Art

Art is hard to define. It could be limited to drawing and painting and sculpture or it can encompass the way you parked your car at a little bit of an angle to the yellow lines in the parking lot.

If the way we set our forks on our plates is influenced by our subconscious need to defy expectations, a rebellion against the status quo, then all of us are both artists and works of art.

That would be a good discussion to have, but not here. This blog is about blindness, not the concept of art. I want to write about visual art. Why would a blind man want to write about visual artistry? Maybe to defy expectations and as a rebellion against the status quo.

I create. That's just what I do. Kitchen cabinets, Toyota trucks, bed frames, short stories, computer programs, stair cases, kids, sculpture, schematic drawings, and today, painting and bead work on reusable canvas shopping bags.

But why? Why not work in finance instead?

If you were the only person in the world would you be rich or poor?

On the one hand the entire planet belongs to you. All the gold, all the land, all the food, everything. But without other people you'd live in a cave and hunt with a stick. On paper you'd be wealthy but in reality your standard of living would tank. Wealth, in the most fundamental sense, isn't ownership, it's other people's labor on your behalf.

Standup comedian Steven Wright said "I have a very large collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches around the world, maybe you've seen it." That's a great summary of the point I'm trying to make. You could own all the gold in the world but it would be worthless to you if it's still buried in the mountains. All the seafood is yours but until someone catches it and cooks it and puts it on a plate and serves it to you you don't really get anything from owning it except bragging rights.

The simple truth is everything in the world is free, plus shipping and handling. We don't pay the fields for the cotton, the forest for the lumber, the hills for the iron, or the trees for the fruit. We pay one another to harvest and process and package and ship those things. That's wealth, the blue collar grind that turns a chunk of iron ore into a car engine and a field of cotton plants into a tee shirt.

The ones who work in finance, moving numbers around? They don't create a bit of wealth. Not a single bit. They just skim a little off the top and pretend they're creating wealth. It's inexcusable to pay these parasites more than your plumber or your grocery store shelf stocker.

I believe everyone in the world would be better off with a little more wealth. That's why I've spent most of my career in the blue collar world, building Tuff Sheds and binding books and welding seat belt casings together. If I take the world's raw material and create something useful out of it I've added to the world's supply of wealth. Scarcity causes prices to go up so I made it my personal philosophy to overproduce wherever I can. It's how I planned on leaving the world a better, more beautiful place than I entered it.

Then blindness struck. It took my vision, obviously, but it took my ability to create useful, tangible goods from raw materials, too. In doing so it took my identity. I stopped being Layne the Craftsman and became Layne the Blind Guy.

Well, I'm taking my identity back, one art project at a time.

We sold the house in San Antonio so I can't post pictures of the front and back porches I rebuilt, the room I painted, or the trim work I did since going blind. All I can do is show you what I've done since October when I moved here. Pictures of the staircase and coffee mug are in the last post so I'm not including them again.

Reusable canvas shopping bags.

 With butterflies!

Looks like a simple drawer pull on a false front for a sink cabinet, right? Twist it a few degrees counter clockwise to turn on the garbage disposal. It's spring loaded so it shuts off when released.

Stained glass name plates for some of my family. I really enjoy working with stained glass. I start with a clear sheet then cut and add pieces of colored glass to it. They all fuse together in the kiln. It's great for the visually impaired because we can feel the colored pieces in our hands and slide them around the clear base piece to put them where we want.

A pottery piece I painted for my daughter's birthday, When the kids were little I used to draw teddy bears and puppy dogs for them. I guess I did it so often I really can do it in the dark.