About two years ago, I discovered at a routine eye exam that I had macular degeneration in my left eye. I also have glaucoma so I felt like it was going to drastically compromise my vision. I pictured being dependent on my husband for my mobility and having my independence being seriously compromised. I also saw it as an end to my work. Fortunately I have wet macular degeneration so I can get monthly injections in my eye that are stopping the loss of vision.

Nevertheless, I am constantly aware that I see the world a little less clearly. I see things out of corner of my eye that are probably not there. Sometimes, it takes a while to focus my vision. I feel klutzy (but then I have never been particularly balanced). I am looking for ways to express this experience in my work. Every month I take photos of the scans they do at the clinic of the back or each eye (the macula). I have altered the color and cropped the image posted below.

The following is from a site call visionandartproject.org in an interview with Dahlov Ipcar, a painter and fiber artist. I found this site to be an enormously comforting and rich resource:

“Among the subjects we touched upon the day I visited her studio was that of her vision, an issue that clearly preoccupied her. She had warned me before I came that her vision had recently worsened and that she feared she had just painted her last work. It was of a panther and birds and, despite familiar subject matter, she was having trouble finishing it. In fact, in the time that had passed between my call and visit, she hadn’t painted at all and was clearly depressed about that. “I was always happy when I was painting,” she said, “and I miss it. It takes a big bite out of my life.”

This has been coming on a long time, and I sort of watched it develop. In the beginning, it was trouble with reading mostly. It didn’t seem to bother my art until just a year ago. I began to have difficulty with not being able to coordinate my hand and eye to get the details. Now it’s like the fog has come in, and that makes it even harder. I mean, almost impossible. Things are in a deep fog now… You are wiped out. I can see your white shirt, and can see your arms and hands, and I can see your legs, but not much. I mean, I can just see they’re there. But your face and your head are gone. And anything on that side of the room is gone. That painting is gone. It’s just black over there, black fog. It’s not solid black, it’s just very dense, deep fogginess. And it gets into the middle of my vision when I try to paint something. My hand comes out and can’t see what to do. It’s impossible to do anything, because it’s just a blur.

Her most recent works were arranged on easels in front of us, including the painting of a panther she had mentioned over the phone. “I got this far, and stopped,” she said.

“The hand knows a lot, but it can’t see through the fog,” she said, explaining how she had articulated the panther’s form by tapping into the magnificent, fluid line that her hand remembered.”