Native American artist George Redhawk may have lost his sight, but not his creative spirit. Despite being legally blind, the designer creates beautiful gifs which portray his unique view of the world, in a project titled The World Through My Eyes.
In his previous life, Redhawk worked in various areas of medicine, instructing on subjects such as x-ray technology and phlebotomy. He claims the sudden loss of his vision ended his medical career and caused him to “lose everything,” but that art helped him to come to terms with his visual impairment.
When Redhawk first began to go blind, he desperately started to use what was left of his sight to create new memories and developed an appreciation for art in the process: “I was obsessed, up day and night, trying to see everything I could,” he said.
Redhawk describes the project as “an artistic expression of the confusion I go through with my vision loss”. He suffers with Charles Bonnet syndrome, which is a condition where visually impaired people see things that are not really there. As Redhawk himself puts it:”Not enough data is getting sent to the brain, and it tries to fill in the blanks with false information, so you can’t trust what your eyes or brain are telling you.”
Redhawk felt gifs were the perfect format to express his new found sensory experiences. Through morphing software, he uses endlessly looping gifs to form images that continously reanimate themselves. He begins the process with still photographs (with the permission of the original images creator) and transforms elements of the image that wouldn’t typically be moving, such as buildings or the sky. The end result is an impressive collection of surreal illstrations with a mind of their own, and technique has even been dubbed the “Redhawk effect.”
Although he enjoys the attention his work has received, Redhawk doesn’t classify himself as an artist: “I was just doing it for fun while my wife was at work. I saw what it could do and couldn’t do.”
Since his vision loss is progressive, sadly Redhawk will one day be completely blind. In the mean time, he is enjoying creating stunning visual artworks that we can’t take our eyes off.
Check out more of his creations here.
