.
And I'll preface this saying that,
whenever you hear about
how I do it a lot of times people think,
"Oh, that sounds like, it's hard to do,
or it's difficult."
But one of the things I do,
I work with museums all over the country.
I work with the Metropolitan, Guggenheim,
dozens and dozens of museums.
And I do a workshop where I blindfold people
and I showed them how to paint the way that I paint.
And I do it in about five minutes.
And in about five or 10 minutes, everybody's painting,
and we're doing, like, cartoon sort of characters.
But it's funny though, because at the beginning of it,
people we're like, "Oh my goodness,
I don't think I can do that."
Then they get started in it and they go, "Oh!"
And it it clicks.
But the way that I paint though,
is by using my sense of touch to do the work
that my eyes used to do.
Whenever I draw, I always draw out my paintings first.
And I just use paint that I can touch and feel.
So, a lot of times I even draw on white paint,
on a white canvas.
So, it's hard for people to see it, but I can feel it,
so for me, it's perfect.
It's not going to interfere with the color later on.
But I just have to be able to feel it
and when I first started,
the lines had to be really, really thick,
and I could only draw very big things. (laughs)
So, I couldn't do a lot of detail.
There was no blending of color, there was no shading,
you know, but this is almost like 20 years ago.
So this, you know, was very simplistic.
If you were here with me in my studio right now,
you would look around the studio
and you would see paintings throughout the years.
And they started out very simplistic
with these giant raised lines.
But over time, the lines get smaller and smaller
because it's just like anything,
the more you do it, the better you get at it, you know,
I don't really need these giant thick lines anymore.
But color is the most fun now.
And I thought it was going to be the hardest thing
because how in the world do you pick colors,
and control colors, and mix colors if you can't see them?
I thought that just sounds crazy,
but it's actually really, really easy
and there's several ways to do it.
But the most fun way is by changing the way the color feels.
So, I'll take different mediums
and mix it in with the paint.
So, what a medium is, well, when you have paint,
like if you break paint down to the very basics,
you have the color, and then you have the stuff
that holds the color together, which is like the medium,
it's a sticky stuff.
But you can actually change that sticky stuff.
You can change the medium, you can make it looser,
you can make it runny, you can make it feel like water
or like satin, you can make it really thick
where it's like putty or even so, so hard and thick
that it's almost like stone, you've got a carving.
So, you've got this wonderful range of different textures
that you can use.
So, I can mix a medium into my white
to make it really thick and gummy,
where it feels almost like toothpaste.
So yeah, I've got this very, very thick white
that I can mix a different medium and with my black
and make it feel like oil.
So, it's really runny and it's really oily feeling.
And because I have these two colors on my palette
that are so different, if I touch the thick paint,
I know it's gotta be white.
There's no way it's black, you know,
so, it makes it really easy to know which color is which.
But if I want to mix the colors, it also helps with that.
Because if I want it gray halfway between the black
and the white, I just mix for the texture, the feel of it,
that's halfway between the way the white feels
and the black feels.
So, you know, it's a little thick, it's a little runny,
but it's right in the middle.
And then the color is also in the middle.
And then I can go from there.
If I want to half lighter than that, then I just go,
you know, I mix it for the half lighter for the texture.
So, and it actually gives you a really, really great way
to be able to control color in a very precise way.
Our hands are fantastic at being able to feel the detail.
We have over 200 touch receptors on the pad of each finger,
and their whole job is just to feel the viscosity of things
(laughs) and how thick and how thin they are.
So, you know, and they're there so that,
you know in life, we can touch things and move things around
without having to look at them all the time.
You know, if you think about it, you actually use this a lot
in your day-to-day life.
Like, if you're driving a car,
you're probably looking out the window,
you know, you're not looking at your hands on the wheel.
If you have a manual, you're not necessarily looking down
every time you shift it, or if you want
to turn the volume up or down,
you don't necessarily look over to the volume.
You can find it with your fingers, you can feel it,
you can feel the buttons that you want to push.
I have a 12-year-old son and he plays PlayStation,
Xbox, all that kind of fun stuff.
And the controllers, "Oh my goodness."
When I was a kid, you've got a controller
that had like two buttons on it,
(laughs) and that was it.
Yes, and now you got the bumpers
and triggers, right?
Covered in things. (laughs)
But he never looks at the controller.
You know, he's off in his own little world,
you know, doing things
and you learn how to be able to do that.
Or if you play a guitar, you know,
at first, you're looking at your fingers, making the chords,
and then after a while, you're not even thinking about it.
We do this all the time with our sense of touch.
I didn't know as a sighted person though,
that you could use your sense of touch
to replace your eyes and a lot of things.
And that came as a big surprise to me.
The more that I do it, the better I get at it.
It does for me now, what it did for me then,
every brush stroke that I make.
I'm not thinking about anything in the past.
I'm not worried about anything that I lost.
I'm also not concerned about anything in the future.
I'm not worried about, you know, I'm only thinking
about the paint on the end of that brush.
So, I'm living in the moment and it's just a wonderful,
wonderful feeling, you know, and I paint eight to 14 hours,
seven days a week.
For me, it's my way of living.
It's my way of saying, and it's my way of expressing myself.
So, you know, it's just been a wonderful gift.
Now, if I understand correctly
when the paint dries,
so once you've painted something and once it dries,
you aren't still able to feel that level of detail
that you have as you're actually creating the painting.
Is that right?
That's true.
Well, and it depends on the painting,
but most of the paintings that I do, one of the things
that I wanted to make sure when I started painting
was that I wanted my paintings to look like anybody
could have done them, you know, so that a sighted person
could have done the painting.
So even though I'm mixing all these mediums in with 'em,
I want it to look like a regular finished painting.
Part of the reason I started painting
was to let people know I'm still in here.
I can still do things, you know, I'm relevant.
Whenever you lose your eyesight,
sometimes you feel a little invisible.
And so, I just wanted to let people know,
"Hey, I'm here. I still understand things."
And it's funny because, you know, when the eyesight's gone,
people don't realize sometimes what you understand.
But, you know, it's funny,
like if your aunt comes in the room
and you've known her your entire life and you know,
and you haven't been blind that long,
but she comes in the room, you can hear talking
to your cousins and the rest of your family.
And then she comes, you know it comes over and says,
"Hi, John, I'm your Aunt Donna." You know?
Right, as if you would suddenly
forget somehow. (laughs)
I lost my eyesight.
I didn't get it in my head, Donna, but thanks so much.
I'm going to give her a big hug. (laughs)
You know, but then on the other hand,
there might be a commercial on TV
and there's like explosions and people running.
And you know, you ask, "What in the heck was that about?"
So, you do miss things,
but I wanted to let people know I was still me in there.
So, whenever the paint does dry,
it feels mostly like any painting
that anybody could have done.
It's when it's wet that it really kind of helps me.
Although there are some paintings where I use a lot
of texture in that remains.
There's some paintings, if I know the people
with visual impairments are going to be seeing the painting,
then I'll make sure to leave raised lines
and I'll try to make it more texturally interesting.
And the new series that I'm working on right now
is some of the most textured stuff I've ever done
in my life.
So that brings up the question for me then
if you're not intentionally adding a lot of texture
to the finished product, and you don't feel the paint
once it's dry, you know, when you're painting,
it's sort of this method of expressing yourself.
And once that's done, has it served its purpose
or are you able to enjoy your work once it's done?
Like, do you talk with somebody else about,
"Hey, describe this painting that I did three years ago.
I want to kind of revisit what that was like."
You know, what's funny, I'm kind of weird in that.
And I remember my paintings really, really, really well.
It is strange that I can't go back
and feel parts of them sometime,
but the little bits that I can feel it's enough
to trigger it and remind me, like,
"Oh, this is this step and that's that step."
But whenever I do a painting, now I have to come up
with different steps that I'm going do it in
because I have to be able to touch it,
you know, to know what I did and to make sure
that I'm where I think I am.
So, at first it was sort of easy.
I had very two dimensional,
like very, like, one-layer paintings,
so, I could do one drawing and that was good
for the painting.
But now though, I may do tons of drawings on a painting,
so I may do a drawing
and then that actually gets covered up with paint.
I may do a wash or a tint on it.
And then, I'll do a different drawing
that that gives me new lines to feel
for the next part of the painting, you know,
and then that might get covered up.
And then I'll do another drawing (laughs)
for the next part of the painting.
And then, so that all gets covered up.
But, you know, for each stage though,
I can feel what I need to feel,
and I've planned it out in my mind.
I know, "Okay, I'm going to do a beach scene,
I'm going to have a couple, and they're very much in love,
and I'm going to base the colors off this music
that these people love over here."
And I have step one through 20
that I want to do to be able to do that.
Do you think that vision loss
has impacted the subjects
of your painting 'cause you do paint a pretty wide variety
of things, but do you think
that you would have been painting different things
if you still had your vision?
I do. I do.
And I think it actually helped my vision in a way.
I know that my drawing changed after losing my eyesight
when I was a sighted artist,
I can do the blueprints for houses, I could do cartoons,
I can do portraits of people. I love to draw.
And you drew every day,
you know, I took every class I could on drawing.
And if I did a portrait of a person
and the portrait actually looked like the person,
like, it was a really good likeness of the person
that I would think, "Oh, that's a good drawing."
After losing my eyesight, I still wanted it
to look like the person, at least with basic lines.
I wanted somebody to be able to look at it and go,
"Oh, that's Tony Hawk," or "Oh, that's my Aunt Sally."
Or, you know, or whoever it became more important
that it felt like the person too though.
I became so interested in perception.
If we had a family member walk into the room right now,
and if we were in a large group of people,
everybody in that group would see
that our family member walk in they would see
what clothes they were wearing, what color their hair was.
Well, you know the hairdo they had on,
how they carry themselves, all of this,
they would all get the same information.
And yet everybody would have a different idea
about what that person might be like.
One person might go like, "Oh, I really like that person,
that seems like somebody I'd want to go talk to you."
And somebody else might think,
"Oh, that's it seems like a really angry person."
It's a perception that's so interesting to me
because, you know, we all get the same information yet.
How we actually view it is different.
And that's, you know, perception just takes place
in the mind.
And I started to realize that more and more.
So, in my paintings, I wanted to pick the way things look,
but I also want to pick the way they feel,
or at least the way they make me feel.
And I think one reason I paint everything
is because painting is my way of seeing the world,
which is where a lot of my friends ended up in my paintings
because I'll feel their faces (laughs)
and I want to see what they look like.
And so, it's a lot of times a friend of mine
and we'll go walk through my house
and then they'll suddenly they'll pause in the hall
because maybe they're next to a rocket ship.
Yeah, they've seen their likeness somewhere. Oh.
But I love to try and envision different things.
I love to travel and I love to get my hands on
as much as I can, and then try to put that into the artwork.
I think that's wonderful.
And I think it shows just based on
when people describe your art,
they always describe it in terms of not only
what it looks like, but the feelings that it evokes.
And I think that's really what art is all about.
Thank you for saying that, by the way then,
that makes me feel good.
All I wanted to do when I started painting
was to connect with people.
And I can't tell you how much of a shock it is
that I've actually connected with people.
It's just a wonderful shock.
It's just huge, I mean, there's not a day that goes by
that I don't walk into my studio and just think how,
what a lucky person I am.
You know, and I started out with it,
as an epileptic and was blind and was felt completely alone
and isolated, to now where I'm an epileptic, who's blind,
and I'm happier than I've ever been in my life.
That's incredible. I just have one
last question for you.
I have to say, I love the phrase, non-visual, visual artist.
The thing about it, is though, when you hear visual art,
it kind of sounds like vision, sight is a prerequisite
for doing it, and that's obviously not the case
'cause you've proven that.
So, I know that there are people listening
to this right now who, they have an artistic bent,
and maybe they're losing their vision,
or maybe they've always been blind,
but they still want to express themselves
in this inherently visual medium.
And you've proven that, that can be done.
What would you say to somebody they have this art,
that's just waiting to come out through their fingertips,
and they want to do it, but they're a little bit afraid?
What would you say to them?
You know, I would say the same thing.
If you're a person who is blind,
if you're visually impaired, or if you're not.
Art comes from your mind, you know perception
is actually takes place in your brain.
It doesn't take place in your eyes.
In the same struggles that you have as a non-visual artist
are the same ones you have as a visual artist.
You're trying to take your thoughts, your ideas,
your emotions, you know, from inside of you
and put them outside,
so that other people can understand them as well.
And it takes a lot of practice
and it takes an intense amount of failure.
I think that's one of the most important things
is that you need to be failing and you need to fail a lot,
you know, and you need to be okay with it.
And take those mistakes and just go with it.
You know, and I've been able to talk
to quite a few successful people in their careers.
And whenever I get a chance to talk to someone
that I admire, I always ask the same question.
"What did you do to get where you are,
like, you know, is there a tip that you can give me?"
And the crazy thing is, almost every time they tell me,
you need to fail.
You know, if you're not failing then you're probably
not trying enough new things.
And if you don't, so just fail, be okay with it.
It's incredible how much your failure will push you forward.
And the great thing about art
is that people don't really see your failure.
You just show 'em that the successes.
You've got the 10 paintings hanging in the gallery,
they're all nice.
You don't see the hundred back in the studio-
That's it. That are crazy.
Absolutely.
John, if people want to find out more about you,
if they want to check out your paintings,
where can they go to do that?
My website is just my last name and
it's bramblitt.com.
And on Facebook, I'm Bramblitt. On Instagram, I'm Bramblitt.
And we do a livestream about once a week, every 8:00 PM
on Tuesdays, Central Time.
We do a livestream on Facebook
where we just get on there and chat,
and I talk about art stuff.
And if people have questions, we'll do questions
and other artists will get on there every once in a while.
And it's a very laid-back time where we just hang out.
But it's also a great time for people to come
and get information,
you know, if they want to chat in real time.
That sounds awesome.
We'll have all of those links in our show notes
for you to check out and certainly tune into Facebook.
Sounds like a great place to be.
John, thank you so, so much for joining us.
I love your story. I love your passion.
I really appreciate your sharing with us.
Ricky, thank you so much for having me.
This has been so much fun.
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