Success for Swindon graffiti artists with face blindness

Street artist Sarah Harris is color-blind and has aphantasia

Imagine the inability to picture a sandy beach, a stunning sunset, or even the person you love.

For Swindon street artist Sarah Harris, aka ‘Lost Dogs’, this is the reality.

Ms. Harris was diagnosed with aphantasia, or “face blindness,” as she calls it, in her fifties.

Scientists describe aphantasia as people who are unable to conjure up images in their head – known as their mind’s eye.

After picking up a spray can for the first time during lockdown, Ms Harris was recently asked to paint the cover of a global graffiti graphic novel – something she says happened because of her amazement.

She was attending an underground group of artists when she said she had been asked to paint a page of the graphic novel in black and white.

Mrs Harris resisted because her work is known for its colour; As she is also color blind, she often juxtaposes colors that are particularly striking and bright.

She said the page she was originally given to paint “had repeated the same character, I said because of my face blindness if I paint the same face four times it looks like four different people, so maybe you don’t want that.” I do that”.

Ms. Harris paints the cover of “Contraband: Bad Benny” on a wall in Stroud

Hear Ms Harris tell BBC Radio Wiltshire about the novel and the aphantasia

She said it was sent back, saying, “‘If color is your thing, why not do the front page instead?’

“I was really thrilled to be pushed onto the cover for my cons,” she says.

Published by indie comics title Markosia, Ms Harris and fellow artist, Southend-based KJ Stilwell, collaborated with graffiti artists from eight other countries including Indonesia, Turkey and India.

Ms Harris said: “It’s even more fun when something is global. All different cultures are involved, although drawing a story in London. They bring their own local art styles, which is exciting.”

People followed comics history on sites like Facebook and had to wait until an artist somewhere in the world had painted a page of street graffiti to know what happened next in the story.

Carfax Street, Swindon, commissioned by Swindon Borough Council. Unable to envision the people and train tracks in her head, Ms. Harris used digital images of train tracks and photos of Swindon’s Blondini statue to paint this piece

Ms Harris has looked back on how tough school was for her and hopes the label won’t stop people with face blindness from becoming the next generation of artists.

“Teachers used to say to me, ‘We don’t understand Sarah, your still lifes are amazing, but everything else, it’s like you’re not trying,’ they thought I wasn’t trying, but I really was.

“Now I look back and it’s really obvious that I could do still lifes because there was a bowl of fruit right in front of me so I could copy it and draw it accurately. They never put two and two together, so I just got scolded a lot for not bothering.”

When a young person with aphantasia considers learning art, Ms. Harris says, “do it and don’t worry, you probably have a classmate who can draw perfect faces without any reference whatsoever.”

“Don’t think, ‘Oh, you’re a real artist and I’m not,’ because real art is a huge range and there are a lot of artists with a fancy and I can look at their work and see that it’s similar to mine.

“Apart from not being very good at recognizing people on the street, the aphantasia hasn’t really put me at a disadvantage at all.”

Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter And Instagram. Submit your story ideas to: [email protected]

Source