Pittsburgh-based artist Benny Blindspots creates abstract, expressionist paintings with surrealist elements, building dreamscapes from intuitive lines and shapes that hold chaos and order.

• Benny’s process starts with intuitive, emotional movement, making lines and shapes, then finding the images inside them and bringing them out.
• His abstract, expressionist paintings with surrealist elements hold chaos and order, drawing on fear, loneliness, and the desire to be understood.
• Through ArtLifting, Benny’s work is displayed in corporate spaces and galleries across North America.

Pittsburgh-based artist Benny Blindspots creates abstract, expressionist paintings with surrealist elements, many of them what he calls dreamscapes. Instead of starting from a planned image, he lets intuitive, emotional movement lead, and the picture takes shape from there.

Benny has lasting blind spots in the center of each visual field from neuromyelitis optica, an autoimmune disorder that affects the optic nerve, which he was diagnosed with in 2014. He describes what he sees as white lights that are missing parts of the picture. A friend and fellow artist encouraged him to create, offering a spot in a pop-up show if he painted the blurriness he was seeing. Painting gave him a way back into his own visual field: for the moments he was making art, he felt in control of it again.

His work holds chaos and order, shaped by fear, loneliness, and a desire to be understood, with biblical imagery and the stained glass of synagogues among his influences.

“I see in my paintings a certain hunger for life and a recognition of its pain and turmoil. There is a juxtaposition of chaos and order in many of the paintings and often a foreboding and yet, I hope, the image remains a thing of beauty. I have learned that to live is to suffer and that we live to create... making creative action, the antidote to our suffering.”

What makes your creative process uniquely yours?

My process is unique by definition because I’m visually impaired and legally blind, and I only picked up painting after that. It means I have to approach creating art differently than people who see visually. It seemed like a disadvantage at first, but it became my greatest advantage in my creative process.

My process is very process-oriented. I don’t start with an idea of “Oh, I want this to look exactly like such and such.” Instead, I make some marks on the page, even chaotic shapes and circles and lines, and then find the painting within that chaos, which represents how I tackle my own mental life.

I get very close to the painting. I use my thumbs and different fingers to fill in places with paint or watercolor, so there’s a little bit of finger painting involved. I go up close to certain parts of the painting to get a sense of what I’m working on, but if I move far back, that part disappears, or at least changes in the way I see it.

Another unique aspect is my color palette. My colors are dampened, softened, and not as clear. Different parts of the color wheel blend together, and I often mistake one color for another. That sounds like a disadvantage, but when I tried to draw earlier in life, I was very uptight about it and wanted everything to be perfect. This has been a much more free-flowing process, where I freely pick colors that look right to me and I’m looser with my mixtures. It ends up allowing for some unusual outcomes, because of the interplay between what I see when I paint and what sighted people see when they look at the painting.

It’s a free-flowing process of creating, and of ignoring or embracing mistakes. With the blind spots in there, those things don’t bother me as much, so I’m not seeking perfection. I create chaotic lines and shapes, look at them, and see what they look like to me. Then I pull the image out of that, almost like a sculpture. I see something here, and then I know where I’m going with the piece. It goes in a backwards order from how other people work, I think.

What life experiences most deeply influence your work?

I was not a painter. In my youth I wasn’t trained as an artist in any schooling. I enjoyed art and lived in a home filled with art. I studied art history, so I had an affinity for art, but I didn’t consider myself an artist or a maker of art, only an appreciator. When I was 25, I had no plans of pursuing an art career. I’d doodle when I was taking notes, but never anything seriously.

What impacted my life as an artist most was that at age 25, I became extremely ill. It felt like my whole body was shutting down. After about eight months of not knowing what was happening, I lost a large portion of vision in the middle overnight. I woke up one day, called my doctor, and told them, I don’t know what happened, but I can’t see like I used to. From there, they diagnosed neuromyelitis optica.

It was a very frightening, life-changing diagnosis, and it took me about five years to turn the corner and get out of denial, anger, depression, and sadness. It was the therapeutic elements of art and the creative process that got me out of that rut and turned on the creative aspect of my humanity. Especially at the beginning, I started taking oil pastels and taking control of my own colors, my own visual array, as best I could, using the vision I had left. It became a way of taking control of my life and what was happening to me. It let the creative juices that were flowing through me get out onto paper, and it took on a life of its own.

The results were greeted with a lot of approval and interest, and I said, hey, maybe this is something. I haven’t stopped painting since. I do some watercolors or sketching almost every day. Otherwise, I just don’t feel right.

The experience that made the artist I am today was what I once considered the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and from there came a lot of the best things that ever happened to me. That’s often the way life goes. Finding that light in the dark and turning that creative element in my humanity back on- that’s what my art means to me. It’s very meaningful, very personal, and very healing.

How has sharing your work through ArtLifting changed your art or your life?

My partnership with ArtLifting has been a massive boost of self-confidence in my artistic ability and in my ability to turn this into something impactful, and also effective in helping the family out financially. When you lose some vision and your good health, you often lose your ability to be the provider and take care of the family. That hurts, to not feel that you’re pitching in as much as you’d planned on.

ArtLifting is a beautiful marriage between artists and larger corporations that have a need for art in their spaces but typically wouldn’t be connected with those kinds of artists. That connection is powerful for us as artists, but also for the corporate art buyers. They get to see art they never would have come across, and hopefully it’s more meaningful to them to know the origin of the art and the artist.

ArtLifting has been an ongoing source of extra income. It’s nothing to replace a job at this point, but it’s definitely enough to help out when the fridge goes on the fritz or there’s a problem with the washer. One check came through a little contract I had where someone was paying for my art in their office space, just in time for my son’s birthday. Otherwise it would have been a very low-key, almost nothing birthday party. That would have been okay, but it was a huge relief and a really good feeling.

It also makes me feel as though my art is going somewhere. I have my art up in 40 or 50 branches of Bank of America throughout the country, which is still mind-boggling to me, knowing that thousands of people are seeing my art every day. It’s part of what makes me keep going. I even had a piece printed and stretched for Chase Bank, and it’s been in different cities. It’s currently in Pittsburgh, where I live. It’s surreal to be driving down Penn Avenue in East Liberty and see a ten-foot mural of my work on the side of Chase Bank. That was beyond my dreams when I first started.

ArtLifting makes it happen. It’s a company filled with people who really care, and it’s been nothing but a wonderful experience for me and my family. I’m hoping to take it to new heights, onward and upward as a team with ArtLifting. I have a lot of gratitude for what ArtLifting has done for me, for my family, for my self-esteem, for my self-worth. I’m hoping we continue to have a long and prosperous partnership.

What do you hope stays with someone after they experience your work?

I want my art to be highly engaging, almost undeniably engaging, in the sense that it’s a little confusing and makes you take a double look. There’s no single central point to gaze at. There’s so much going on that you have to take time to look into it: what exactly is the image, what’s between the images, what’s between the lines. People have told me that’s exactly what they end up doing. They look and look, find new things, and think of new ideas. There’s a mix of Impressionism in the shapes I paint with, but there’s a lot of surrealism and enough abstraction that it allows for a lot of interpretation.

The second goal is just as important, and it’s why ArtLifting is so great: it focuses on sharing my story. It’s the story of being hit with something so life-changing and damaging, and then finding a way to create, hone a skill, and stick to it. I hope that if people know my story when they’re looking at my art, it hits them in a way that inspires them. I think we’re always capable of finding the silver lining and finding a way to be our best selves.

Losing vision opened up other senses in my deeper psyche. That lack of visual stimulation turned into me creating my own visual stimulation more than I ever had before, so the creative output has been unrelenting.

I hope people look at my art and say, people can get through hardships. That’s what life comes down to: how we respond to the challenges placed in our lives.

I won’t stop, because it’s all I know how to do now. Even if I lose more vision, I’ll turn to sculpting. There will be more art by Benny Blindspots no matter what happens. Thank you to ArtLifting for being an outlet and a channel for this to take flight for me, because in a certain sense, it saved my life.

Painting began as something Benny did for himself in the years after his diagnosis. Five years in, he describes becoming “fearless in my expression,” and the work has since moved from private pages into rooms full of other people.

Through ArtLifting, his paintings are displayed in corporate spaces and galleries across North America, including Bank of America, State Street, and JPMorgan Chase. In Pittsburgh, a large-scale print of his work covers the side of a Chase branch on Penn Avenue in East Liberty.

Closer to home, Pittsburgh’s WTAE featured Benny’s story in October 2026, introducing his paintings to a new group of viewers in the city where he lives and works. Read the WTAE story.

Follow Benny's creative journey on Instagram.