PROVIDENCE
One morning two years ago, painter Ruth Dealy woke up and saw -- nothing. Her bed, her room, even her body had all seemingly vanished overnight.
"It was like being in my own personal Twilight Zone," Dealy says. "I knew it was daytime, but I couldn't see anything."
The darkness lifted after a few hours. But Dealy, who is already blind in one eye, knew something was wrong.
"If things had just been a little hazy, I might have chalked it up to old age," she says. "But a total blank? That definitely wasn't normal."
It turned out that Dealy had uveitis, an eye condition that can cause a host of problems from blurred vision and heightened light sensitivity to cataracts and glaucoma. In extreme cases, uveitis can damage the eye's circulation system, resulting in permanent sight loss.
It was a condition Dealy knew well: as a child, she'd lost her right eye to a severe case of the disease.
This time, though, Dealy's prognosis was good. In fact, after enduring a period of temporary blindness during which she painted by touch rather than by sight, the 56-year-old artist has regained nearly all the vision in her remaining eye.
Now Dealy's ordeal is the focus "In the Land of the Blind: Paintings by Ruth Dealy," a RISD Museum exhibit that chronicles her two-year journey into darkness and back again.
The result is a surprise on several counts.
First, all but one of the paintings are landscapes, an art form that typically demands a strong visual connection to the real world. Second, all the landscapes were inspired by a specific place -- a small park outside Dealy's studio on Regent Avenue in Providence's Valley district.
Most surprising, however, is Dealy's reaction to the show's artist-survivor storyline: she hates it.
"Honestly, I can't stand all that illness-makes-you-a-better-artist crap," she declares shortly after arriving at the museum for a mid-morning interview. "Being sick doesn't make you a better artist. All it makes you an artist who's sick."
But what about the idea, celebrated in popular artists' biographies such as Lust for Life (about Van Gogh) and The Agony and Ecstasy (about Michelangelo), that suffering is a stepping stone to great art?
"That's ridiculous," Dealy answers. "If you don't have any talent, suffering isn't going to help. If that was true, there'd be a lot of artists running around with their ears cut off."
Such pronouncements might sound deliberately provocative, if not presumptuous, from some artists. But from Dealy, whose black dress, zaftig figure and kinetic mop of black hair give her the look of an art-world earth mother, they're more engaging than outrageous.
"That's just Ruth being Ruth," says contemporary art curator Judith Tannenbaum, who organized the exhibit. "It's not an act. She really feels that her art should come first. But I also think the whole experience was extremely difficult for her. You can see it in some of the paintings."
It's an assessment even Dealy finds hard to dispute. Indeed, despite efforts to downplay her illness, she freely admits that losing her eyesight, even temporarily, was a huge shock.
"At the height of the illness, I really was blind as a bat," she says. "I mean, if I tilted my head in a certain way, I could see sort of a flickering light. But otherwise, nothing. And I remember thinking: 'I may never see my children's faces again.' It was dreadful."
Healthy ambivalence
Dealy, of course, isn't the first artist with a healthy ambivalence toward injury and disease.
Illness may be a basic fact of life -- and therefore a natural subject for art -- but most artists are wary of having their work viewed through the peephole of their medical and psychological histories. They'd rather be known for their genius than their jaundice.
Perhaps the famous attack on the art-illness connection is Susan Sontag's 1978 essay "Illness as Metaphor," which argued against defining people, including artists, by their diseases.
Sontag wrote the essay after undergoing treatment for cancer.
Another artist who knows how Dealy feels is Thomas Sgouros. A longtime RISD professor with a national reputation as a painter and watercolorist, Sgorous suffers from macular degeneration, an eye disease that attacks light-sensitive cells in the retina.
Unlike uveitis, there is currently no cure for macular degeneration. Yet Sgorous, like Dealy, continues to paint, creating spare, light-filled vistas he calls "remembered landscapes."
"Sometimes it's a challenge," Sgouros says of his efforts to keep viewers focused on his art, not his illness. "On the one hand, I can't deny that I have a serious eye problem or that it has affected my work. On the other hand, if I thought people were buying my paintings because they felt sorry for me, I'd probably jump off a cliff."
Asked if the phrase "remembered landscapes" doesn't subtly advertise his condition, Sgouros responds with disarming logic:
"What else would I call them? I can't see. I paint landscapes. Therefore everything I paint is a 'remembered landscape.' "
Separate tracks
In Dealy's case, the desire to keep art and life on separate tracks may also reflect her background and training.
Born in Cambridge, Mass., Dealy attended the Rhode Island School of Design from 1967 to 1973, earning both her bachelor's and master's degrees in painting.
At that time, many art-school painting departments were still under the sway of Formalism, an austere branch of art criticism that seeks to analyze works of art on the basis of "formal" properties such as line and color.
According to Formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg, imagery and composition, not biography and psychology, are the keys to art appreciation. In effect, what you see is what you get, whether you're appraising a Renaissance altarpiece or parsing a Pop Art portrait. Everything else is superfluous.
Still, there's something undeniably fascinating about artists coping with illness, especially when it threatens their ability to make art.
Think of the elderly Monet dabbing away at his late landscapes (including the famed 80-foot-long Orangerie murals in Paris) while suffering from cataracts. Or Beethoven composing some of his greatest symphonies while slowly going deaf. Or Matisse, who virtually invented the medium of cut-paper collage after cancer confined him to a wheelchair.
Some contemporary artists have even started to make illness the focus of their art.
Through Aug. 31, for example, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art is hosting "Pulse: Art, Healing and Transformation." The show, which features works by German artist Joseph Beuys and choreographer Bill T. Jones, among others, is billed as an examination of "the complex relationship between healing and the creative process."
Illness and creativity are also the focus of Ringshout, a summer-long installation at the Worcester Art Museum (through Aug. 21).
Created by Massachusetts artist Richard Yarde, who nearly died of kidney failure in 1995, Ringshout takes both its title and inspiration from a traditional African-American healing ceremony.
Straddling conflicts
"In the Land of the Blind" straddles these conflicting trends and attitudes.
Step into the museum's lower Farago Wing gallery, for example, and the first thing you see is a big semi-abstract painting of tree branches bathed in dappled sunlight. Called Regent Place Park No. 1 (Ground Fog), it's executed in the raw, paint-lashed style that Dealy has used throughout her career (and which her blindness barely altered).
It's only after you turn a corner and move on to the show's other paintings that you come across a note explaining the exhibit, including a brief description of Dealy's illness.
On the other hand, the show's title, which appears in bold letters above Regent Place Park No. 1, puts Dealy's blindness front and center. So does the sequence of the paintings, which follows the development of Dealy's uveitis from 2001 to spring, 2002, when Dealy underwent successful lens-implant surgery at Rhode Island Hospital.
Tannenbaum, who worked closely with Dealy on the exhibit, says she wanted to preserve the paintings' chronology.
"It's really a coherent body of work," she says. "Even if you're not aware of it at first, there's a definite sense of progression from the first painting, which was done before any symptoms appeared, to the last painting, which Ruth completed after her surgery."
Even Dealy seems resigned to having her art share equal billing with her illness. "As long as I'm in the studio, I'm in charge," she sighs. "After that, it's out of my hands."
Artist's comments
Asked to comment on some of the paintings, Dealy repeats her early warning about confusing illness with inspiration. Then, after letting out a reluctant groan, she turns to Regent Place Park No. 1.
"That was the last painting I did before I knew anything was wrong," she says. "It was part of a series of paintings of the park outside my studio window. At the time, I remember thinking that it was a pretty good painting. But I had no idea what was to come."
Dealy says the park offered a convenient starting point, especially since she didn't have to leave her studio.
"I always start with something real," she says. "I've always envied artists who can just stand in front of a canvas and just start painting. I can't do that. I need a starting point. I'm a realist by default."
The next two Regent Place paintings, No. 2 and No. 3, were done while Dealy's eyesight was "still pretty good." Both feature the same dappled contrasts between light and dark as No. 1, although the darting movements of Dealy's brush have become more agitated.
"Maybe I was getting a little nervous at that point," she says.
Dealy skips over No. 4 ("It's just more of the same"), before stopping in front of No. 5. Unlike the previous canvases, in which light and dark colors are roughly equal, this one is noticeably darker. What's more, much of the paint the looks rubbed in rather than brushed on.
"At this point, I was painting completely by touch," Dealy recalls. "Every morning I'd come into the studio and try to trace the outlines of what I did the day before. I'd even leave myself little daubs of paint as markers. Unfortunately, that didn't work very well."
Ironically, No. 5 is the quietest of all Dealy's Regent Place paintings. Compared to the other works in the series, it exudes a peaceful, almost Zen-like calm.
"I find that totally amazing," Dealy says. "When I painted it, I was in a complete panic. I was convinced that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life."
Emotional flare-up
The show's only non-landscape -- a striking self-portrait in which Dealy's face and head are rendered in slashing strokes of red, black and yellow -- dates from the same period. If Dealy's emotions are generally held in check in the landscapes, here they seem to flare out with a vengeance.
"When I look at it now, I think 'Wow, I must have been pretty upset when I painted that,' " she says. "But at the time, I really I had no idea what I was doing. I could have been painting the wall for all I knew."
The last painting in the Regent Place series, No. 7, is also the most unusual.
Like the other paintings, it's filled with a dense network of leaves, branches, flowers and other organic shapes. But there's also something new: a dark green circle that hovers in the center of the painting like a mysterious bull's-eye.
Dealy says the painting, completed after her surgery, symbolizes the mark her blindness left in her memory.
"I know it sounds crazy," she says. "I spent two years worrying about going blind, then as soon as I got my sight back, I paint something with a hole in it. But I felt like I couldn't just move on. It was too soon. Even though I could see again, some of that blindness was still with me."
"In the Land of the Blind: Paintings by Ruth Dealy" runs through Sept. 7 at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St. in Providence. Hours: Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: adults $6, senior citizens $5, $3 for students with valid I.D., $2 for children ages 5-18. Phone: 454-6500.
