Book Review

My friend Sarah made a picture book. She let me review it. You can buy it online if you want to.

Imagination can be trouble. Relationships, drugs, boredom are all testament to this fact. Sarah Welch’s first book, "Misseen" describes a novel way that imagination can go wild and ruin your day. In life with her eyes, Sarah sees things that aren’t there. Part of the fault is her eyes—they’re bad eyes—the rest can be blamed on her imagination making an opportunity out of that.

There’s a laundry list of problems that amount to Sarah being considered legally blind. The names her doctor gave to her are: nystagmus, astigmatism, myopia, strabismus. But it is obvious from the cover of the book and the rich detail inside that this definition of blindness does not mean the absence of a sensation of light. This blindness is not empty or dark. Nor is it complete. No doubt Sarah’s sight is fractured, irreconcilably. But she can see, and what she sees is not exactly what we see.

Whenever a sense becomes weakened, another strengthens to make up for that deficiency. In Sarah's case it is her imagination that comes flooding in through the cracks and makes up what her eyes don’t see. What that amounts to is something like life as described by a stereogram. A blinking, cross-eyed struggle to find out what’s there, only to find out that what she finally saw was what she expected to see—the imagination part—and what was actually there was something else entirely.

These miss-seen events are drawn with a loose, shaky hand. Not unconfident. This is what Sarah sees. Biographical, cherry picked from young adulthood, these images give the viewer an exclusive look into Sarah’s subjective experience: her sight, as well as the emotional tumble that it creates in its wake. She mistakes one thing for another, she can’t tell things apart, she has a hard time deciding exactly what something is. The material is supposed to be light-hearted, but it is impossible to ignore the contradiction (blind, visual artist) that every page of this book implies. This is a first book, and an artist’s statement of sorts. Everything that Sarah produces in her lifetime of art will be affected and shaped by what is described in this book.

Underlying the lighthearted humor of the book is the incredible frustration that Sarah felt during her formative years where her eyes seemed out to get her. In a mature retrospective of those events, there’s also something of an apology to her eyes. Sarah explains that her eyes used to be the cause of much insecurity. All of the pictures describe a kind of geeky awkwardness that might leave one embarrassed afterward. It’s clear though that she should be enjoying them now. Because, of all the mistakes that Sarah’s eyes have made, they have also done something else. That is, they have gone on to imprint her with an undeniable uniqueness of vision, and passed that imprint into her work.