by Fern Shen
(Reprinted from The Washington Post, January 10, 2002.)
Could a blind person ever "see" a painting?
Maryland sculptor Street Thoma believes he has found a way to make it happen.
He takes famous paintings and makes three-dimensional versions of them for museums and traveling exhibits. The usual message in museums is "Don't touch!" but Thoma's art is meant to be stroked and traced, with fingertips and palms. "It is a wonderful moment, when you see a person who is blind smile and you know they are really 'getting it,' experiencing a piece of art in a way they may never have before," said Thoma, who is the Americans With Disabilities coordinator for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
On a recent afternoon, bits of one of these projects were scattered around his Jessup studio: headless Barbies, hairless Barbies, Barbies with shaved-down bottoms. Thoma was using them to create a sort of diorama version of a painting of a seated woman, holding a child.
"I got her propped in the chair and she was three-sixteenths of a inch off and it messed everything up," said Thoma, who was trying to make all the proportions on his diorama match those in Cecilia Beaux's "Last Days of Infancy."
Thoma's 3-D version, which will go to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has cool-to-the-touch wood-paneled walls, a tiny ceramic vase that feels smooth and a swatch of oriental carpet on the floor that is bumpy. The figures are draped in crepe and cotton.
For a touchable version of Van Gogh's 1888 "Portrait of Camille Roulin," Thoma used lumps of plaster to match each of the thick paint daubs. You can feel the pointy nose, the deep eyes, the jacket button.
Thoma was inspired to do this work in the mid-1980s after making a raised Christmas card for a blind friend. It was a Mondrian painting done in felt, with a Braille message.
"I had thought art was never going to be a part of my life," the friend told him.
What Thoma designs is a three-part process, which he demonstrated with his interpretation of an 1832 Audubon painting of a kind of wading bird, the snowy egret.
First, the person listens to Thoma talk: he tells about the artist and vividly describes the painting. Then the person touches diagrams of the main shapes in the painting, made with a special paper, known as "swell paper." When heated, lines on the paper swell up. These raised lines, some fat, some thin, form a black-and-white version of the painting. Guided by Thoma's voice, the "viewer" explores them. Sometimes, Thoma gently reaches out and moves the person's hand or fingers to help. The final experience is to touch the 3-D version. The egret is carved out of wood. Fishing line and feathers are used for its plumage. Electrical wire conveys the bumpy texture of the bird's long legs.
Trying to make visual art accessible to people who cannot see has been an interesting challenge for Thoma. He shows color differences by representing different colors with different textures: big bumpy dots for one shade, small bumpy dots for another, stripes for a third. What about light and shadow? Think of light as being like the spray of water in a shower, he tells people. When something is bathed in light, it's like the water hitting your face and the front of your body. Shadow is like the places that aren't getting wet, along the back of you.
"All you need is something to get the person thinking," Thoma said, "some way to get them into what the artist was after."