Painter with No Fingers Creates Incredible Artwork

00:02 DESMOND: If you allow yourself to believe that you can’t do something, you probably won’t ever do it. 00:15 DESMOND: I am missing all ten of my fingers but I don’t look at it as a disability. I look at it as a difference. You only become disabled when you stop yourself from pursuing your dream and the things you really want to pursue in life, in any area of life. 00:30 COMM: Desmond Blair hasn’t let being born without fingers hold him back from pursuing his love of art. Once he’d worked out how to hold a pencil and a brush as a child it was just a matter of refining his technique. 00:44 DESMOND: I started drawing when I was a kid because I was learning how to write, and in the process of learning how to write, I learned how to draw. After drawing I just started exploring different mediums but I started painting around middle school. I started out with Acrylics. And I got to college, and I started doing more digital work in college and I took an oil painting class around 2005 and that was my first introduction into oil paint. 01:12 COMM: He let his painting lapse for a while but found renewed enthusiasm for it when he was looking for a job. 01:18 DESMOND: I would go on job interviews and I would get these crazy looks. People would see my resume but then I would walk in and not have hands and so they were wondering “well, how is he gonna use a computer.” After running into that a couple of times, I started painting again, I started using oil paints, and decided to record myself because if I was ever in this situation again, I wanted to be able to show somebody if I can paint without fingers than I am pretty sure I can do this job. 01:48 DESMOND: When you know really diving into my artwork and my painting, I was doing it to solve a problem and in doing that it just kind of turned into this thing. I just kept going with it. I fell in love with it again. 02:06 DESMOND: I paint portraits but really I am painting the light and the shadow. And if I had to describe that feeling, it just...it’s almost like a relaxing feeling because I get to turn everything off and really just allow myself to focus on letting something develop. 02:25 DESMOND: But I would like to do is to get to appoint where I can use my painting to really raise money for charity and organisations that work with people with limb differences. Being disabled is something that I think is internal, it’s a mindset, it’s when you allow yourself to become defeated by your circumstances or the obstacles that you face. It’s more about finding the opportunity that’s in your circumstances instead of dwelling on the challenges.