put me in the right place at the right time to do another miracle.”
In early 1993, Lisa Fittipaldi was the picture of success. She had a loving husband, a thriving career, and a very busy schedule.
“At the time,” says Lisa, “I was working forty or fifty hours a week as a professional, and driving to work, and going grocery shopping, and doing the normal things that we all do.”
And then, in March, Lisa’s life was suddenly thrown out of focus.
“I was driving down 1–35,” Lisa recounts, “and there was a semi in front of me, and all of a sudden, the semi disappeared.”
For one terrifying moment, Lisa went completely blind. She dismissed the incident, but a few weeks later, it happened again. Deeply shaken, she called her husband, A1.
“She explained the situation to me,” recalls A1, “that she was driving, and all of a sudden her vision just blacked out, and she almost hit a truck.”
Lisa refused to get back behind the wheel, and during the next month, the episodes became more frequent.
“I thought I was having a brain aneurysm, because one minute I would see something, and the next minute I wouldn’t see it,” Lisa says. “Then the colors would start fading away, and everything became a milky color, like it had a handkerchief over it.”
But her doctors could not pinpoint the exact cause of the problem.
Dr. Michael Nacol explains, “Initially, when she was seen by her eye doctor, she started out with a corneal irregularity that made her vision distorted. Not only did she have hazy vision but her vision field was decreased.”
Lisa underwent several surgeries to cure her condition, but her eyesight continued to deteriorate. And slowly, her world disappeared into complete darkness.
“It was like a grey-black obscurity,” describes Lisa. “Even talking about it makes my stomach go into knots. It is incredibly hard to even describe the kind of panic you have.”
Lisa was eventually diagnosed with a rare form of vasculitis, a disease that was attacking the nerves in her eyes, and that would leave her legally and permanently blind.
“The first thought I had was,” says Lisa, “my life is over. Simple as that. You can’t see, what can you possibly do? Seventy percent of everything you do is done with your eyes first, whether you notice it or not.”
“She broke down into tears,” A1 remembers, “and pretty much knew that in a very short period of time, her world as she knew it was gonna go away. And that’s a hard thing to take.”
Lisa tried desperately to adjust to a life in the shadows. But even the simplest activities had become an enormous challenge.
“After a while,” admits Lisa, “you feel like it’s just not worth the effort. The world is dark, let’s just stay in the bedroom because the space is comfortable, and you know where you are, and why move?”
Adds A1, “She didn’t want to have to fend for herself. It was like, hang up a towel for me, or get me this, or get me that. I think I started getting a little angry at having to do for her when I knew she could care for herself.”
And then, in May of 1995, Lisa received a phone call from a friend asking her to join her at a two-week painting seminar in Louisiana.
“She said, ‘There’s a man out there, and he’s supposed to be very motivational,’” recalls Lisa. “‘And you just sleep in a dormitory and you get away from A1, ’cause you’ve been with him day and night now for a year.’ And I said, Okay, I can do this.”
“The friend never showed up,” A1 continues. “So Lisa, rather than canceling the class, wound up saying, ‘Would you drive me to Louisiana?’”
Lisa attended the seminar on her own, and the two weeks away helped boost her confidence. Although some of her classmates expressed skepticism about a blind person’s ability to paint, Lisa became determined to prove them wrong.
“I said, Well, why not?” recounts Lisa. “Why can’t I do this? If I learned how to get dressed again, and I learned how to eat with a knife and fork again, why can’t I paint?”
“Can darks be luminous, bright, and powerful all at the same time? Yes,” says Al.
With Al’s help, Lisa began absorbing everything there was to know about painting.
“We went through hundreds of volumes of art books, magazines, catalogs,” Al says.
“That’s when I realized how difficult it was to paint if you can’t see what you’re doing,” explains Lisa. “You can’t verify in front of you what you’ve painted. And that’s when I started to teach myself how to feel if a paint pigment and watercolor was yellow, versus blue, versus red.”
Once Lisa memorized the various color formulas, she perfected a technique called “mental mapping,” which helped her find where she was on the canvas. Soon, Lisa was creating beautiful life scenes in intricate detail. And before long, she was displaying and selling her work at art fairs around the country. Lisa’s mysterious ability shocked everyone, including her close friend, Claudia Lane.
“I couldn’t fathom how she could paint with such depth and detail,” says Claudia. “I couldn’t even speak. I didn’t know what to say at that point because it was so amazing. It was like watching a miracle.”
In the summer of 1999, Lisa caught the attention of Jason Siegel, a gallery owner from Austin, Texas.
“One day I received a packet in the mail,” recalls Jason. “I get packets from artists asking me to review their work and consider representing them. And I was very intrigued with the work, you know, very intrigued that she was blind and that she could paint realism.”
Jason arranged to meet Lisa for lunch and quickly agreed to represent her. The very next day, he sold one of her paintings.
“When I would show people these paintings,” says Jason, “I’d say, ‘What do you think of this painting?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful painting. I really like it.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, what would you say if I told you this artist happens to be blind?’ And they’d just be blown away by that and want to know the rest of the story.”
Seven years after her odyssey began, Lisa has become a full-time artist, painting seven hours a day, seven days a week in her studio, “Blind Ambition,” and selling her work through one of the largest galleries in the country. Her incredible transformation amazes even those closest to her.
“It blows you away,” Jason says, “that somebody who can’t even see can paint these most amazing paintings, and get these compositions, and balance—all these things other artists are trying to achieve in their paintings.”
“How she does this is a miracle,” adds Claudia. “She sketches it out in pencil. She puts the color on and she gets this incredible piece of art that is totally unexplainable.”
A1 agrees, “I’m not really sure there is an
