LIFE WITH HEARING LOSS: Starving Artist No More
By Jessica Woodard, Staff Writer
Joe Finkler, 71, is a prolific artist. But he hasn't always been able to create to his heart's content and pay the bills too. Overcoming an inaccurate diagnosis when he was a kid and then the challenges of establishing himself as an artist with hearing loss, Finkler has only enjoyed the liberty to work full-time at his passion for the last 13 years.
Things were tough when he was a kid growing up in New York City. At a very early age, his mother noticed that he wasn't learning to speak. Finkler doesn't think he was born deaf: "I believe something happened between the ages of two and three," he says. "I remember hearing music." Doctors were stumped. His mother even got him an appointment with famed pediatrician Benjamin Spock, M.D., author of numerous books on childrearing. Unfortunately, most of the doctors, including Spock,
thought Finkler was developmentally disabled.
Consequently, at age six, Finkler was sent to a school for children with disabilities. Since he couldn't speak, he used art to communicate. "I wanted to prove I wasn't an idiot," he recalls. One insightful teacher, who began to suspect the real reason why Finkler wouldn't answer when called upon in class, took him to the principal's office and suggested that he was deaf. The school arranged for an IQ test, which revealed Finkler's well-above average intelligence. These results led to a hearing test, which finally diagnosed his hearing loss.
A teacher at a school for the deaf, where he subsequently enrolled, "saved my life," he says. She taught him to pronounce every letter of the alphabet. However, as Finkler explains, "I was not given the opportunity to learn sign language, so I became a master in lip reading." And with years of speech therapy, Finkler's speech became clear.
After completing his studies at the school for the deaf, Finkler started going to a regular high school. "I was out to prove to everyone that I was the same as them," he recalls. Finkler became a star athlete, an honor student and the artist for the local newspaper and school yearbook. At 16, he knew he wanted to go to art school. This aim was complicated, though, by his increasing fascination
with science.
Earlham College, in Richmond, Ind., a Quaker school renowned for its strength in the sciences, admitted Finkler as a prospective scientist. Little did they know what would happen when he discovered the art of Paul Czanne. "I started off as a biochemistry major," he says. "By the third year, the formulas on the blackboard became paintings. I lost focus unless I transformed the laboratory to a studio where I began a journey to another kind of exploring." In addition to Czanne, Finkler found new inspiration in the works of Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse and Rembrandt. "To succeed, I needed to study all the masters of the Renaissance period through the Impressionists and beyond," Finkler recalls. So he switched his focus from biochemistry to art and English. During the summer, he attended art school in Woodstock, N.Y., while also working his way through college. After graduating, Finkler unveiled his artistry at his first show in Taos, N.M., at the age of 22.
The late 1960s found Finkler immersed in the hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and on a two-year road trip between New York and Florida. "I covered almost every state," Finkler said. Making a living as an artist did not come easily, though, especially considering his hearing loss. To supplement his income, Finkler worked for a time as a painter of another kind - a house painter. And at his lowest point, he became homeless and without a place to create or store art. Thankfully, though, after an article was published about him 13 years ago in a local Woodstock newspaper, fortune smiled and he was able to purchase a home. "I've painted every day since then," Finkler smiles.
Finkler's style is eclectic, with works featuring everything from rocks to robots, and his sense of humor is apparent in his cartoon drawings. "I use art, also, to express humor resulting in over 4,000 human drawings and cartoons," he wrote in his autobiography. Finkler has organized his cartoons into books.
One published work, Hair Dos and Don'ts, is a comic indictment of women's hairstyles. "When I was living in Florida," he says, "I couldn't believe how much money was spent in hair salons. I find it very interesting." Finkler has as many as 12 more illustration books he would like to have published, along with an autobiography.
As Finkler continues to paint and draw, every corner of his house has filled up with illustrations. His art has been inspired, in part, by his hearing loss. Finkler says he's "more sensitized to the actuality of what is going on around" him, which enables his creativity to come through even more powerfully via the paintbrush. He shares with the world his unique perspective on life through art shows in New York City.
And though it's been many decades since he fondly remembers hearing music as a child, Finkler has found genuine joy and success in channeling the creativity within him onto the canvas and the posterboard, where the supposed limitations of his hearing cannot reach. In fact, they serve, in some way, as a catalyst to his artistic expression.
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