July 5, 2017
Until recently, I could never have been an artist. My chronic short sight would have been beyond correction. Without glasses, my focal point lies, with my left eye firmly shut to let my right one see, at the tip of my nose. I would have been, as was recently pointed out to me, fully dependent on others, a beggar if I had been poor.
But I was born in a century where my sight could be treated, and I’ve been able to live as a painter for thirty years. After a recent emergency visit to an eye doctor away from home (where I heard those grim historical observations), it occurred to me this would be a good time to thank the professionals who have tended to my eyes over the years. They are my collaborators in the creation of over two thousand paintings. Thanks to them I feel I’ve never worked a day in my life. With their help, I’ve achieved my hopes of being an artist since the day I left college.
The first visit I recall clearly was to Ellis and Killpartrick in Bath, England. I was being fitted for my first contact lenses. Before then I had worn perennially broken and taped-together National Health glasses. I collided with as many people playing cricket as I did in rugby. Finally, for the sake of everyone’s safety, I was told to just run around the pitches for the duration of the games. I didn’t mind, and perhaps the loneliness of Sillitoe’s hero was good preparation for a solitary career ahead.
I remember frustrating the doctor with my inability to put in the contact lenses. After a full hour of my efforts, he came back in and sighed heavily. “Let’s try another way,” he suggested, “Put them in the corner of your eye and sort of move them across.” I never learned to improve upon this laborious morning ritual.
In Atlanta, an optician at the mall exclaimed that I had a ‘doozy of a prescription’. In Birmingham, Alabama, the UAB School of Optometry was more professional. In the little town of Franklin, North Carolina, Dr. Darryl Gossett looked after my eyes for nearly twenty years. We would chat about my art and he and his wife’s avid pursuit of dancing.
Every few years I would switch to a new pair of glasses, and there was always my capsized hope that technology had advanced to the point where the new lenses would somehow be thinner. Fat chance. The myopic do not strut the catwalk of any season’s optical fashion. My spectacles would turn up like craft fair jewelry- those heavy, clear stones one sees, barely netted in delicate wire.
I kept visiting Dr. Gossett long after I had moved sixty miles away to Asheville and, missing those conversations, I often regret that practicality required I find something closer. My new doctor is very experienced, though, and part of a team not likely to exclaim (like that doctor at the Atlanta mall) at the magnitude of my prescription. In Franklin, the waiting room was small and quiet, with a video of waterfalls. In Asheville, the waiting room is much larger, with patients seated in different areas for different doctors. Some are there due to serious injury or illness that threatens their eyesight- a reminder to be thankful.
I got a new pair of glasses there recently, and we risked a slightly larger, circular frame. Both the lady who fitted me and myself were pleasantly surprised. “These actually look pretty good!” I exclaimed, looking in the mirror, “I mean, of course, they still make my head look like an hourglass.” We both smiled at the inevitability of the latter. My son says they are Harry Potter glasses. In a recent drawing he did of me he kindly suggested my lenses merely shrink my eyes into tiny, manic circles.
I wake up each morning and celebrate the fact nothing has ‘detached’ through the night. I paint with a certain urgency that makes for braver paintings, and hope that if I have to switch to another form of creativity I can adopt Epictetus’ stoic attitude- ‘Never say of anything, “I lost it,” but say, “I gave it back.”
Treatment recommended that my vision was never corrected to absolute perfect sight, but this has been a gift for me as a landscape painter, where too much detail is often a hindrance, and many artists have to squint to slightly blur their vision the better to see tonal values.
Together, my eye doctors and I have painted 2500 paintings: of the Scottish Highlands, the South of France and my native Somerset; the Texas border, the coast of Maine and Louisiana bayous; hidden waterfalls and rivers of Appalachia; vanishing architecture from Charleston to the Delta; state fairs, wrestlers and flea markets; murder ballads, Low Country mermaids and a Napoleonic countess lost in 19th century Alabama. Thank you all for such a journey.
An update (November, 2021) In a visit to my excellent doctor here in Asheville, my exam showed the early signs of cataracts. I imagine this in part due to all my days outside in the bright American sun. She told me that in my case, this was blessing- the lenses they would insert would retire my heavy glasses and contact lenses. I had previously been told (on that emergency visit to another doctor four years ago) that I would not qualify for such a surgery, and that grim prediction, correct or not at the time, had galvanized me into being as productive as possible, and also into pursuing my writing as a ‘back-up’ form of expression should I no longer be able to paint to my satisfaction. My first novel is to be published this month.