Around 1.3 billion people, about one in six worldwide, live with a significant disability, according to the World Health Organization. Among them are painters, illustrators, photographers and craftspeople whose work stands on its own. The artists below paint with a brush held in the mouth or between the toes, draw entire cities from memory, take photographs without sight, or have redesigned their tools to fit their bodies.
Their methods differ as much as their conditions. Some were born without arms; some lost limbs, movement or vision through accidents and illness; others are autistic and experience the world in ways that shape what and how they draw. What unites them is long practice. Mouth and foot painting takes years of training, typewriter art demanded weeks of patient keystrokes per picture, and memory drawing rests on a lifetime of looking closely.
The stories are grouped by technique, with a short note on who each artist is, how they work and where to find more. The photographs and artworks belong to the artists and photographers credited under each one. Where a detail from older viral posts could not be confirmed, it is flagged as reported rather than stated as fact.
Painting with a brush held in the mouth
Huang Guofu, China
Huang Guofu lost both arms in an electric shock accident when he was four, and as a boy he taught himself to paint, first with his feet and later with the brush in his mouth. The photographs show him working on a large ink landscape of old wooden houses in the Chinese tradition, standing at the wall and controlling each stroke with his neck and jaw. His work has been widely covered in Chinese and international media.
Photo credit: via Bored Panda
Doug Landis, United States
Doug Landis was left paralysed from the neck down after an injury in a high school wrestling match. Some time later he noticed a simple sketch of a house printed on a holiday greeting card, decided he could do that himself, and began drawing with a pencil in his mouth. His finely shaded studies of a falcon, an owl and a wolf show the level of control he developed; he works through the mouth and foot painting artists’ network.
Photo credit: Mouth and Foot Painting Artists
Alana, painter
In 2016 a Reddit user shared photos of their sister Alana, who has never been able to use her hands and paints with her mouth and feet. The collage includes a girl among sunflowers, a close-up of a dog, a vineyard path and a melting instant camera, showing how wide her range of subjects is. The top picture shows her painting live at a public event.
Photo credit: reddit.com
Mariam Paré, United States
Mariam Paré is an American painter who became quadriplegic as a young woman and paints with the brush held in her mouth. Here she is working on a portrait of Chuck Close, a fitting subject: Close was himself left largely paralysed by a spinal artery collapse in 1988 and kept painting with a brush strapped to his hand. Her version echoes his famous grid-like portraits with a bright patterned background.
Photo credit: Mariam Paré
Steve Chambers, England
Steve Chambers was born with a rare condition that left his arms without working muscles, so he paints with a long brush gripped in his mouth. The finished watercolour here shows two sailing boats on a calm estuary at dusk. His local paper in Norfolk, the Eastern Daily Press, profiled his appetite for life and painting.
Photo credit: Matthew Usher / EDP
Zuly Sanguino, Colombia
Colombian artist Zuly Sanguino cannot use her arms and works with the brush held close to the canvas, as the photos show. Her vividly coloured peacock is typical of her animal paintings. She has built a following by sharing her process online and painting in front of audiences at schools and events.
Photo credit: Zuly Sanguino, Zuly Sanguino
Painting and drawing with the feet
Peter Longstaff, England
Peter Longstaff was born without arms because his mother was prescribed thalidomide during pregnancy. The drug was sold from the late 1950s, often for morning sickness, until it was withdrawn in 1961 after it was linked to severe birth defects in thousands of babies. Longstaff has said he has never thought of himself as disabled, and here he paints a wintry woodland scene with a deer, holding the brush between his toes.
Photo credit: Archant Norfolk, Archant Norfolk
Uttam Kumar Bhardwaj, India
Indian painter Uttam Kumar Bhardwaj paints with his feet. His canvases range from abstract colour fields and blossoming branches to a large seated Buddha framed by leaves and lotus flowers. According to his own public page, he has won a state-level gold medal and more than thirty awards for his art.
Photo credit: Uttam Kumar Bhardwaj
Fatemeh Hamami, Iran
Iranian artist Fatemeh Hamami draws with her feet, sitting on the floor with coloured pencils spread around her. This portrait of the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo went viral in 2017, and the photo captures her obvious pride in it. Her work shows how fine detail and skin tones can be built up with pencils held between the toes.
Photo credit: fateme.hamami
Making art without sight
John Bramblitt, United States
Texas painter John Bramblitt, born in 1971, lost his sight in 2001 after a series of severe seizures. He paints by touch: raised lines help him find his way across the canvas, and he mixes additives into each colour so that it has a texture he can recognise with his fingers. His bold, colourful portraits have since grown into large outdoor murals, and he runs free workshops that have earned him national service awards.
Photo credit: John Bramblitt
Victorine Floyd Fludd, United States
Victorine Floyd Fludd lost her vision at 26 and later took up photography with the Seeing With Photography Collective in New York, a group of blind and visually impaired photographers. Their method, often called light painting, uses long exposures in a dark room while the photographer moves a small torch over the subject, guided by touch and by talking with the sitter. The ghostly, glowing portraits here are the result.
Photo credit: Victorine Floyd Fludd, Victorine Floyd Fludd
Autistic artists and visual memory
Stephen Wiltshire, England
Born in London in 1974 and diagnosed with autism at three, Stephen Wiltshire was largely non-verbal as a young child but drew constantly. He is now famous for drawing whole cityscapes from memory after a short look: a 10-metre panorama of Tokyo in 2005 after a helicopter flight, and an 18-foot view of New York in 2009 after a 20-minute ride. He was appointed MBE for services to art in 2006 and has a permanent gallery in London’s Royal Opera Arcade.
Photo credit: Stephen Wiltshire, Stephen Wiltshire
Iris Grace, England
Iris Grace was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, and her parents introduced painting alongside speech therapy. She showed an unusual eye for colour and composition early on, producing the flowing, layered abstracts shown here. Her mother, photographer Arabella Carter-Johnson, documented her childhood, including her close bond with the family cat Thula, which often sat beside her as she worked.
Photo credit: Arabella Carter-Johnson
Adapted tools: typewriters, prosthetics and headgear
Mariusz Kedzierski, Poland
Polish artist Mariusz Kedzierski was born without arms and draws by holding the pencil against his short upper limbs. His hyperrealistic graphite portraits, such as the bespectacled child and the man’s face shown here, often take many hours each. He has drawn in public in city squares, letting passers-by watch a portrait take shape.
Photo credit: Mariusz Kedzierski
Paul Smith, United States (1921–2007)
Paul Smith, born in Philadelphia in 1921 with severe cerebral palsy, made pictures on a typewriter for around seven decades. Using his left hand to steady his right, he worked only with the symbol keys on the top row, locking the shift key because he could not press two keys at once, and varied the spacing to create tone. His works include a Mona Lisa, portraits and detailed cityscapes, each taking weeks or months; he died in Oregon in 2007.
Photo credit: John Stofflet, Paul Smith Typewriter Artist
JC Sheitan Tenet, France
French tattoo artist JC Sheitan Tenet lost his right arm years ago, yet kept working with a prosthesis built for him by artist JL Gonzal. The custom steampunk-style limb, unveiled in 2016, has a tattoo machine fitted to the end, with piping and a gauge that make it look like a working engine. The tattoos shown below the photo are his own work.
Photo credit: JC Sheitan Tenet
Doug Jackson, United States
Doug Jackson of Port Arthur, Texas, was born with cerebral palsy and paints using a brush fixed to a headband. He began painting at eleven, and in 2015 his local paper marked his fiftieth year as a painter. His impressionist landscapes of lakes, boats and autumn trees fill the walls of the hallway outside his room, as the photographs show.
Photo credit: Beaumont Enterprise
Rakan Abdulaziz Kurdi, Saudi Arabia
Saudi painter Rakan Abdulaziz Kurdi uses a wheelchair and has limited movement, but produces large, realistic acrylic paintings. One shows a football fan in a black-and-yellow striped shirt facing a crowd, and another a formal group portrait he is seen presenting at an event. He shares his work under the name rakanku.
Photo credit: rakanku
Annette Gabbedey, England
Goldsmith Annette Gabbedey was born without fingers, yet designs and makes fine jewellery by hand, using her palms and adapted grips to hold the tools. The rings and pendant in these photographs, one set with a deep blue stone, show the precision her craft demands. Her story was widely reported in the British press in 2014.
Photo credit: David Hedges
Yang, paper-cutting artist, China
This young artist, identified only as Yang, makes Chinese paper cuts, an art form UNESCO added to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009. Because his hands are weak, an elastic band around his face helps him guide the blade, and the detailed red figures of guardian warriors are the result. The original report said he was diagnosed with ALS at ten; childhood ALS is extremely rare, so the exact condition is unconfirmed and may be another muscle-wasting disease.
Photo credit: Chilture
How mouth and foot painters make a living
Several artists on this page work through or alongside the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World. It was founded in Liechtenstein in 1957 by German painter Arnulf Erich Stegmann, who had lost the use of his arms to polio as a child and painted with his mouth.
The association is not a charity in the usual sense. It is a business owned by its artists: it buys reproduction rights to members’ work and sells it as Christmas cards, calendars, prints and puzzles in dozens of countries. Full members receive a monthly income for life, and students get a scholarship while they train. It now represents roughly 800 artists in more than 70 countries.
Many other disabled artists sell directly through social media, commissions, exhibitions and workshops, as John Bramblitt and Zuly Sanguino do. Barriers remain real, from inaccessible studios and galleries to the extra time and cost that adapted tools require, which is why such networks matter.
Looking at the art first
Stories like these are often framed as triumph over tragedy, but many of the artists themselves prefer to be judged on the work. Peter Longstaff’s remark that he never considered himself disabled, or Bramblitt’s focus on teaching, point to the same idea: the disability explains the method, not the value of the picture.
If one of these artists stays with you, the best support is to follow and credit them, buy a print or card, or book a workshop. Many of the links above lead straight to their own pages.
Sources: WHO: Disability and health; Wikipedia: Stephen Wiltshire; Wikipedia: John Bramblitt; Wikipedia: Paul Smith (artist); Wikipedia: Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World; artist and photographer credits as listed under each image; first compiled by Bored Panda.
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