I learned to oil paint from a semi-famous professional artist from New York, who would come down from the City once a week to teach us. Her work was just amazing; she painted abstract forms onto slate instead of canvas, and if you were someone to whom forms and color speak deeply, her work tended to speak. She confided in me her secret- she had no depth perception at all; she perceived the world like it was a stained glass window (or a tv screen). Her massive brain adaptations to still function by finding 2d ways of navigating etc had made her amazing at translating 3 dimensional images into 2 dimensional form, which is what painting is at its most fundamental.
Interestingly enough, my wife was born the same way, with a "lazy eye" that prevented normal stereo vision, but it was successfully corrected surgically when she was very young, and only emerged at all after that if she was extremely tired, or heavily medicated. She is great at perspective and at architectural rendering, but can't paint to save her life.
Me, I have no defects of eye or lens, rather I have very unusual vision for several reasons:
1. I have extremely high visual acuity. It has deteriorated with age, so I am down from 300-20 to around 200-20 vision now; but I can still read a paperback from across the room if the lighting is bright.
2. whether it was due to brain damage that repaired itself in the womb, or brain damage that occured and was adapted to later, or just freakish wiring from the get-go, my visual cortex does much of my conceptual (and ethical, and future planning) processing- when I think deeply I will be staring out in space like I don't see what is in front of me, because I don't- I am seeing concepts, ideas, etc. I can envision solutions to very complex problems; I literally squint and I see them in my visual field.
3. maybe because my vision is busy doing most of my productive thinking? I am a synesthete- all of my senses overlap, so if I don't keep the walls up through habitual mental discipline, I taste colors, hear movement and relative sizes, feel texture of shapes and of three dimensional forms, hear relationships between objects or ideas, and smell emotions. That's a simplification, but typical for me.
We are all different; learning to accept my gender differences has allowed me to finally start accepting, and celebrating, the uniqueness of how I perceive the world as well.
