Living Paintings

Living Paintings was formed in 1989 by its founder and chairman, Alison Oldland MBE, formerly a lecturer in Art History.

Having provided a home for a rejected trainee guide dog, Alison decided to go further and raise some money for Guide Dogs for the Blind. This resulted in their Head of Appeals, Tony Castleton, attending one of a series of lectures Alison gave to raise money for them. Tony, blind himself, was so enthusiastic about Alison's descriptions of the paintings that she was lecturing on that she offered to make some tapes about other works of art which he could listen to at home. He said "Alison's wonderful gift for using words to describe colours, textures and perspective, interlaced with historical facts and details about the artists under review, really stimulated my imagination."

He was thrilled by the realisation that the world of Art could be opened to visually impaired people like himself, and this gave Alison the idea that has turned into Living Paintings. She decided to produce evocative tapes, to be accompanied by raised diagrams of the great works of art described. Since then, Tony has always given great support in her battle to create Living Paintings.

Many excellent contacts were made and an expert in tactile diagrams was found to help create the first Living Paintings "Thermoform", raised representation. From then on the members of Living Paintings and their, by now, numerous friends worked tirelessly to formulate a method of bringing this innovative idea to those for whom it was designed, visually impaired people.

The subjects for the first collection of paintings, known as an Album, were selected from the National Gallery in London. With the help of their staff, scripts describing the paintings, their style and the period in which the artist lived were written. The finished sample Album was distributed to a wide variety of people for evaluation, following their feedback, amendments were made to achieve the optimum design and content.

Living Paintings now had a unique, innovative product that worked and would enable it to bring immense enjoyment to those whose lives had been dulled by the loss of sight. A national, postal free library service was established, stocks of Albums produced and distribution began.

In April 1989 the Charity Commissioners granted Living Paintings charitable status and fund raising began in earnest. At this time the Trustees were delighted when Sir Oliver Millar G.C.V.O., F.B.A., Surveyor Emeritus of the Queen's Pictures, agreed to become Living Paintings’ Patron.

With the realisation that Living Paintings had created a method that successfully explained pictures to adults who cannot see it naturally turned its attention to considering other applications for the touch and sound system. After much research Living Paintings embarked on its work with blind and partially sighted children. Today Living Paintings makes a huge variety of images from Thomas the Tank Engine to The Mona Lisa accessible to blind and partially sighted people of all ages.

Since those early days, Living Paintings’ tremendous success with its unique, groundbreaking work has led to enormous growth, it now occupies offices of it’s own, with the library and workshop on site. The 7,000+ library members now have access to a Library of thousands of touch and sound packs.

It is clear that Living Paintings has identified a real need and we are constantly aware that there are many more blind and partially sighted people out there who we have as yet been unable to reach. It is with this in mind that we have established a 5 year strategy known as ShareVision which is designed to double the number of people we reach and optimise the level of benefit they gain from our services.