The answer later in the show.
Wheat Ridge resident Jim Stevens had
been creating art for more than 30 years
when in 1993, an old war injury, thought to be benign,
left him legally blind.
From then, life became a series of rediscoveries
and new methods.
Among the latter is an art form he
calls polymorphs, for which Stevens
layers thousands of strands of monofilament
to stunning effect.
JIM STEVENS: Art can be done quickly and look brilliant.
My work can't be done that way.
The work that I do does require patience.
Because one wrong line, one wrong dot,
one misplaced scratch, and it's ruined.
I paint portraits on monofilament line.
Each layer I paint and I shade slightly different
from the layer in front so that it grabs the eye
and pulls it down and through all eight layers.
And when you look at it, no matter where you stand,
the painting always gives you a different perspective back.
And what happens with my work today
is that people will start to walk by it and then stop.
And they back up, and they look, and they go, what?
And they come around to the side,
they look through the side.
And when people look at them, sometimes they
ask me if they're holograms.
No, they're paintings.
It's a painting.
But I want to engage people.
I want people to be interactive with the art.
STEVENS' DAUGHTER: I've been working with my dad
to get into bigger shows that he probably wouldn't normally
put himself into.
I really just have to tell them what it is.
Because if I say a monofilament painting, of course,
the answer is, well, what is that.
And so I just have to tell them, it's
129 strands across, eight layers deep of hand-painted fishing
line.
And as soon as I get to the fishing line,
they're like, well, wait a minute.
Start that over.
Once his art has been accepted on its own merit,
then I will tell them, oh yeah, my father is the artist.
He's right over here.
And they're like, wow, he's blind, too?
JIM STEVENS: I was shot in the head in Vietnam in 1970.
And it left bullet fragments in my head.
And in 1993, I was teaching.
I was a professor at the University of Colorado.
And the bullet fragment in my head
moved and caused a stroke in my visual cortex.
And I woke up at the hospital.
And the surgeon looked at me and said, you're blind.
My vision is pin dots just straight ahead.
And I was angry for a very long time after I lost my eyesight.
And my two youngest daughters came to me and said,
Dad, you've always loved art.
Why don't you get back to it?
STEVENS' DAUGHTER: In the beginning,
it was encouragement to say that your life isn't over.
Obviously, you still have something to give back.
You can relearn to see, relearn to pour your own coffee,
relearn to do your art.
JIM STEVENS: I spent two frustrating years
learning how to do my art again without the eyesight
that an artist truly needs.
But I figured it out.
I switch back and forth now between five different lenses
while I'm working.
And my art eventually got me so busy, I forgot to be angry.
And my problem is, I enjoy too many types of art.
STEVENS' DAUGHTER: He's taken that leap, done so well,
and then broken through those boundaries
to create something new.
He started by doing the VA and a lot of smaller shows,
a lot of things that are disability oriented.
But I felt like his work was getting much better
and deserved a broader audience, and so I
wanted him to start getting into more events around town.
JIM STEVENS: I see an empty space, and I paint in the way
that I see.
So you're actually looking through empty space
to see the image.
All the art hangs freely in space on the strands.
So that exploration of empty spaces
is what led me from the monofilament
to the abstract linears that I'm doing now,
because it's a continuation of that exploration
of empty space.
They look at my abstracts, and they
realize there's the painting in front, but there's no shading.
And then they realize that all the shading
comes from the abstract design in the back.
And it engages people.
And to me, art should engage.
STEVENS' DAUGHTER: I think art is
something that speaks to everybody on such
a different level.
It gives everybody such a different perspective
to themselves, to the world, to the world
they personally live in.
I think art can heal.
JIM STEVENS: It made me overcome my anger.
It gave me purpose.
When I get discouraged, I get frustrated, I look up,
and there's that sentence.
And I wrote that for myself.
A man with a vision is never truly blind.