Disabled film-maker and artist Richard Butchins questions assumptions and expectations in his bold film, as he hears from visually impaired artists giving us new ways of seeing
Even with the unavoidable flattening effect caused by seeing it through a television screen, Keith Salmon’s painting, Sunlight and Stones, Beinn a’Ghlo, strikes immediately at your eye and heart. It looks like the eternal essence of the thing – sunlight on stones, as it was, is now and shall be ever more. Moving through his other landscape paintings of the Scottish Highlands, it is as if you are moving through the hills and forests – not because they are hyper-realistic, but precisely because they are not. They capture the ineffable qualities of the place so beautifully, it is as if they wrap themselves around you and take you there.
If Salmon had been the only artist showcased in The Disordered Eye (BBC Four), he would have been enough to answer the question posed in the programme: do you need good eyesight to make great art? Salmon was diagnosed in 1989 with diabetic retinopathy and his vision deteriorated quickly after that. He is now registered as blind.
