The Great People who have Disabilities that have Great Contribution in Arts. 1. Stevie Wonder Masterpiece: Dark Side of the Moon, Stevie Wonder is also another musical prodigy who became blind after his birth. He knew how to play multiple musical instruments and learned how to sing by the time he was ten. He is known to have a profound understanding of musical theory. He has a huge fan base around the world for his mastery of the piano and is recognized as a legend. 2. Henri Matisse Masterpiece: Luxe, calme et volupté Henri Matisse became a wheelchair user after having surgery for cancer. He did not let his loss of mobility dampen his spirits. Instead, he was reenergized, and called the last 14 years of his life “une seconde vie,” or his second life. Matisse felt that this period as a wheelchair user allowed him to re-think his priorities and free himself to do and say what he wanted. Matisse adapted his artistic methods to suit his life in a wheelchair. He started making artwork out of coloured paper shapes. Matisse would cut out the shapes and direct an assistant where to stick the piece on a large piece of paper mounted on the wall. Matisse also used chalk on the end of a stick to sketch out the initial pattern of the picture. Matisse mentioned that while his mobility was limited, he could wander through gardens in the form of his artwork. Unable to travel like he used to, Matisse was able to experience beauty around him through the art he created with his own hands. 3. Stephen Wiltshire Masterpiece: Dark Side of the Moon, Wiltshire was born in 1974 in London to West Indian parents. He is an autistic savant and world famous architectural artist. He learned to speak at the age of nine, and at the age of ten began drawing detailed sketches of London landmarks. While he has created many prodigious works of art, his most recent was a eighteen foot wide panoramic landscape of the skyline of New York City, after only viewing it once during a twenty minute helicopter ride. 4. Ray Charles Masterpiece: Born to Lose Ray Charles was a celebrated singer and songwriter known for his genius in the unique genre of soul music. He had blindness from an early age and learned music in a school for deaf and blind students. He became a master at the piano and learned it through the Braille script. 5. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Masterpiece: La Troupe de Mademoiselle Églantine Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman (someone who does technical drawings), caricaturist, and illustrator. He is among some of the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, including Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Toulouse-Lautrec’s parents were first cousins, a likely contributing factory to his numerous congenital health conditions. At age 13, Toulouse-Lautrec fractured his right femur. The break did not heal properly. Modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, possibly pycnodysostosis (sometimes known as Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome), or a variant bone disorder along the lines of osteopetrosis, achondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta, which result in dwarfism. It’s also been suggested that he had rickets, aggravated by praecox virilism, where puberty occurs at an unusually early age. Afterwards, his legs ceased to grow, so as an adult he was extremely short (1.42 m or 4 ft 8 in). He developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs. Additionally, he is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals. Physically unable to participate in many activities of boys his age, Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in art. He became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer, and, through his works, recorded many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. ToulouseLautrec contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s.
