In Kansas City, visually impaired artist makes a splash with her tactile, colorful paintings and collages

From the Kansas City Star:

It’s First Friday at the Crossroads Coffeehouse, and well-wishers are coming and going from the table where Tina Blatter (pictured) is holding court.

“Hi-i-i-i!” she says with unfailing cheer to every person who walks up, touches her on the shoulder and identifies himself or herself. “I’m so glad you came!”

Her canvases hang on the coffee shop’s west wall. Most of them are fluid, abstracted landscapes of the Southwest United States that Blatter has re-imagined in salmon, blue, purple and fuchsia. The paint is piled high and brought into further relief with plaster, string, pebbles, foam — objects she discovered over the years and incorporated into her art.

In promotional materials Blatter describes herself as a “self-taught, legally blind artist.” Twenty years ago, she made a commitment to her art, with tactile creations her stock-in-trade.

Throughout the night, several of her friends, blind as well as sighted, approach the wall and run their hands over the surface of her paintings.

“When I was in Colorado, I had a vision,” she says. “Everything you see says, ‘Please Do Not Touch.’ So I told people, ‘Please touch!’ ”

At the age of 17, well-meaning people gave Blatter some practical, sensible — and fateful — advice. Forget about art school. You’re not really college material anyway. Teaching? I don’t think so. Have you considered a position in the fast-growing social services field?

One of her larger works is in three pieces. It’s a triptych, she explains to an inquiring friend.

“I see the world in sections, so that’s why they’re in sections,” she says. “I put the canvases together at first. I use acrylic paint, and I put that on heavy. Then I separate them while they’re wet, or else they stick together. Then I apply light spackling compound with paint mixed in, to give texture.”

Ten years ago, the Kansas City-based nonprofit Accessible Arts invited her to move here and become its program director.

She said yes. The decision changed her life. Mostly for the worse.

“Really, the blindness is the least of her worries,” says Pat Milburn, one of her closest confidants.

Milburn had never been around a visually impaired person until she volunteered to read to Blatter 10 years ago. She has been with her through some of the worst times.

“There were years, not just days or weeks or months, that I thought she would never be able to hold a brush again,” Milburn says. “But she was determined never to give up her art.”

“It would have been so easy to give up,” says Christine Klasinski, a friend who is also visually impaired. “But Tina knows she’s an artist. She gets so excited when people appreciate her art. I’m not sure all artists are that way. It’s funny, but on a certain level I don’t see her as visually impaired. I see her as doing what she really wants to do.”

•••

Tina Blatter (rhymes with daughter) was born 57 years ago to first-generation German immigrants in Williamsville, N.Y., near Buffalo. Her father sold toys to mom-and-pop stores in the region, while her mother sold homegrown vegetables and flowers at a roadside stand.

Tina was born prematurely and didn’t get enough oxygen. As a child, she strained to see anything that was more than a few inches away. Despite this, she was raised like the two siblings before her, as if she had been born fully sighted.

Her parents sent her to regular schools and steered her away from other blind kids. Her only specialized education came from an itinerant teacher who worked with the visually impaired.

What’s more, she had an undiagnosed learning disability. She struggled with classes. She went through several pairs of glasses in physical education because she couldn’t see the ball coming her way. Classmates mocked her relentlessly.

“In middle school my grades were poor, so I think they thought I would do better in special ed,” she recalls. “But most of the kids in special ed had behavioral problems. Finally, one time I got a B and my friends said, ‘Well, yeah — but you’re in special ed.’ ”

She wants to be clear that her parents, both now deceased, “did the very best they could” and that they probably felt some shame and responsibility for her problems.

Still, she was almost an adult before she even knew she was legally blind, and it wasn’t her parents who told her.

“A doctor told me when I was 16,” she said. “He slapped me on the knee and said, ‘Oh, honey, don’t worry about it.’ Very patronizing.”

When she was 13, she picked up a utility knife in the kitchen and began whittling. Thin strips of wood were then assembled into a cityscape — her first tactile piece of art. When her father died in 1995, she found it still hanging in a prominent place in his office.

“They were both proud and supportive of me doing artwork,” she says.

Her parents thought a practical course for her life would be teaching. And that was the plan in her senior year of high school, until she met with a counselor from the New York State Commission for the Blind.

“He told me that I wasn’t college material,” she recalls. “I told him I wanted to teach kids with vision impairments. That same counselor said, ‘Oh, no. You want to work with the retarded.’ ”

So it was back to special ed — this time as her major at a local college, D’Youville. Afterward, she moved across the state and spent the next few years in jobs working with the mentally disabled.

She started to paint. At first she tried to create a realist style. She would scrutinize images with her peripheral vision until she had memorized the forms, then try to re-create them on canvas.

Finally, a friend who was a photographer said, “I have to spend a couple of hundred dollars on a lens that distorts the picture. You can do that naturally.”

Eventually, she came to love the impressionists, whose pop-bottle refractions of splendor reminded her of her own childhood, standing awestruck in fields of flowers. As she learned more about her own disability, she wondered if that might have been behind their genius. She’s convinced that van Gogh had glaucoma — all those gauzy globes of light.

In 1980, she moved to Baltimore to escape the New York winters. But she still held down rehab jobs while dabbling in her art.

The wakeup call came in 1985, when she was diagnosed with bilateral cataracts in both eyes. At first the news sent her into a deep funk.

“No one said to me, ‘You could have other problems,’ ” Blatter says. “It forced me to deal with my low vision, because now I had even less vision.”

She took up the white cane that her parents detested, as much to alert motorists as to find the curb.

Her new assertiveness as a blind person led to a breakthrough in her art. One day she saw some wooden nickel-size pieces of rice paper and thought they would be interesting to add to her canvas. She liked the way they felt to the touch. She began to add tissue paper and other objects. She started to exhibit her tactile collages, as she called them, in her home and even made some sales.

Thus emboldened, she applied for training at the renowned Colorado Center for the Blind. After her training, she took her first job working with the visually impaired: senior citizens with recent vision loss who needed help with their transitions to using talking clocks and taking the bus.

“I loved it,” she says. “And I got into the Denver art scene.”

At night she would kneel on the floor and paint on her bed. She began to add foam, beads, colorful foil, netting, salt, yarn. Her sighted friends noted how the collages changed as the light moved across them. At the same time, she says, “I was creating coherent, tactile representations for blind people who wanted access to visual information.”

In the summer of 2000, Accessible Arts invited her to accompany some students from the Kansas School for the Blind on a 900-mile camping trip along the Oregon Trail. Afterward, she rolled out plaster gauze and showed them how to use it like clay to create tactile displays of the sites they had visited.

Accessible Arts made her the offer. It was her first full-time arts position and instantly made Blatter the talk of the Kansas City low-vision community. But there would be one more setback ahead, and it threatened to undo everything Blatter had worked for.

•••

The Braille ‘n Speak 2000 was touted as a revolution in accessible technology. It was a notetaker specially geared to blind and visually impaired users. It recorded both spoken notes and those entered using a Braille keypad.

It cost $1,400 in 2000. Klasinski recalls that for most people she knew, it was worth every penny.

“Fifteen years ago, can you imagine what it would be like to go through your life and not put down information?” Klasinski asks. “It would be like you going through life without pen and paper. For many people who went through rehab, that was such a breakthrough moment, getting that Braille ‘n Speak.”

The 2000 model was a considerable upgrade on the older model Blatter had, so she ordered it. On the day it arrived, she went over to the house of a friend, Karen Folsom, who lived on Meyer Boulevard. Folsom had one as well and showed Blatter some of its new features.

“Tina doesn’t even remember what we were doing that night,” Klasinski says. “We went over to Karen’s, and the sun was starting to set. Tina decided to walk up to Brookside and catch the bus because she didn’t have cab fare. And that was when she was hit.”

She was wearing the Braille ‘n Speak in a fanny pack. She had gotten half a block away when someone stopped her and grabbed the pack. There was a brief struggle. Then he hit her in the skull, probably with a baseball bat, and made off with what must have seemed to him later as a worthless prize.

•••

The onetime rehab worker was now the rehab patient. And it wasn’t going well.

“I had severe tremors in my left leg and my right hand,” she recalls. “The doctors here couldn’t do anything for me.”

She had trouble standing up. Milburn saw her become disoriented in her own apartment.

“I had doubts that she would be able to live independently,” Milburn recalls.

The job that had brought her to Kansas City seven months earlier was slipping away. After the brain injury, she would soldier into the Accessible Arts office and try to work a four-hour day. Finally, she took a leave of absence, then went on disability.

“For a long time, I felt I was a failure because I left that job,” she says.

At the end of 2001, she went back to Colorado for a short visit, and that led to a breakthrough.

She had lunch with an old colleague from the Colorado Center for the Blind, Duncan Larsen. Larsen talked about the car accident she’d had years earlier and the brain injury that resulted from it. Blatter talked about her problems staying balanced and oriented. Larsen said she’d had those, too, and had found relief through a form of alternative therapy known as brain repatterning.

Blatter wanted to know more about it. As it happened, Larsen had been so impressed by the therapy, she’d become trained in it as well. Over the next week she saw Blatter four times. When she was done, Blatter says, the tremors had subsided.

Larsen says she found “basic confusion in the brain, that her connections were switched — left-right, top-bottom, front-back. Then I determined what would connect or switch them back.”

Larsen’s patients often respond favorably to acupressure applied to the face and head. But reconnecting parts of the brain does not always involve physical stimuli.

“Sometimes it involves bringing up a certain emotion,” she says. “The brain is not the computer we think it is. Sometimes a recent emotion, or a throwback from our childhood, can cause imbalances in the brain. Imbalances could be there for a very long time but not create a problem, until someone has had an injury like the kind Tina had.”

•••

It was a start, but there was much more involved with treating her traumatic brain injury. Blatter had physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy. Milburn drove her to most of her appointments, and she could feel the tension in the room.

“I got the feeling that the doctors didn’t know what to do with her,” she says. “I don’t think they’d ever worked with a TBI who was blind before. The brain injury exacerbated the problems with blindness. And she had a learning disability.”

The standoff came to a head one day when Blatter insisted on using a support cane — a sturdy aluminum waist-high crutch with a curved handle — in addition to her white walking cane.

“My walking was very slow and labored, and my gait was way off,” she recalls. “It was my agenda to ask to use a support cane.”

Her therapist said no.

“They told her at therapy it would be dangerous if she had a white cane in one hand and a support cane in the other,” Milburn says. “But the opposite was true. When she had the two canes, she didn’t fall. She absolutely advocated for that. What she did and what she’s come through, I hope it helps other patients in the future.”

It took more than three years before she could retire the support cane, but with the help of a specialist at St. Luke’s Hospital, Brad Steinle, Blatter regained her balance.

Nine years later, though, she still has trouble standing for long periods. Blatter’s speech is much slower than it was before the attack.

“I tire more easily now,” Blatter says. “And when I get tired, I can’t form sentences.”

•••

She wasn’t just determined to recover her balance. She wanted back what the attacker had really stolen from her — the craft that she had spent decades learning. That took even longer.

“Even in the tactile work she did, her attention span was so short,” Milburn says. “She physically didn’t have the eye-hand coordination. But most of all, it was overwhelming to her. Anything that took a multitude of supplies, all the extraneous things, it bothered her so much.”

One day, a fiber artist, Jill Harmon, offered to teach her how to dye scarves.

“It was simple,” Blatter says. “It was just a few steps, and you didn’t have to be real coordinated to do it.”

And she was good at it.

“That really started her comeback,” Milburn says. “She started to gain confidence. And they became popular.”

Friends bought her scarves. Silk, which had started out as therapy, became her new medium.

Six years after her assault, Blatter finally picked up a paintbrush again. A friend had driven her to Arizona, and the vivid colors unlocked something. When she returned home, she began to create mountain scenes on canvas. Unlike her earlier collages, she used more paint and only a few tactile enhancements.

Still, Blatter knows she is a changed person. It is clear from comparing the works in the Crossroads show to some of her earlier works, hanging on the walls of her apartment south of the Country Club Plaza.

By the door, there’s “Mardi Gras,” an ambitious, multilayered collage she made in Denver. Above the couch, a shiny, foil-encased triptych of water lilies she made while traveling in South Dakota.

Does it depress her to imagine never attaining that level of complexity in her work again?

“No,” she says. “I don’t mourn it. I’m doing the painting. I was doing the silk scarves before I was doing the painting. It was new for me. I don’t really think too much about, ‘Gee, I haven’t done a three-section tactile waterfall with rock formations lately.’ That was the work I did then. Maybe I’ll do it in the future, but I don’t hold onto it. I’m doing more of a variety than I was before.”

And just as the cataracts spurred her to pursue her art, the assault has spurred her to do new things. This month, she’s publishing a memoir, “Journey to Creative Heights With the Help of Angels,” detailing her recovery using conventional and alternative healing. The Kentucky State Federation for the Blind wants her to do a motivational speech to parents of visually impaired children. She’d love to move into that sphere as well.

The dream, it seems, is changing. And yet it is still the same.

“For a long time, I was just taking it day-to-day,” she says. “But I am settled in Kansas City, and I want to continue to be creative.”