BLINDSIGHT: An Ophthalmologist Reflects on Visual Loss and Artistic Creativity

Dinner, Dessert and Great Conversation

SYNOPSIS: Is illness an obstacle, or an opportunity, for the genius of artistic creativity?
How lindspdid artists cope and contend with visual loss? How do visual changes affect an
artist's work? In this conversation, I will discuss the visual impairments of several of the
great artists in the western Canon - Euphronios, Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, JMW Turner,
Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keefe, Francis Bacon and Chuck
Close- taking a “Slow Look” at their paintings and works in other media, to demonstrate
how they overcame visual loss to create their masterpieces.

Vincent de Luise M.D. F.A.C.S. is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology at Yale University
School of Medicine and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Stony
Brook University Renaissance School of Medicine. He is former physician program chair for the
Connecticut Society of Eye Physicians.
Dr de Luise is a graduate of Princeton University, the Weill Cornell Medical College and the Bascom
Palmer Eye Institute. He was a Heed Foundation Fellow at the Proctor Foundation of UCSF in Cornea and
Ocular Immunology, and a Harvard Advanced Leadership Institute Fellow in Medical Humanities.
Dr de Luise gives an annual course on art, visual perception and the eye at the American Academy of
Ophthalmology.
Dr de Luise is a clarinetist and serves as president of the Connecticut Opera Foundation. He is on the
board of the Connecticut Virtuosi Orchestra and is a program annotator for the Waterbury Symphony
Orchestra and the Weill Cornell Medical College Music and Medicine Orchestra.