Captain William E. Jordan: He Paints in the Dark

“BLIND MAN DOES BRILLIANT PASTELS.” 

“HE PAINTS PICTURES HE CANNOT SEE.” 

“BLIND ARTIST EXHIBITS WORKS AT MUSEUM.” 

“HE PAINTS IN THE DARK.”

So exclaimed the headlines of the Savannah Morning News, The Charleston Constitution, and other publications, filled with awe and disbelief, by the rich, arresting artwork of one Captain William Jordan. The late-1950s equivalent of clickbait, these headlines evoked obvious questions: how could a blind person create images to be seen when he himself would never see them, how did he orient himself on the page, or know which color was which? After seeing Jordan’s artwork, either in print or in person, some viewers dismissed him as a fraud. Many found it hard to believe that a blind person could create the elaborate landscapes and kaleidoscopic graphics of Jordan’s colorful works, but as someone a very long time ago once said: “we walk by faith, not by sight.” 

If Jordan’s artistic abilities seemed unlikely, the rest of his life story is almost equally far-fetched. Born in Savannah, he ran away to the circus at the age of nine, eventually landing in Philadelphia. He would go on to study medicine, serve in World War I in France, and explore much of the United States. After losing his sight at the age of 62, Jordan began making art for the first time. The scenes began in his imagination, memories hidden in his subconscious that he articulated onto paper. From this internal vision, he made outlines with heavy pencil, feeling the grooves of his marks with one hand while coloring sections with the other. His wife, Helen, arranged his pastels and pencils in a coded order, allowing the artist to match the colors he envisioned. Jordan drew from memory, depicting lush Savannah swamps, rippling western canyons, Pennsylvania farmland, and deep, dense forests. He also made drawings of abstract experiences, depicting the sensation of having glaucoma and visions from his mind’s eye. This practice became a way to “rescue from oblivion” the beauty of things he had once seen.

Jordan’s scenes are suffused with ornate foliage, precisely arranged trees and structures, long sunsets traveling along the horizon. His marks are confident and precise, yielding flat yet expansive compositions that experiment with dramatic symmetry: a perfectly balanced stone in an Arizona canyon, a boiling volcano, an endless, sweeping valley. Hypnotic, geometric designs allude to circus tents and mysterious dreams. Other memories abandon uniformity for sensitive specificity. In one drawing, a tree overtaken by wildfire stands beside a river, hungry flames reflected in the rushing current. In another, flowing hills reveal a constellation of tree stumps, the ruin of what once was a dense forest. There is often a sense of before and after, here and there, tension. Jordan’s work measures the impact of fleeting moments, a testament to the force of experiences that linger in one’s mind long after they’ve passed.