The impossible dream

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As an hereditary eye disease claimed Tammy Ruggles sight, she learned how to keep producing art. She tells her inspiring story

I was born with an eye disease known as Retinitis Pigmentosa, which robs you of your vision over time. As a young girl growing up on my grandparents’ farm in Kentucky, I was too occupied with running around the fields with my siblings, cousins and dog to worry about what wearing my thick glasses really meant.

Yes, at night someone always had to hold my hand or I would hold on to an arm or jacket sleeve. At school I had to sit in the front desk in order to see the chalkboard. And then there were a few times I stepped on a nail jutting up from a board in the barn because I couldn’t see it. But for the most part, I spent my youth unconcerned about vision loss.

I had as much fun with my indoor activities (writing short stories and poetry, and sketching portraits and animals) as I did my outdoor activities. I took four years of art classes in high school.

At the age of 16 I met my sweetheart, and knew I wanted to become a social worker, so Office For The Blind helped pay my way through college, where I earned a Bachelor’s in social work, then a Master’s in Adult Education and Counseling. During college, I took three more years of art classes, as electives.

Not everyone has the good fortune to work in a profession they love. I was born to be a social worker, and it was very fulfilling.  My sweetheart and I wanted to have a child together, and we named him Travis.

My vision got worse over the years. My glasses got thicker and it was harder and harder to read regular-size print. But I took it in stride and went about my life. By the time I reached 40, however, my vision had declined to the point of legal blindness, and this is where I could no longer minimize my visual impairment. I had no choice but to face it straight on. I lost my driver’s licence, my social work position, and my sense of identity.

If I weren’t a social worker helping people, who was I? A mother, certainly.  But no longer a helping professional.

It was my role as a mother that compelled me forward. My son needed me. He was 14 and his dad had died in a car accident four years earlier, leaving behind no insurance and no social security. I needed extra money. I needed to feel as if I were contributing to the human race again. My thoughts turned to writing. Could it be more than a hobby? With nothing to lose, I took a chance by writing some self-help and social issues articles, and have been a freelance writer ever since, doing so with accessibility features on my computer.

What happened to my art during these years? Mostly it fell by the wayside. As my vision worsened, my sketching dried up. For 10 years I didn’t draw a thing.

And then a wonderful thing happened in 2009. My son bought me a 47-inch TV screen that doubled as my computer monitor. Images could be blown up giant-size. Big enough to see them.  Since I see best in high contrast, I began sketching with a black ‘Sharpie’ permanent marker pen.

These two items enabled me to sketch portraits again – something I thought was lost forever. I sketched compulsively, almost day and night, for fear that I would lose the ability again.

I was able to see well enough to sketch this way for a few more years, but then RP had its way again, and people began telling me that my portraits weren’t as good as they used to be, that they couldn’t recognize the person in the picture.

That’s when I decided I’d taken art as far as my vision would allow. I knew no way of continuing. Sculpting had never appealed to me. Neither had crafts. It was time to put my sketching away. But just as I was about to put art behind me and adjust to the loss, as I had adjusted to other losses before, an online friend, Sonja van Schalm, suggested I try finger painting, because it was something I could do intuitively.

I was sceptical, for several reasons. One, I was a sketcher, not a painter. I had only one painting, and I’d done it with a brush. Finger painting sounded ‘childish’ to me. Two, I was legally blind and could barely see. Yes, I understood what Sonja meant about using intuition – I use it all the time to do many things – but to apply it to finger painting? It sounded impossible. I was still thinking that painting was something that had to be done with the eyes.

But art was such a big part of me, I had to give it a try, and I discovered that once I let go of the idea of perfect, visual representation, another kind of art came through, and it was by instinct, imagination, and memory. No longer could I rely on my eyesight to create. I couldn’t even see a person or a photo well enough to duplicate it. Now I could only capture general shapes and colours. I had to paint the images in my mind’s eye, and those images hearkened back to the rustic scenery I grew up with in rural Kentucky.

To create again, I had to discard the notion that I had to use my eyes and that it had to be perfect. I had to let go of my old art, to find my new art. Up until then, art had only been a private passion, something to do on a personal level at home, but when people began to tell me that my paintings were ‘interesting’ and ‘emotional’, and could be in an art show, I realized I could show the world that the blind and visually impaired could create art.

Since April 2013, my finger paintings have been exhibited in a few local art galleries, and have been featured in literary journals and art magazines. Finger painting creates a dialogue between the viewer and myself. Since I can’t really see my finished picture very well, I rely on the audience to tell me what they see, what they feel, what they like or don’t like. I like hearing all the different interpretations. It’s a dialogue that couldn’t have taken place with my sketches. In a way, RP is responsible for my art.

I am finding out that there is more than one way to be a social worker. I can use my art to help others, just as I used my writing. I have taught finger painting to children in a community outreach programme, and was invited to speak to local art teachers on how to teach art to blind and visually impaired students.

Whenever I am asked about my artist’s statement, it is usually a variation of the same thing: When people look at my paintings, I want them to feel an emotion. Whether yearning, a memory, regret, a fondness for a time or place that once meant something to them.