Framed oil on panel painting of a blue bicycle in the foreground of a derelict industrial scene by the acclaimed and widely exhibited blind painter, Gary Sergeant.

The son of a decorative plasterer, Gary Sargeant was born in 1939 in Abergele, North Wales, where his mother had been evacuated from London during the war. He was born with a squint that was never corrected and as his life prgressed his eyesight gradually and then severeley deteriorated. By the early 1990’s Mr Sergeant was registered blind, with only “a sliver of sight” in his left eye, and that impaired by a cataract.

Upon completely losing his sight Gary suffered a nervous breakdown and laboriously re-learned his craft with the aid of his wife, Val, and the inspirational art therapist Brian Tiffney. Over many years he learned to distinguish colour by the smell of the pigment in the paints he used and form and texture is determined by this sense of touch. Viewers at Mr Sergeants exhibitions are often encouraged to touch the canvas to better understand the intention of the artist.

“I work very slowly because I can’t see what I am doing. I work off the knowledge of having been in paint all my life and the perception of knowing my way round the canvas. I measure things, I always have done, with my body, so many hands like you’d measure a horse, a hand, then an arm, then a white stick. Val says to me: ‘It’s four times taller than you or six times’, and that gives me a sense of scale.”

Mr Sergeant paints the post industrial and rural scenes of his adopted home in the North East, particularly around Tyneside and Northumberland and has exhibited widely with paintings in the permanent collections of the National Library of Wales, House of Commons and the European Parliament in Brussels.