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Art Within the deaf and blind

I cannot help but be spellbound when I encounter art within the mysterious, yet incredibly enlightened recesses of the soul of a deaf and blind artist. Be it in the case of The Israeli Deaf and Blind theater company performing “Not by Bread Alone” in London, or 17-year-old piano prodigy Yerko DiFonisor performing in his native Chile, the intensity and sheer, transcendental brilliance that emanates from the art within them touches on the spiritual, and yet, spoken with such humane eloquence that a blistering image will burn in one's soul. A pictorial message that will not leave our minds anytime soon - not without yelling unspoken words of life, pain, joy and more.

From all the artists that I have seen and met, I find that those who are deaf, or blind, or both are most likely to bring out, from what seems “beyond,” a poignant light that inspires an aesthetic, symmetrical honesty that allows us to see and hear what it is that really matters in life. That artistic language requires a more sophisticated set of senses at work within us. Senses that do not merely rely on a simple pair of seeing eyes and hearing ears, but instead senses that are born of what is godlike in man and navigate ever so freely beyond space and time to capture the very essence of humanity. And that is what art is and should always be. Art that in our modern, money driven, Viagra crazed, superficial world seems harder and harder to find. The art within the artist who cannot see and cannot hear as we do, is brighter and clearer than what we're used to.