The Story of the Blind Artist
The paintings you see in this post might seem not be worth publishing from the first site. The thing can make us look more closely at them is the story of the artist who brought them to life. What makes them special is that this person is… blind. I don’t know if he is unique or there are some more people around the world who are totally blind but here his story.
He was not blind from the birth. He lost his sight during a digging operation in the forests of Ukraine, where they tried to find remains of Russian soldiers who are considered to be missing since the World War 2. He got blew up on the 50 year old German Nazi land mine and since then he couldn’t see with the both of his eyes.
One of the Dmitri’s works.
Before this accident he had already some recognition among the local artist community and his works didn’t look like those later ones. You can see one of his works when he still was able to see as the last photo of this post. Then when he lost sight he lost everything. He became a disabled person whom nobody needed or cared about. He was in deep depression, and once he has got a call from his old friend, who tried to support the artist and offered to conduct an public exhibition of his old works. Of course he agreed. Then they had some time before the exhibition and Dmitri - that is the name of our hero - decided to try to draw something again to present at the ongoing exhibition, to show the world that he is still an artist, even with a missing sight. He called it “Even the longest way starts with a tiny step.”
At first he couldn’t draw anything that reminded the sane painting. But after hours of practice and persistance he managed to give a birth to his first painting of his new life. Now there are 250 new works, created after the accident in which he lost his sight, and some of them are highly recognized by critics and were bought for private collections of Russian and foreighn art lovers.
Dmitri, the blind artist.
“When I see the works of Dmitri, I became ashamed of ourselves, how often do we complain, how often we say that life is not fair with us, and still we can see the world around us. But Dmitri can’t, and still he doesn’t complain, he works. Every his painting is a piece of the world he knew, he knows and he would know. We, proffesionals from art, don’t care that he can’t see - he still remains a proffesional artist for us. Of course, his style has been changed, but still he is a good colorist and stylist and we don’t make any discounts on his wound, when saying this.”, says Valentina Myzgina, the chief manager of Kharkov Art Museum.
Leningrad Siege: Now and Then
“The Siege of Leningrad, also known as The Leningrad Blockade was an unsuccessful military operation by the Axis (Nazi) powers to capture Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) during World War II. The siege lasted from September 9, 1941, to January 27, 1944, when a narrow land corridor to the city was established by the Soviets. The total lifting of the siege occurred on January 27, 1944. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest and most destructive sieges of major cities in modern history and it was the second most costly.” - from Wikipedia.
During nine hundred (!) days a few million people city of Leningrad suffered from cold and hunger, being deprived of almost all supplies of food and fuel. Many thousands died, those who survived remember this not very willingly. The situation with food was so heavy, no food was sold/distributed among people except a few grams (not even tens or hundred grams) of bread, and not each day, that people had to eat stuff that they would never eat in normal life, like making soups of leather boots (because leather is of animal origin) or boiling the wallpaper because the glue with which they were attached to walls contained a bit of organic stuff. Of course many occasions of cannibalism occurred.
On those photos you can see some pieces of those old photos made during those black days overlaid to the modern city views, respecting the place and angle of view.
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