Life & Work with Jim Stevens

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jim Stevens.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was shot in the head in Vietnam and 23 years later a bullet fragment in my head moved, triggered a severe migraine, and the two combined to cause a stroke in my visual cortex. I lost all but a pin dot of my eyesight in just 30 minutes. I lost my job teaching at the University of Colorado, my wife left and we divorced and I became the blind single parent of two preteen daughters.

Despite being legally blind, my daughters encouraged me to pursue my love of art and I struggled for two years to learn how to create art again without the eyesight an artist truly needs. But I succeeded and today my art is collected internationally, I have three books published on art, my art has won numerous Best of Show awards, I’ve been honored by the Kennedy Center as a Registered Kennedy Center Artist in their VSA program, honored with the National Gold Medal for Fine Art by the Veterans Administration, and honored with work in numerous gallery and museum shows.

Thanks to the encouragement of my daughters, I also earned black belts in both Shaolin Kempo and Taekwondo and I’m the only legally blind martial artist to win the men’s fighting competition at the Martial Arts Tournament of Champions.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
After I lost my sight, I lost my driver’s license and believed my love of art was also finished. I was so angry I took a crowbar to my motorcycle and a baseball bat to my studio, all my unfinished art, and destroyed most of my art notes drafts, and records. Not being able to drive, my daughters and I would walk to the grocery store and push the grocery cart home. You can imagine how difficult this was in winter snow, but we did it.

I spent four years dealing with anger and depression, until one day my daughters said, “Daddy, you always loved art. You should get back to it.” I told them I couldn’t see but they kept insisting until I finally promised that I’d try. I found special lenses and even made one myself to both magnify and minimize my pin dot of vision to help make art again.

I started on a small sculpture that my youngest daughter wanted and ended up switching between five different lenses while I worked. (I still use them.) But that first little sculpture was so hard and I got so frustrated that one day I threw it across the studio in an angry fit. My youngest went over, picked it up and brought it back, and set it on the studio table in front of me. She said, “Daddy, you promised not to quit.”

I felt about an inch tall and went back to work. It took 900 hours but I finished that sculpture for her and it was then I realized maybe I really could create art again. After two long frustrating years of working every day for as many as 12 to 18 hours a day relearning my craft without the eyesight an artist truly needs, people started buying my work again and began asking me to complete special commissions.

Even though I was creating art again, my blindness was still causing a few problems. I cut off the end of my thumb on a table saw roughing out a design (but unbelievably it grew back) and I misjudged the distance of a brush stroke and fell off a ladder while painting a mural and cracked a couple of vertebrae in my back (I did finish the mural).

Despite my blindness, my art was finally accepted by the public again and it had finally made me so busy, I forgot to be angry or depressed.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
As I became an artist again, I reached out to almost all areas of art because I love art in all its forms. As a kid, my Grandmother taught me drawing and painting. Later, I apprenticed under master sculptor Ed Dwight on his 12-foot bronze of Martin Luther King Jr. that stands today outside Morehouse College’s King Chapel in Atlanta, Georgia. I also learned from the Russian/Ukrainian master gem and stone carver Vasily Konovalenko for a short time before his death.

I had taught myself the art of scrimshaw etching and ivory restoration before I lost my eyesight and after the sculpture for my daughter, it was the first art I focused on professionally after losing my sight. I am still busy with my restoration work for individuals, companies, and museums, but the more art I did the more I felt I could do and it wasn’t long before I was painting again and completing other works.

But each medium I tried required relearning how to do it and creating ways to do it with the tiny field of vision I have left. It has required some ingenious workarounds and it takes me a bit longer but I have been able to figure out how to do all the art I love. Sometimes, when I choose to paint an ultra-realistic piece I’m asked if they are Photoshop prints. For those pieces, I have to tell folks that my work is all hand painted.

I’ve even created new painting techniques that have been honored with Best of Show awards and shown in galleries and museums. I especially enjoy the abstract linear painting technique I created and I’ve had the honor of celebrities permitting me to paint their portraits in that technique for fundraising campaigns that have helped our nation’s veterans. I’ve concentrated on black and white in my painting work thus far, but recently decided to move into color again so now I have more work and study and practice ahead of me to train my eyesight to love color again.

It may sound strange, but I feel most proud when I am at a gallery and someone admiring my work says how beautiful it is and then they turn to me, see my white cane, realize they’re talking to a blind man, and ask if I know where the artist is.

I have developed a philosophy, wrote it down and it hangs on every wall in my studio. It reads:
“A man with a vision is never truly blind.”

We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
I’ve been asked what I learned from the Covid crisis for this interview and I hope we all learned that politicians are not to be trusted to make medical decisions and in a crisis, we win by working together not pushing individual agendas, and most of all I hope we learned how precious our time is with those we love.

Contact Info:

• Website: The Scrimshaw Studio and Art of Jim Stevens at https://www.scrimshawstudio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jimstevens7762
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jim.stevens.31924