By Brian Nemtusak
Gannello got a job with Sears Roebuck, but just before Christmas he slipped and fell on the ice on the way to work. He didn’t hit his head, but the next morning he noticed a veil over his vision that came and went. He had suffered a retinal detachment in his right eye. Doctors said that while the chances for successful surgery weren’t good, it was the only option. Without the operation he was guaranteed to lose the remaining vision in the eye.
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He began making welded metal tripods with a kind of swiveling tube at eye level that one looked through to simulate his restricted vision. Turning it left and right, Nelson realized that with his visual memory he could piece together “a perspective as great as anyone’s–only segmented. From there I presumed that other artists experiencing sight loss might be able to illustrate the world through their eyes, and convey not loss but some things that might be found there.”
An operation to remove cataracts from Gannello’s eyes in 1995 restored some of his color vision, lost in the 60s, but he feels more confident working in black and white. He credits his impairment with “making” him, despite the hardship and economic distress it’s often caused. “I never thought of money. I thought of art. I thought of the eye,” he says. “And that’s why I was able to see what I saw. And in fact I went far beyond what was in front of me.”
