I have congenital glaucoma
it is a degenerative disease
so at this point I have no vision in my left eye at all
and haven't since I was about 13
and have very limited vision in my right eye
The audio descriptive tours are designed for people who have limited vision
or no vision at all
I give an hour and a half audio descriptive tour
giving detailed descriptions of the paintings
I've seen a lot of these paintings and things
that I talk about
I do have extensive vision lexicon to draw from
which obviously somebody who hasn't seen for their whole life doesn't have
My husband is extremely supportive
and very patient and helpful
He will come along with me beforehand to go through the exhibition
and then I come home with all of that material and I then work actually with my mother
We have a shared lexicon of visual memory
So for example with the Turner
there is a painting Sunset from the top of Rigi which I describe
a very difficult painting for both my husband
and my mother to describe
What helped was her being able to say when we would drive down
the canyon in the Rocky Mountains
and you could see the fog coming in over the valley
I remember that
So I can draw on those types of memories
"These become like somebody is looking through cataracts
like you're looking through a mist and it's just washes
of colour…”
Painting is a blind man's profession
because a painter paints not what he sees
but what he feels
So I think that the main thing is getting across
that emotional reaction that somebody has when they look at a piece of artwork for the first time
or a piece of artwork they might remember and then have that brought back to them by looking at it
“They’re kind of blues, mixed together, sort of softer and darker blues…”
Describing paintings to someone or pieces of artwork to someone who's never seen before
particularly paintings is very difficult
“Many people in it with oars sticking out the sides…”
After I gave my first tour
there was a gentleman who came up after the tour
and said that he hadn't seen since he was two
and so had no memory of colour really
and I said well
what do you think of, when somebody says blue what comes to your mind?
and here I was thinking it would be something like ice
or something cold or water
and he said jeans, and I said "Why? Why jeans?"
and he said because everybody tells me that jeans are blue and my jeans are blue
so I think of jeans and the texture of jean fabric
Often all of these things are dependent on the individual
and what background they have, what memories they have
and how to tap into that
and try to get at what kind of description is going to be the most successful for them
I suppose I hope that when people have been on one of the tours that I give
that they'll walk away having had as close to the same type of experience
that any goer to a gallery would have
so that people can create their own opinion about the works that
I've been describing to them