As a first-year international student from Pakistan, I once came across an uneducated, yet gifted person whose artwork was far better than many of my counterparts who took extensive art courses in high school. After my first encounter with Waris I became determined to discover the origins of his art.
As he carefully traces the outline of a tree branch on faded paper, the frail man sitting cross-legged in front of me keeps one hand slightly atop the other, as if guiding it.† His hands move across the paper as if feeling every fiber; he holds the pencil very close to the lead. Occasionally, his hand is splayed, fingertips spread out on the unfinished, yet exquisite black-and-white landscape. The sketch is very tactile ó you can almost feel the texture of the leaves and the light softly filtering through the branches.
But there is something even more extraordinary about Waris, the man who drew this sketch. He was born blind. He did not develop the blindness at a later age ñó he has never seen light, colors or the play of shadows. He has never set eyes on a tree, a bird, or the ocean, but he sketches them with the skill of a sighted person. The first time I observed Waris and discovered his blindness, it seemed entirely impossible ó how did he have any perception of depth, shadows and texture, if he had never set eyes on the objects he drew? The answers came much later.
Since that first day, I took to making frequent stops at the crowded street corner where Waris sat. Soon, conversations become a daily tradition. Conversations that temporarily brought me out of the competitive, ambitious bubble I lived in ó a product of my upbringing in an upper-class family, and my schooling at one of the top institutions in my country. Here, as I sat next to Waris, with barefooted kids, taxis and horse carriages passing us by, I was a common man, mesmerized by the sight of his hands moving deftly across the paper.
As I watched the remarkable man beside me draw ó a man with no eyes, or education, I realized his art came not from the world around him, but truly from inside him. This was brilliant art. I scanned the pile of finished sketches that lay next to him ó† mainly landscapes, sometimes inanimate objects, but always disarmingly real. Sometimes he would sell them for a few pennies, but more often he would give them away to admiring eyes as gifts. I wondered what motivated him to spend hours sketching shapes on a piece of paper that he would never set eyes on.
Over the weeks that followed, I realized that Waris was a self-taught man in every sense of the word. He grew up in a house where eight siblings slept in one room. He was always the familyís liabilityíó the blind child who did not bring an income to the house like the others did. Unlike his siblings, he was not allowed to play cricket on the streets or go to school.
Waris grew up in his own lonely world of darkness, with touch being his only interaction with the objects around him.† Touch taught him the shapes that he could ëseeí in his head, and that he could now put down so skillfully on paper. The first object he felt in great detail was a tiny toy ship that belonged to his older brother óthe first toy of its kind in his household. Waris was seven then. He held the wooden ship and ran his hands along its every side ó the sail, the hull, the carvings along it. A few days later, as his mother knelt alongside the stream behind their house to fill up water, Waris sat next to her with a crooked stick in his hands. He was drawing out a rough form of the toy ship on the ground ó his very first work of art.
As he grew older, Waris would collect scrap paper and steal pencils from his school-going brother. He would sketch rocks, leaves and shoes ó everyday objects around him that he had taken pains to feel and remember in great detail. Using his hands, he would feel shape and measure distance. He would ask his family and friends about shadows and light, and memorize these facts that we know from vision. Back home, in my curiosity to explain Warisí gift, I read more about vision and learned that perspective is very much a matter of direction, and that touch can reveal direction just as vividly as vision detects depth. Like vision, touch produces an awareness of how surfaces rise and fall, have bumps and hollows, how they come towards us and recede.
Warisís art was the product of a rigorously trained mind. It was his way of showing the sighted world what he was capable of, and something to look forward to every day. Even by the standards of a developing country like Pakistan, Waris came from an impoverished family. Much of his artistic progress was accelerated by his own perseverance, and his asking those around him questions about objects he sketched. It was not recognition or financial gains that drove him to this. He sketched simply to have an outlet in a life of darkness, to feel that he could interact with the world around him, and to express the plethora of thoughts and emotions trapped in his head.
Usman Gul is a first-year student from Pakistan and can be reached for comment† at UGul13@wooster.edu