For years I’ve been struggling more and more with close-up vision. I’ve worn contacts for distance since sixth grade, but eventually I realized I could still see up close perfectly well without them. So I switched to glasses, thinking it would be easier to simply take them off whenever I needed to see up close.
Unexpectedly, this has turned into an advantage for painting. I’ve been experimenting with leaving my glasses off for the first half of a piece, and then taking them off intermittently afterward. I often talk about squinting to see the “big picture” and compare values accurately—but squinting also darkens everything. Letting things go fuzzy because of my natural vision softens the details without dimming them, which makes value relationships easier to judge. In a way, you could say I’m lucky to have poor vision. : )
