[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Article: Friends use art to help each other past theirdisabilities

[Shelley L. Rhodes]

Los Angeles Daily News
Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Friends use art to help each other past their disabilities

By Susan Abram, Staff Writer

NEWHALL -- Theirs is a friendship forged without any formal handshakes or 
visual recognition.  Joe Caron lost his hands. O. Quintin DiMaria lost his 
eyesight.

But the men will say they have gained admiration for one another's love of 
the paint and the brush, of white canvas transformed into cherry trees 
bursting with pink blossoms, blond desert roads dotted with hunter green 
chaparral, and deep blue oceans that meet a magenta horizon.

"He's my hands, and I'm his eyes," says Caron as DiMaria visited him one 
afternoon. "That's the way it works."

For DiMaria and Caron, painting is more than just a way to pass the time 
through their twilight years. It has brought them together in a most 
unsuspecting way, with each amazed at how the other can re-create beauty 
without eyes to see color or hands to direct a brush. They are each other's 
biggest fans.

"When I found out how he painted, I couldn't believe it," DiMaria said.

Their friendship began five years ago at a senior adult apartment complex in 
Newhall.

DiMaria, 86, lives in Unit 223. Caron, 82, and his wife, Dorothy, moved into 
Unit 221.

The two were drawn together by the styles in which each other painted.

DiMaria, a former advertising manager for The Wall Street Journal, said he 
always liked to draw. On one of his walls is a detailed pencil sketching of 
his shiny Army boots from 1947. He took up painting seriously just before 
his doctor declared him legally blind in 1994 due to macular degeneration. 
To compromise for his visual loss of detail, his teacher at the local art 
school said he should try to paint like the impressionist Monet, who used 
dabs of blended color to suggest a tree, a flower or a lily pad. She helps 
him mix the paints, he said.

"Greens, blues and browns, they all look like black to me," DiMaria said 
recently as he stood in front of dozens of his paintings, mostly landscapes, 
he had hung on his wall. "I can only see yellow. But my teacher thinks I 
paint better now than when I could see better."

Caron lost his hands while working in a sheet metal factory in 
Massachusetts. He was 24.

"It was a blessing in disguise," he said. "I was careless."

Caron had always liked to sketch, too. He learned to paint reading art books 
by Walter Foster, but after his accident, he had to relearn how to control a 
brush with his artificial limbs. He holds the brush between metal clamps and 
moves his body as he would his wrists, to direct the acrylic paints he uses. 
His first painting of orchids still hangs on his wall, as do several others, 
mostly the faces of clowns and American Indians.

DiMaria said he admires the details he can make out in some of Caron's work, 
the fragile black strings on a violin, and the soft blades of grass on sand.

"It's so fascinating to watch him," said his wife, Dorothy Caron. "He goes 
into all these different positions with his body while he paints."

The two men don't sell their art. DiMaria has donated his to local 
organizations as well as to his nieces and nephews. Caron gives them away to 
his children.

And neither likes to dwell on what he has lost.

"What was I going to do?" DiMaria shrugs, "Lay down and die? Painting 
relaxes me."

"It puts you in another world," Caron continues. "You don't think about 
things that bother you."

The two men visit frequently, often meeting in the downstairs lobby of their 
apartment complex for what they call an "organ recital."

"You know," DiMaria says laughing when a visitor inquires about it, "an 
organ recital, as in, 'Oh, my liver hurts! Oh, my kidneys hurt! Oh, my heart 
hurts!"'

Dorothy Caron rolls her eyes as the two men laugh.

"It's not so funny when you've heard it a dozen times," she says. "But if 
you've got a sense of humor about things, then you've got the world by its 
tail."

Susan Abram, (661) 257-5255 susan.abram at dailynews.com


http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2720284,00.html




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