Through Blurred Rainbow Vision
Navigating the Fear of Losing My Sight as an Artist
26th Sept 2024
Her aging fingers, tipped with perfectly painted nails, fumbled through her pristine handbag, scrambling for her purse. She was starting the end-of-visit ritual of giving my two sisters and me our treat of one pound coin each. Upon finding her purse, began the meticulous inspection of each coin. She would hold it up so close to her eye that I thought she was actually going to pop it into her socket. I watched as she slowly tilted the coin back and forth in the light, with one eye shut, the other desperately trying to materialise the details of the metal through a thick veil of black. As a seven-year-old, observing this routine was excruciatingly tedious, and sometimes even a bit embarrassing if we were in public. Now, my heart grows tremendously heavy and aches with sadness at this memory.
My Grandma started to go blind at the age of 75. My mum would describe her vision to me as looking out and seeing black obstructive shapes in the centre, with gaps of light around the edges. My stomach drops even now as I write that. How terrifying must that have been? To no longer be able to see the familiar faces of those you love, or the ever-changing world around you. Would you forget what colours looked like? Could you still imagine them in your mind? Would the love of your life’s facial features stay engrained in your mind’s eye forever, or would they slowly erode away like an ancient moss-covered statue, features slowly smoothing over and eventually disappearing? I’d like to think I’d never forget the face of my partner in that scenario, but how can one truly know? It makes me want to sit next to him now and soak in his features, downloading them to my mental database for eternity.
She wasn’t my biological Grandma. She adopted my mum as a baby, saving her from a terrible situation, and she was a very caring mother to her. Later on in life, my mum repaid the kindness by nursing her through a very long, challenging period of dementia which eventually passed her over to the next life. Although we weren’t blood related, and I know I couldn’t biologically inherit anything from her, I still worry endlessly about my own health. Especially my eyesight.
My Grandma Dorothy and Grandad Albert dancing at a party during the 1980s
I first found out my vision was blurred when I was fourteen years old, sitting in the back of my Maths class in High school. The numbers would almost fade into nothingness on the board as I squinted my eyes so much they were practically shut, and headaches would flash in my head throughout the whole lesson. I was always awful at Maths, but this surely didn’t help. The optician gave me my first pair of glasses and told me that my eyesight would deteriorate until I turned 21 and then it would either plateau or slightly get better.
It did neither.
It progressively deteriorated until now, at 29 years old. I am now being told that by the time I am 35 years old my prescription will continue to degrade until it reaches a certain scary number… but THEN it will plateau.
I don’t believe this either. Especially as I constantly work with screens and close-up detailed artwork.
It has become a running joke within my friendship circles about how poor my eyesight is. The humour fuelled enormously by me of course, as there’s been no other way to cope but to make light of it. I refer to my contact lenses as My Eyes, and I often wonder how on earth I would survive without them and my contact solution if there were to ever be an apocalypse. I imagine scenes from 'A Quiet Place,' where I’m huddling in a hole underground somewhere with my severely blurred vision, while my poor partner treks across dangerous lands, battling zombie aliens, to find the nearest desolated Specsavers. It wouldn’t be ideal.
More importantly, it’s every artist’s worst nightmare. The notion that my power, my skills, and my joy, may be taken away from me one day is quite frightening. The possibility looms ominously in the back of my mind when I sit in front of my paper and paints without my lenses in. Or even with the menial things; I’ve often caught myself grabbing at shadows on the bed or the floor, thinking they’re socks or underwear I’ve dropped from my laundry. My legs are frequently covered in bruises from banging into the bed when I’m settling in for the night. A familiar scene from the past comes to mind as I rummage through my dresser, searching for the right product for my hair or face. I often find myself on the verge of tears, my eyes stinging and wet, as I lift a bottle to my eye and gently tilt it back and forth to read the label in the light. To some, perhaps a few of these things sound quite funny, and it is at times, but there’s also a poignant lack of control that I feel in these situations, and it can be incredibly unnerving and sometimes even demeaning.
I must assure, that as long as I’ve got my lenses in, I am coping fine. As I look out of my bedroom window now, I can see flecks of green leaves swaying in the summer breeze on the furthest of trees. I can see crevasses and shadows between each grey slate on the houses across the road. I can see the metal bolts on the closest lamppost outside the window, and the dried white cupboard paint caked on my red painted fingernails in front of me. However, the second I take my lenses out, all of this vanishes into a colourful wishy-washy blur, and I feel alone again.
My Grandma Dorothy and Grandad Albert dancing at a party during the 1980s
I am reminded that at the age of 65, painter Claude Monet began to notice changes in his vision. He realised a shift in his perception of colour, which would essentially affect his paintings. He was developing cataracts in both eyes, and it worsened to the point where he had to label his paint tubes as he could no longer see the colours properly. Supposedly, critics would debate whether the wilder, browner, and occasionally jarring colours in Monet’s later paintings were deliberate choices or merely the unfortunate results of an old man losing his vision.
After a back-and-forth battle of losing his sight between treatments, he was finally met with the opportunity to have a cataract operation. After repeatedly refusing surgery out of fear, Monet finally underwent a successful procedure. There is a poem, "Monet Refuses the Operation," where poet Lisel Mueller reimagines his resistance as a passionate response to the world's failure to appreciate exceptional artistic vision. In the poem, Monet believes he sees beyond the surface to the spiritual essence of things. You can find the poem below.
Monet Refuses the Operation
By Lisel Mueller
1996
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
I find this poem truly beautiful, and it gives me hope that things might not be so bleak if I were to ever face the same fate as Monet and my lovely Grandma. It’s probably time to start a savings pot for my own eye surgery, although I have a million and one other things to be paying out for after buying a house during a cost-of-living crisis. In the meantime, I will make sure to take my eyes away from harsh, bright screens as much as I can, and turn them towards peach summer skies and indigo oceans. Living on the coast of England, I am surrounded by natural beauty every day and I’m so lucky I get to soak that in whenever I wish to. Whether with optical aid, or through blurred rainbow vision, I find comfort in knowing that the beauty out there always remains.
Yours,
Rachael x
Receiving the keys to our future home, November 2023
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