Viewers are captivated by Lisa Fittipaldi’s lively, colorful canvases.  When they learn that she is blind, they are astounded.  Fittipaldi was declared legally blind in 1993, and in the ensuing years her vision dropped below measurable levels.  She cannot see color or distance, dimension or print.  A blind painter?  Until they see her work for themselves, people think it’s impossible.  Clearly Lisa Fittipaldi is doing something quite extraordinary, seemingly beyond the normal range of human capability.  It appears that she is the world’s only profoundly blind realist painter.  Since 1997, her complex scenes of diverse cultures and everyday life have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.

Why, of all things, did she choose to paint?  Vision is our main source of sensory information.  Without constant visual input, the brain begins to “forget” the world, losing track of whatever it cannot hear, touch, or feel.  It is only through constant visual reinforcement that reality does not fade away.  In addition, this constant stimulation is as necessary to the survival of the brain as water is to the body.  When you are blind, you must find alternative sources of nourishment for the brain because the mind no longer receives imagery from the eye.

Lisa began painting in 1995, two years after she lost her vision.  Painting was one of several avenues that Lisa explored as a way of finding her place in the world after losing her  sight.  She quickly understood that painting her storehouse of memories was both a source of nourishment and a way to keep her world alive in her mind.  As she began to paint, she also realized that the principles of art gave her a system for comprehending and navigating the three-dimensional world she could no longer see.  Whatever she learned in her painting studio, working on a two-dimensional canvas, could be applied to her understanding of the vast dark world she now lived in.  After she understood spatial relationships and the principles of art, she could make her own way in the world as both an artist, and a human being.

How does she do it? Clearly for Lisa Fittipaldi the loss of her sight was a challenge to her formidable intellect, one that she knew she must meet in order to keep her spirit and vitality alive.  With no prior art background, she had to start from scratch.  A former CPA with a photographic memory, Fittipaldi recognized that she would have to build her knowledge of line and shape, contour and color, step by step, and meticulously store it in her internal filing cabinet.  Unable to learn as others do, through viewing paintings and watching demonstrations of technique, she had to develop her own language, and her own perceptual system.  Thus began an odyssey to learn her new craft.  She listened to hundreds of books on tape and traveled with her husband to museums around the world that she’d never taken the time to visit when she could see.  She tackled each new aspect of art with fervor, each time mastering a new theory and adapting it to her use, rigorously practicing each new technique. Eventually she could envision her compositions so well that she no longer needed the grids of string or rows of staples that oriented her to the canvas.  A deep understanding of color theory supplanted her need to “feel” the consistency of the paint to know what color she was using. Colorful abstract paintings gave way to still life and landscape, and ultimately to complex figurative paintings of a teeming marketplace or a crowded jazz club.  Moving from watercolor to oil painting meant learning yet another system of color theory and application.