Shouting in the Dark: My Journey Back To The Light

by John Bramblitt, Lindsey Tate

Overview

John Bramblitt makes his living as a visual artist. His works have been sold in over twenty different countries, and he’s received three Presidential Service awards for the art workshops he teaches. He’s painted portraits of skateboarder Tony Hawk and blues legend Pops Carter. He’s given talks about his art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there has even been a documentary made about him. And. .. he’s blind.

When Bramblitt was declared legally blind ten years ago due to complications with epilepsy, his hopes of becoming a creative writing teacher were shattered and he sunk into a deep depression. He felt disconnected from family and friends, alienated and alone. But then something amazing happened—he discovered painting. He learned to distinguish between different colored paints by feeling their textures with his fingers. He taught himself how to paint using raised lines to help him find his way around the canvas, and through something called haptic visualization, which enables him to "see" his subjects through touch. He now paints amazingly lifelike portraits of people he's never seen—including his wife and son. Shouting in the Dark is the story of Bramblitt's life, his journey navigating through this new territory of blindness, and how he ultimately rekindles his joy, passion, and relationships through art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762780075
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/04/2012
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

John Bramblitt is an artist whose work has been sold in over twenty countries. He has appeared on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, ABC, and BBC Radio, and he's been featured in The New York Times and Psychology Today. He's the subject of the documentary short “Bramblitt.”                 

Editorial Reviews

In this beautifully written memoir, portrait artist John Bramblitt tells us why being blind doesn’t necessarily mean living in a world of darkness. His story is both inspirational and haunting, and readers will find themselves thinking about it long after the last page. It is one of those books you find yourself slowing down at the end just to make it last.” 
—Homer Hickam, Author, Rocket Boys/October Sky
 
“Shouting in the Dark is an incredibly inspiring story of courage and a triumph over what could have been a tragedy.”
—Sheryl Berk, co-author of Soul Surfer
 
“John’s talent for creating emotion through his use of color and texture in his paintings is evident. He
successfully challenges people’s conceptions of blindness, ultimately finding that painting gives him a meaningful opportunity to connect to others.”
—Governor Rick Perry

From the Publisher

With the assistance of children's author Tate (Kate Larkin, the Bone Expert, 2008, etc.), blind artist Bramblitt chronicles his childhood and his art without resorting to pathos or sentimentality. From an early age, the author accepted the two halves of his life, sick and well, and integrated the two. In his memoir, he offers no complaints of the poor medical care he received from age 4 in his Texas hometown. He suffered from undiagnosed congenital kidney disease for three years, then months of Lyme disease, again undiagnosed, and eventually the epilepsy that would lead to total blindness. He was lucky, however, in that he always had friends by his side. They may not have always understood his difficulties, but they supported him. The author's determination to complete school and teach, in spite of missed classes and incompletes, illustrates the remarkable tenacity with which he has attacked life. Early on, Bramblitt drew from memory—"all my favorite drawings were stored in my brain in all their intricate detail." Surely this ability is what led him to find and develop haptic visualization, a way of seeing the small parts of an object in order to make them a whole. The sense of touch is a large part of the nature of that perception, and Bramblitt's work is a good example of an artist who proves Picasso's comment that a painter "paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen." An artist's story about more than just his talent and his techniques.

Kirkus Reviews