Loss of sight gives artist a more focused vision

Kathleen Kridler sat in her studio scrutinizing her latest work. The piece hadn't turned out like she had expected, but that was typical.

It was a portrait of her youngest son, his bare feet on a river rock surrounded by water, his figure looking back with an expression only his mother might decode.

On this recent weekday, she was trying to decide if it was finished. She walked up to the piece, took off her glasses and scanned the surface with her left eye from within an inch or two. She put her glasses back on, backed off a few feet and took in the entire work.

"There's a little more I need to do on this one," Kridler pronounced.

She had a deadline: In 10 days, her first solo show would open in a Norfolk art gallery.

Much of her work, she said, starts out as an accident but turns out better than she could have planned. "Which is kind of a metaphor for what ended up happening to me," she said.

"If you had told me five years ago, when I was a designer, 'OK, you're going to be legally blind in five years, and you're going to get everything you wanted.' "

Who would believe that?

It's been a long, strange trip for Kridler, way before her eyes went haywire.

At 15, she was interviewed by Barbara Walters on NBC's "Today" show.

At 21, she was hanging out with John Belushi and Kinky Friedman.

Before that, her life was pretty normal. Everything changed in 1970, when her mother, Judith Sullivan, left her husband and only child, moved to Manhattan and became the poster lady for a feminist runaway wife. Kathleen was 11.

Three years later, her mother published a book, "Mama Doesn't Live Here Anymore," and took her daughter with her on a book tour. TV icon Walters interviewed them on a morning show. They also appeared on "The Mike Douglas Show" and a game show, "To Tell the Truth."

After the book tour, she returned to her usual life, spending school years with Dad and summers with Mom. Because divorce was rare in her world, Kathleen felt like the odd kid. Before long, she started drinking.

"I found it killed a lot of pain, and it made me fit in."

Her mother was an art history professor, and from childhood Kathleen had loved art, too. She decided she wanted a career in commercial art and enrolled at New York's School of Visual Arts.

For extra money, she finagled a job at The Lone Star Cafe, a hip club where bands like Willie Nelson's and The Blues Brothers and Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys performed and where the cast of "Saturday Night Live" hung out. She talked the club into hiring her to create a distinctive graphic look for the place but was also charged with baby-sitting the stars.

"Keep them from getting too high to go on stage or on 'Dave Letterman,' " she explained.

Booze and drugs permeated the scene. After three years of art school, she dropped out. Riding around in a limo with Belushi was just more interesting.

She realized she was endangering herself, by her lifestyle and in the city, where her apartment was repeatedly burglarized. What made her finally leave was watching a thief put a gun to Friedman's head while she sat across the table at a Chinatown eatery.

She fled to San Antonio, where her father and grandmother lived, and soon met Jim Kridler. They married, he joined the Navy and within a year or so they were transferred to Norfolk.

That was 1986. It would be another year and a half before she stopped drinking and stepped onto her path to recovery.

She had their first son, Austin, in 1990, and went to work as a graphic artist for Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

Her right eye went around 1993. She remembers looking at the Venetian blinds and watching the horizontal lines turn wavy. She had hemorrhaged in her retina and gone into myopic degeneration.

Laser surgery stopped the bleeding but destroyed her central field of vision. Looking out of that eye, whatever's in the center isn't visible; the rest is blurry.

She compensated for that eye and continued to work. Around 2006, the left eye acted up in the same way. She hoped it was smudged contact lenses. An ophthalmologist examined her and said, "I'm so sorry."

That time, better treatments were available. Injections in her left eye halted the hemorrhaging with far less damage to her sight.

Kridler's mother, who lives in New Hampshire and teaches art appraisal at the Rhode Island School of Design, said her daughter dealt with her loss of vision "much better than I was able to manage what was happening to her."

The Virginia Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired hooked up Kridler with equipment and financial aid. She was given a video reader that pointed a camera at a design proof or other paperwork and then enlarged it on a computer monitor.

Watching the monitor sometimes gave her motion sickness, but it enabled her to do the work. A year later, she quit the housing authority.

"It was too stressful," she said. "I was making so many mistakes."

Then she enrolled at Old Dominion University as a blind fine arts student.

Gia Labidi, an artist who lives next to Kridler in Colonial Place, reassured her shortly after she was tagged "legally blind": "Once an artist, always an artist," Labidi had said, adding that she knew Kridler would find a way to continue to create. "It's in our hearts."

The state paid her ODU tuition, but she wondered if she could still draw.

She remembered her first meeting with Elizabeth "Bella" Leeor, who teaches figure drawing at ODU.

"I just told her, 'I can't see.' She said, 'Let's not worry about what you can't do. Let's see what you can do.' "

Kridler burst into tears.

At that first class, she was relieved to find she could see well enough to draw. To sketch a live model, she had to sit within 4 feet of the person. But she could do it - and even excelled at it.

"I've taught the figure for 20 years," Leeor said, "and she's in the top 10 of any of my students, as far as ability and passion."

When she graduated in May, both her mother and father showed up. Her father died in a local hospital a few days later. At the emergency room, Kridler had a chat with God.

"OK, this is the plan, really?" she asked. "OK, let me get out of the way. Lead me."

In recovery from alcohol abuse, she had developed a strong faith and a new attitude.

"When things that look bad happen, I can't worry about what that bad thing is," she said. "I don't know its purpose. What I have to learn is where it's supposed to lead me.

"Like with my eyes. I had a choice: that it was a disaster, or that I was simply supposed to look at the world in a different way and do something else.

"God just used a 2-by-4 to get my attention."

The changes in her eyesight led to changes in her artwork.

Kridler has three main ways of looking. Up close, within 2 inches, she can see a fairly clear, sharp image without her eyeglasses. From a few feet, wearing her glasses, she can decipher outlines and shapes, highlights and shadows.

With a single-lens magnifier called a monocular held up to her left eye, she can read street signs and watch films in a movie theater. With a monocular, she can make out most things from 5 to 20 feet away.

When Kridler was a graphic artist, she made small, tightly detailed drawings. After her vision loss, she had to find a new approach. She now works on a larger scale, so she can better see the painting or drawing. She comes in within an inch or two with her naked left eye for detail work, then backs up to see the blurry outlines.

She said there's an advantage in having fuzzy vision: "The fact that I can't see the details - I see the shadows and the highlights - takes away the distraction of details. And the fact that I have to get so close to see details means I probably get closer and see more of it than I would bother with otherwise.

"It actually is a different way of seeing."

Kridler has been drawing a lot of portraits of friends and family members, and that's mostly what's in her show, called "Peripheral Vision." Through today, the show is at One Eleven Art Gallery and Studios, where she has set up a studio alongside other artists and is a part-time manager. (After today, her work, as well as the artist herself, still can be seen during gallery hours. )

Among works on display are pieces made by tearing up paper, collaging it onto a canvas, then drawing a portrait over the collage. Many of her subjects face major challenges in their lives. Like the paper, they have been ripped apart and are putting themselves back together.

She's heard that artwork is often autobiographical and can see herself in some of her own work. But she doesn't start out with big intentions. She's learning to be open to happenstance.

For example, the artist found two canvases in her house and decided to do something with them. She had a photo of her 11-year-old son's bare feet standing in a rocky stream, a scene she painted and split into two horizontal sections.

Then she made a small, realistic drawing of Ryan, from a photo of him saying goodbye to his college-bound brother. She attached the drawing to a canvas and used it to link the two larger canvases.

As she worked, she discovered a greater meaning in the work. The two canvases suggested the split between Ryan's life with and without his brother, and all that water surrounding his feet seemed a metaphor for his new life about to be explored. She titled it "The Next Step."

Kridler's mother likes to interpret her daughter's work and toured the show with a reporter.

"This one is where it all comes together," said Judith Vance, now remarried. She was referring to a drawing called "Game Over," of a woman with spiky hair drawn on a torn sheet. "There's layers and layers, just like her personality."

Whose personality? The portrait subject or the portraitist?

"Both of them," Vance asserted. "Portraits are always about both."

Kridler came upon her mother's tour.

"Doing the art hysterical thing?" she asked.

The two have been close for many years. Vance said she was depressed when she fled her family in 1970 but will always regret abandoning her preteen daughter.

Kridler, now 51, said she forgave her mother long ago. They visit often and have much in common, including a quirky sense of humor.

If she needs comfort, Kridler finds it in her new life in art.

"If I'm healing anything now, it's the part of me I lost in the 20 years I abused drugs and alcohol. It feels really good to be present and comfortable in my own skin.

"I am right where I'm supposed to be."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com