Dominique Moody looks out from window.
“A Matter of Perception”, an article written by Adrienne M. Johnson, discusses a lady named Dominique Moody and the tribulations she endured which changed her perception. She was born in Germany around the 1950s where as an infant she was treated as a pariah. Johnson writes of Moody: “for the luck of the horns they thought a dark child possessed”. Her experiences were bitter due to the color of her skin and racist ideologies. As a painter, she loved using color to add “emotion and depth to the images she brushed on walls”. This love for color tragically was compromised by her sudden loss of eyesight becoming blind at twenty-nine years old. She would learn to use her blindness as a gift seeing life in a whole new perspective.
Reading this article brought me thoughts of awe, inspiration and respect. She didn’t give up on art and with that life but tapped into her heart to adapt and overcome her setbacks. She began to use color in her art “as a detail of importance but not paramount, precious and yet superficial”. That flimsy quality of color is metaphorical – color can be transcended as the mind perceives beyond face-value. Color brings out variation in life and is beautiful in it’s resistance towards uniformity.
“A Matter of Perception” moves beyond discourse of racial injustice and discusses how perception of color can bring solidarity in embracing our differences. Perception is a guiding force to survive racism and to elevate aesthetics while overcoming limitations like Moody did her loss of eyesight.
