How a profound loss of vision, years of rehabilitation and the practice of Yoshinkan Aikido transformed one Vancouver artist’s way of seeing and painting.

What happens when a painter can no longer see the world in the way she once did? For Vancouver artist Kathleen Tonnesen, the answer has been neither to stop painting nor to surrender to what she has lost, but to find another way of seeing. Living with profound visual impairment, Tonnesen has spent years retraining her brain and body, while practising Yoshinkan Aikido to rebuild balance, coordination and confidence. The result is a body of work that offers a fascinating reminder that painting is not simply an act of looking. It is an act of perception, memory, imagination and embodied experience.

Kaleidoscope Eyes

I first encountered Kathleen Tonnesen’s paintings as paintings of a place I know well: Vancouver’s West End.

The West End is an unusual neighbourhood. It is densely populated and densely built, with apartment towers and blocks packed into a relatively small area. Yet it is also remarkably green. Trees line the streets, and throughout the neighbourhood tiny pockets of cultivated land have been transformed into exuberant community gardens. Every available patch of earth seems to have been claimed, planted and cared for.

One particularly interesting area is Mole Hill, a small neighbourhood of heritage houses and gardens tucked into the urban landscape.

At first glance, Kathleen’s paintings seemed to be paintings of this place. But the more closely I looked, the more I realised that something much more interesting was happening.

These aren’t straightforward representations of Vancouver. Kathleen isn’t simply recording what is in front of her. She is translating it through her own particular experience of seeing.

And that distinction matters.

A photograph can record a street, a building or a garden with extraordinary accuracy. A painter does something else. The world passes through the painter’s experience and emerges transformed. Line, colour, atmosphere, memory and emotion become part of the image.

With Kathleen, there is another layer still.

She has experienced profound and progressive problems with her vision since childhood, compounded by serious problems with her right eye. In 2007 she was told that she was going blind, and in 2017 a further complication dramatically reduced the amount of clear vision available to her. Even after cataract surgery, her field of vision remained fragmented.

As Kathleen describes it, she cannot simply scan a room or a page. She has to move her body from one point to another, almost using herself as a camera.

That radically changes the relationship between artist and subject.

Learning to see differently

Kathleen describes the process of adapting to her altered vision as involving years of intense daily training. Her brain and body have had to learn new ways of coordinating movement, balance and visual information.

This is where Aikido enters the story.

Kathleen practises Shioda Yoshinkan Aikido, a rigorous Japanese martial art known for its emphasis on precise movement, posture, balance, timing and coordination. For Kathleen, Aikido has become far more than a physical discipline.

It has helped her address some of the physical and psychological consequences of living with impaired vision: problems of balance and posture, the loss of confidence, the difficulty of navigating space and the need to develop a new relationship with her own body.

And then something remarkable happened.

After six years in which she believed she might never paint a portrait again, Kathleen painted one.

The portrait that changed everything

The resulting work, Shioda Yoshinkan Aikido Master, Tin Ma Sensei, Sandan (3rd-degree black belt), is both a portrait and a record of Kathleen’s own transformation.

She describes the painting as the culmination of years of training, rehabilitation, perseverance and faith. She had resigned herself to painting flowers and had stopped believing that she would be able to return to portraiture.

Then, unexpectedly, she did.

The painting became a way of asking a much larger question: what exactly has happened inside her brain and body through the practice of Aikido? What has changed? What has been retrained? What has been rewired?

Kathleen sees the painting as an expression of her understanding of Aikido, but also as evidence of something she could not have anticipated.

She writes:

“My epiphany is that I could not have created this work without my mental and physical experience of Aikido, in conjunction with my visual experiences since 2017.”

There is something wonderfully circular about this.

Aikido has helped Kathleen negotiate the physical consequences of impaired vision. Painting has become a way of exploring that altered physical and visual experience. And the painting itself becomes evidence that the process has changed her.

The artwork is therefore not simply about Aikido. It has emerged from an embodied experience of it.

The artist’s eye

This is what changed my understanding of Kathleen’s landscapes.

I realised that I wasn’t simply looking at a painter’s interpretation of a neighbourhood I know. I was looking at a world reconstructed through a very different visual experience.

Her contours, lines and colours are not simply stylistic choices. They are part of a particular way of apprehending the world.

And that made me think about something fundamental about art.

We often talk about artists as people who are exceptionally good at seeing. But perhaps that is only half the story.

Great art does not necessarily come from having the sharpest eyes. It comes from having something to say about what the eyes, the body, the memory and the imagination encounter.

Kathleen’s work brought this home to me with unusual force.

It made me think of Beethoven composing music after losing his hearing. The comparison is not literal, of course, and the circumstances are entirely different. But the underlying question is fascinating: where does the artwork actually reside?

Is it in the eye?

The ear?

The hand?

The memory?

The imagination?

Or somewhere in the mysterious territory where all of these things meet?

Kathleen’s paintings suggest that perception is far more complicated than simply receiving information from the outside world. We don’t merely see. We interpret, remember, reconstruct and imagine.

Sometimes the limitations imposed upon us can become part of that process.

Perseverance as practice

Kathleen calls her work Kaleidoscope Eyes, a title that captures something of her experience. Light can fragment. Forms can become unstable. The visual field is partial rather than seamless.

But the kaleidoscope also suggests transformation.

Turn it, and the same fragments produce a different image.

That feels like an apt metaphor for Kathleen’s practice.

Her vision has changed. Her body has had to adapt. Her relationship with space has changed. Her confidence has had to be rebuilt. And yet she continues to paint.

More than that, she has returned to something she thought she had lost.

The portrait of Tin Ma Sensei therefore represents more than the likeness of an Aikido teacher. It records a moment of breakthrough: the moment when Kathleen discovered that the future of her painting was not necessarily determined by the limitations of her eyesight.

Perhaps this is ultimately what makes her work so compelling.

Kathleen is not trying to paint despite her altered vision.

She is painting through it.

And what emerges is not a diminished version of the world, but another world altogether.

https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/kathleen-katon-tonnesen