The excellent scholar of disability studies Tom Shakespeare writes over at BBC that disabled achievers should be remembered. Indeed. And he shows that Matisse was a disabled achiever in his later years:
“Matisse moved from painting to the medium of cut-outs after losing his mobility in surgery to remove cancer in 1941. It was impossible for him to paint freely as he had done before so he turned to the decoupage technique, getting an assistant to pin and re-pin painted shapes to his wall until he was satisfied with the effect, creating undersea creatures, stars, and abstract compositions. It is still possible to produce something beautiful and memorable, and we should have higher expectations of older people with disabilities. Over half a million people visited an exhibition of Matisse’s cut-outs in 2014 at the Tate Modern.”
Tom makes several important points in his blog post. The aging process can be a creative experience; we expect too little from the elderly; classifying people by embodiment is a mistake. The imagination is not beholden to your physical capacities. Or another way to put this is that obstacles or formal constraints in art lead to breakthroughs.
I have a poem (the title poem from my book “Only Bread, Only Light” that among other things, makes the case that blindness can be a vehicle of beauty even on an ordinary street:
“Only Bread, Only Light”
At times the blind see light,
And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,
Grace among buildings—no one asks
For it, no one asks.
After all, this is solitude,
Daylight’s finger,
Blake’s angel
Parting willow leaves.
I should know better.
Get with the business
Of walking the lovely, satisfied,
Indifferent weather —
Bread baking
On Arthur Avenue
This first warm day of June.
I stand on the corner
For priceless seconds.
Now everything to me falls shadow.
Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Only Bread, Only Light.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/1017I.l
Tom Shakespeare is right: the embodiment of beauty, the very idea of it, may be a mistake.
Planet of the Blind 