Dallas’ Blind Muralist

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John Bramblitt is a talented artist from Denton Texas. In fact its no less to say he is one of a kind. His art has been sold in over one hundred and twenty countries and he has appeared internationally in print, TV and radio, like CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, ABC, NBC, FOX, Discovery Channel and BBC Radio. He’s been featured in The New York Times and Psychology Today. Also designed the artwork for numerous magazine covers and artwork for major film productions. The award winning documentary shorts “Line of Sight’ and “Bramblitt” is based on him. Oh, are you asking what is so special about him? John is blind.

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Three times he won Presidential Service Awards for his innovative art workshops.

Bramblitt wasn’t born blind but was rendered blind after a series of severe seizures due to epilepsy and complications from Lyme’s disease in 2001. “I drew everyday – that is until I lost my eyesight in college.” But with his sight, he lost his hopes and dreams too. He sunk into a deep depression disconnecting from family and friends until he discovered passion again in – painting.

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Bramblitt learned to distinguish between different colored paints by feeling their textures with his fingers. He also learned how to apply paint by outlining an image and using his fingers to guide the brush strokes. While many of his portraits are taken from events in his life he experienced while sighted, he has also produced life-like paintings of people by simply feeling their face with his fingers. Bramblitt has never seen his wife or his son but has painted remarkable portraits of them.

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“I didn’t create any art for a year – I had drawn everyday from almost the time I could walk up to that point, and then suddenly nothing. After a year I was able to travel independently some with my cane, and this is when I started taking the techniques that allowed me to navigate and get around a room or a city alone that I had been learning, and started applying them to a canvas.” Brambitt says. “Making it so that I could use thick paint to actually feel my way across the canvas much in the same way that I might use my cane to cross a street” . Colors came later. Each type of paint – whether oil, acrylic, or watercolor – has different textures. He started to differentiate them by feeling them, touching them. Also he made sure that all colors have braille labels.

Bramblitt began with white and black, and he eventually expanded to the wide selection visible in many of his other compositions.

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Apart from landscapes and sceneries, Bramblitt paints portraits too. Though he has never seen the person with his own eyes, his sense of touch makes him feel exactly how they look like. In this way, he painted his wife Jacqui, son Jack and his guide dog Echo.

Bramblitt paints murals but does not limit himself in the canvas but also in the walls. Jacqui Serie, Bramblitt’s wife, directs him through a walkie-talkie from the ground. He painted his first large-scale mural on a building in New York for World Sight in 2017. The painted scene, below, captures a woman peacefully strumming on her acoustic companion, just as a lingering breeze catches strands of her polychromatic locks, and a golden sun sinks in the distance. This is a four-story mural is painted by Bramblitt in the Bishop Arts District, on the corner of Melba Street and N. Madison Avenue, Dallas.

For more of his works visit: bramblitt.n/

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Sources are dmagazine, littlethings.com/john-bramblitt-blind-paintings/2, wiki and Line of Sight: John Bramblitt’s Story by Stephen Menick (https://library.creativecow.net/article.php?author_folder=menick_stephen&article_folder=PBS_Blind-Painter&page=1)