The last thing Kevin White remembers from
the evening of his accident is the brilliant June sky and thinking
"what a beautiful sunset it would be."
CARL E. FEATHER / The Star Beacon
|
That was back in 1984, when
Kevin, just nine credit hours short of his commercial art degree from
Cuyahoga Community College, suffered a spinal cord injury that left him
a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair.
"A friend was driving the car," he says.
"We were just going home, and I just happened to be a passenger. I only
go by what they tell me, that we were blindsided by a drunk driver. No
one else got hurt out of that ... And that was that. We were almost
there, just three blocks from home."
The first few years following the accident,
Kevin focused on surviving. "I always had art in the back of my mind,
but I knew I had to rehabilitate first. My main concern was to get up
and get walking again."
His family tried to care for him, but Kevin
says the demands were too great. "They had their own lives to live,"
says Kevin without a trace of bitterness in his voice. "I think that's
probably the thing to do. I can see it."
His social worker told him about Broadfield
Manor in Madison Township, and Kevin became a resident in 1992. He says
the long days with nothing to occupy his mind were grueling; the
accident had taken away the use of his hands, arms and legs, but not
his creative spirit.
"I had to do something," he says. "I could
not sit with an idle mind. I kept asking the counselor if he could get
me a computer."
Kevin got his wish in 1995. The Ohio Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation provided a used computer and software.
"It just happened to have an art program on it," he says. "I said 'Let me mess around with it and see what becomes of it."
The package included an interface that
allowed him to manipulate the computer's cursor using a small sensor
that attaches to the user's forehead. Kevin, however, mounted his on
the bridge of his eyeglasses.
"It's like a little microchip," he says. "I
used to have it on my forehead, but I came up with this idea. It
wouldn't stick to my forehead."
It took several months for Kevin to master
the interface and basic art program that came with the computer. He had
no books, no tutorials, no online resources or training.
"Just by sitting at this
computer every day and practicing and practicing," he says, explaining
how he mastered the software. "Whatever art program I could get, I
practiced with it."
The
acquisition of a more powerful computer and a copy of Photoshop allowed
him to experiment with layers, gradients and other elements of computer
art. In time, he was creating complex designs and planetary landscapes
that recall the lovely colors of the sky on that fateful June evening.
Kevin calls it "Acid Art" because it is colorful and suggestive of the hallucinogenic art of the 1960s.
Despite the complexity and quality of the
work he was producing, it never ventured beyond his west wing room.
Sometimes, due to the second-hand nature and unreliability of the
equipment the state provided, his art vanished, the victim of a hard
drive crash. Kevin persisted, an artist without an audience. The lone
exception was five years ago, when he teamed up with another artist for
a two-man show in Cleveland.
"Who looks into a nursing facility for
artists?" says Kevin. "Nobody, realistically. They look at a nursing
facility as a place to put people for their last go-around."
