[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] interior designer, Indian and Australian artist

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Some links to articles. One fascinating forwarded from AEB list about a 
blind interior designer and additonal link about him. Have put the 
articles together where the whole article is not about visual 
impairments and tactile etc under '"mentions". Otherwise full article 
under "article".
Good weekend.
Lisa

Link addresses
designer
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-blind14apr14,1,5339533.story?coll=la-headlines-home 

http://www.thebody.com/apla/dec99/sight.html

Artist and film about
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050415/asp/opinion/story_4611941.asp
http://www.satyajitray.org/films/innereye.htm

artist
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12840204%255E2862,00.html

map
http://icberkshire.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0500newburythatcham/tm_objectid=15397772&method=full&siteid=50102&headline=-talking-map--to-guide-the-blind-name_page.html


mentions
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1513/5352092.html
• Wander over to Montparnasse in Paris to visit the park dedicated to 
beloved chanteur Georges Brassens. The park on Rue des Morillons is 
alive with puppets, carousels, beehives, a mountain stream and a special 
garden for the blind.

blind inmate

http://www.portlandtribune.com/archview.cgi?id=28789
So last August, a bricks-and-mortar Captive Imagery gallery opened in 
the heart of Old Town, 211 N.W. Fifth Ave.
On a tour of the gallery’s 200 hanging works, Marin Lee, 31, points out 
some of the peculiarities of the inventory. “There’s a whole category we 
call prison art, with a lot of bars, clocks and demons,” she says.
She points out the gruesome clown art of Donald Lane, who is legally blind.

interactive game
http://www.wtoctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3200686&nav=0qq6YZxd


http://www.towntopics.com/apr0605/art.html

Art as Recovery

Paintings, pastels, and needlepoint are not the only forms on display 
here. ArtFirst! also includes sculpture, stained glass, scrimshaw 
(Sitting Bull and Custer, Grant and Lee), woven baskets, mixed media, 
montage (pages from old ledgers, labels off cans), and fibreglass 
figures. In black and white photography, stand-outs are Roger Weiss's 
film-noirish /Tracks to Nowhere/ and a particularly evocative image of a 
mangled sphere at Ground Zero. Sofi wa Nairobi's expressive photographs 
of musicians in performance are so alive as to make mentioning the fact 
that she's legally blind a necessary exception to the rule of not naming 
specific disabilities. Her work seems all the more extraordinary if you 
know that what she's photographing has more to do with what she hears 
than with what she can see. In spite of being able to make out only 
vague forms, she catches the force of the playing, right down to the 
play of shadows in Ezra Reed's trousers in her Second Prize photograph, 
/Keys to My Heart/.


Articles

EYES, LAUGHTER AND GREATNESS

Eyes and laughter — this is the strongest impression that Nemai Ghosh’s 
series of photographs on Satyajit Ray and Binode Bihari Mukherjee leaves 
behind. The remarkable collection of sixty-six photographs, taken during 
Ray’s filming of /The Inner Eye, /his documentary on the blind artist, 
makes palpable the special quality of Ray’s and Binode Bihari’s 
engagement with each other. It is relaxed yet intense, two great artists 
— one once the other’s teacher — meeting after a long time, talking, 
looking, listening, reflecting. In his foreword to the volume, Andrew 
Robinson quotes from a letter Ray wrote to Marie Seton, referring to the 
general lack of knowledge and understanding about the painter: “His 
total lack of flamboyance may have had something to do with it….I have 
always felt a great affinity with him.”

Nemai Ghosh’s camera, however much he deplores the quality of his 
efforts, captures even more. The shared enjoyment of filmmaker and 
painter stems from the excitement of work. There is a film in the 
making, and the subject himself is shown at work, his mobile face still 
and exploring fingers poised, as the director finds, chooses, ponders, 
instructs, and discovers. Ray looks at Binode Bihari through his lens, 
and Ghosh looks at both, together and apart. Soumendu Roy, Ray’s 
cameraman, and the artist Dinkar Kowshik, who writes the introduction, 
are often present. The drama of sight, outward and inward, could not 
have been rendered with greater purity. Ghosh’s own vision shaping the 
series can perhaps be traced back to the first moment he saw the two men 
together. He says in the preface: “The blind painter looked at his 
former student. Even through the impenetrable darkness of his glasses, 
he seemed to see Satyajit; his inner vision was focussed — still and 
unwavering — on him. Both had much to say to each other, many questions 
to ask. Above all, there was happiness in the air, and endless laughter.”

Ghosh captures the two faces again and again, each time anew. There is 
the tall man, his rugged and penetrating face turned towards every new 
possibility, his eyes lustrous or pensive, as he explores not just 
Santiniketan and Binode Bihari’s favourite /khoyai/, but also Kathmandu 
and Varanasi, where the painter had also lived and worked. But the 
quiet, slowly moving or seated painter in his dark glasses is an equally 
vibrant presence, as his humorous face creases in thought or pleasure. 
In repose, there is a quality of stillness about him that Ghosh’s camera 
interprets as intense absorption. Around him lie the paraphernalia of 
his everyday existence, while his former student gazes at his murals and 
frescoes for the best angle, or sifts through his unframed paintings. 
The few sketches that have been reproduced convey the miracle of Binode 
Bihari’s “insight” — which he himself happily attributes to Ray — and 
the unwavering steadiness and grace of his hand. The volume is an 
exhilarating memory of two of India’s greatest artists.




Blind faith and inspiration
Jacqueline Freegard
13apr05

GOING blind has not stopped artist Erika Peril from painting.

Ms Peril has worked as a journalist, acted on television shows including 
Police Rescue and has a five record deal with Mushroom Records.

And she is raising two young daughters.

Ms Peril was diagnosed with macular degeneration at 23.

She started going blind while studying art at the Victorian College of 
the Arts.

Now 40, she has limited peripheral vision, cannot drive and struggles to 
cook.

"When I started going blind people told me I would have to give up 
painting," Ms Peril said.

"Don't ask me how I'm still painting.

"I think I'm doing it mostly from memory and my understanding of the 
medium."

Ms Peril has entered /The Butterfly Vase, /in the /Herald Sun 
/Camberwell Rotary Art Show.

The show runs from Saturday April 23 to April 30. Admission: Adults: 
$12, seniors and concession: $10.

Net link:



DECORATING
Light, sound, touch: vision
# Eric Brun-Sanglard became a designer only after he lost his sight. He 
relies on texture and an innate sense of space to create a classic look 
for clients around Los Angeles.

By Alexandria Abramian-Mott, Special to The Times

Eric Brun-Sanglard, who is blind, relies on other senses to visualize 
interiors. He taps his feet to get a feel for the scale of rooms, he 
absorbs the sun on his face and hands to know when and where the light 
falls and he touches everything — walls, windows, doorknobs, moldings, 
tiles, fabrics and plants — to literally get a feel for a home's shape, 
texture and dimension.

"When I discover a house that needs work, I don't see what's there, so 
it's easier for me to visualize the potential," says Brun-Sanglard, 42, 
an interior designer who has worked on homes throughout Los Angeles, 
including midcentury Bel-Air retreats and Hancock Park Mediterranean 
mansions.

When it came to remodeling his West Hollywood house — once a forlorn 
fixer, now a sleek city oasis with water features and subtle Zen 
detailing — it was just another day in the converted home office for 
Brun-Sanglard, who has been professionally remodeling, decorating and 
landscaping homes for nine years.

For his home, he designed an expanded and updated kitchen, created a 
master bedroom suite with a fireplace and walk-in closet, and selected a 
palette of earth-tone furnishings throughout. "My overall style is 
masculine, but I like to get in lots of natural materials and soft 
fabrics like cashmere and silk," Brun-Sanglard says.

Sure, the idea of a blind designer might sound absurd. And in 
Brun-Sanglard's case, it even has an odder twist: He came to the 
profession after losing his sight. "Vision is great, but design is also 
about texture, light and sounds," says Brun-Sanglard, who landed in Los 
Angeles from France more than two decades ago but still looks perfectly 
Côte d'Azur casual in white linen drawstring pants and a cashmere sweater.

Brun-Sanglard's greatest gift as a designer, however, may be less about 
sourcing sofas and side tables and more about finding a home's optimal 
flow, something he says is a direct result of his blindness. For this he 
spends days walking through a house until he has memorized its movement 
from room to room, a process he describes as "almost like doing 
psychotherapy. I get a subconscious feeling and understanding of what 
needs to be done. It's about finding out how homes breathe and how rooms 
need to work together," he says.

To study the layout of a house, he reconfigured a child's toy into a 
primitive Braille machine that pops out floor plans with raised lines. 
By running his fingers over the printouts, he figures out how to correct 
the flow by moving, expanding and rethinking rooms, rerouting passages, 
shifting walls and creating an interior logic that he says is often 
"locked up in homes like a series of boxes."

"Eric's most extraordinary strength is his sense of space," says Peter 
Dunham, an interior. "If you think about it, that's the one thing that 
would seem to be most challenging to someone who is blind, but that's 
what he's strongest at."

"I've seen about five of his houses, and the whole design of them was 
amazing," says Craig Van Skaik, who has hired Brun-Sanglard to remodel 
his 7,000-square-foot Hancock Park Tudor. "He knows where things need to 
go. He's designed an enormous kitchen-den-dining area, and has also 
redesigned six bathrooms as well as the master bedroom.."

Before he lost his sight, "houses were for entertaining and impressing 
friends," says Brun-Sanglard, whose retinas detached in 1995 as a result 
of a virus associated with HIV. "Afterward, designing homes became about 
creating manageable little worlds. The experience gave me a craving to 
build a very safe haven."

He gave up his career as an advertising executive who shuttled between 
L.A., New York and Paris and began flipping houses with his 
then-boyfriend. One year later, they started taking on clients as a 
full-service remodel team, with Brun-Sanglard working as the designer 
and his partner as the contractor.

Watching Brun-Sanglard walk through his home, it's difficult to tell 
he's blind. Legion, his seeing-eye dog, lies on the dark wood floors, 
officially off-duty as Brun-Sanglard cooks and cleans, reads and writes 
e-mails with the help of a speech-to-text program, soaks in the tub 
while listening to TV and screens calls via a talking Palm Pilot.

Three stairs separating the living and dining rooms look like a 
hazard-in-the-making for the sightless. But Brun-Sanglard, who walks up 
and down the steps almost without hesitating, says they were one of the 
house's main selling points.

"I saw potential in this house because of the high ceiling in the living 
room, and I immediately loved those steps going up to the dining room," 
says Brun-Sanglard, who has filled the house with art and objects from 
his travels to Bali. "I'd never gone there when I was sighted. I started 
building a new memory bank based on my senses when I went there."

Even after Brun-Sanglard and his boyfriend broke up in 1997, they 
continued working together. At the pinnacle of their professional 
partnership in 1998, he was living the high life, making more money as a 
designer than he had as an executive, and redesigning his own 
3,500-square-foot Hollywood Hills villa with city-to-ocean views.

"Even though I'm blind I like great views," he says. With its swimming 
pool, private patios and Balinese-inspired indoor-outdoor rooms, he saw 
the home as proof that he was back on top.

But Brun-Sanglard says the most difficult challenge in his life was 
still to come. In 2000, the designer says he discovered that his partner 
had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from him by obtaining 
credit cards in his name. "Within a year, I owed $250,000 on my American 
Express and had another $350,000 to repay from another line of credit," 
he says.

He was forced to put the Hollywood Hills home on the market in July 2001 
for $1.85 million, a last-ditch measure to repay part of the debt that 
had been amassed in his name. "I had lost my company, my home, most 
importantly my sense of trust. I found myself alone with no money, no 
job and a big depression," Brun-Sanglard says.

At that point "remodeling" took on new meaning. "I decided that I wanted 
to remodel myself too. Even though I was blind, I had still been living 
in a world based on appearances, and I had been trying to prove to the 
world that I was OK," he says.

With a loan from his family, Brun-Sanglard bought his present house on 
Crescent Heights Boulevard in 2001 and spent six months renovating it. 
Putting a fence around the property, one of his signature design 
statements, became even more important in creating a sense of safety, 
and today the 8-foot wall made of twigs and stained wood is one of the 
house's stand-out characteristics. Water features in the front and 
backyards anchor and orient the house via sound, and throughout, he has 
planted sweet-smelling plants like jasmine and lavender.

After completing the house, Brun-Sanglard was ready to strike out on his 
own as a designer. His first project, a midcentury house in Beachwood 
Canyon, led to more work, and now he's back to juggling projects, 
including a 6,000-square-foot Hancock Park English Tudor that's in the 
planning phase. In the last four years, Brun-Sanglard has worked on five 
large-scale projects.

Richard Krug, a real estate agent for Sotheby's International Realty, 
hired the designer to remodel two of his homes. "He knows exactly what 
to do when it comes to design," says Krug. "It's as if everyone knows 
Eric's blind except Eric."

"I had to lose everything, including my sight, to get my own vision, and 
I want to share that with other people, to show them that we only set 
our own limitations," says Brun-Sanglard, who adds that he has been 
symptom-free of HIV for eight years.

And what would a comeback story be without landing your own TV show? He 
is hammering out a deal for his own TV makeover show that's scheduled to 
air later this summer on A&E. He'll work with sighted couples having 
troubling communicating a shared design vision.

When his Palm Pilot announces a call from his producer, Brun-Sanglard 
politely excuses himself. In search of a little privacy, he walks up the 
stairs, through the dining room, past the kitchen and toward the back 
garden where he's soon hidden by towering papyrus plants.