Phoenix, Ore. — Sometimes artists don’t have to see what they’re creating, they just feel it. That’s how one Rogue Valley woman paints her pieces; each canvas, a blank slate for her next vision.
“I’ve got my music on, my paint brushes, and my paints, and that’s what I do, ” Iris Loehr said.
Loehr doesn’t see like most people, but her vision on the canvas is pretty clear.
“When I did the owl, I put the background in first, on the dark color, and then I could actually sort of see where his eyes went, and his beak, and it was just sort of there on the canvas.” Loehr said. “I can’t really see it, you understand, I can’t visualize it, but I get this sort of vague idea that it’s really there.”
Art has been present in Loehr’s life since high school, but she didn’t start painting until more recently.
“I really started doing it after i got really sick… you know, what am I going to do when I’m laying there in bed? And that’s when I started drawing,” Loehr said.
Doctors couldn’t diagnose the illness, and Loehr still doesn’t know what it was. She noted life changed dramatically after that.
“I”ve always been blind in the right eye, but my left eye had a retinal detachment, and it was reattached, so my vision is twenty-two-hundred, and it has been for years,” Loehr said. “Some things actually show up for me. not like you would see it, but how I would see it.”
Since 1972, to be exact. But that doesn’t stop Loehr from painting her vision.
With the support of her husband, Robin, and her ever-present cat, Pixie, Loehr says she’s continuing one piece at a time, each project, a part of who she is.
“It gives me something I can do… for me.”
Loehr is on Facebook, click here for more information.
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