Overcoming adversity one brush-stroke at a time
An artist without hands
Ramon Dennis shows a sketch of a landscape, but among the trees, animals and buildings there’s sadness.
Two amputated arms lie in the foreground. The work is painfully autobiographical.
Dennis paints and sketches without hands.
The 19-year-old’s life hasn’t been easy. His story is one that brought him from an orphanage in Russia to the Village of Angola.
His mother died shortly after his birth. His father, he says, was a doctor, but also an alcoholic.
Dennis says he was just 5 when his father abandoned him, and he ended up in an orphanage.
That’s where the accident happened.
It was winter, and he decided to skip school that day, he said. He wandered around the orphanage trying to find a place to keep himself warm.
“As a kid I was interested in things, so I started playing around with wires, and I held onto transformers and got [shocked],“ Dennis said.
Dennis said he suffered third-and fourth-degree burns. His hands and part of his forearms were amputated.
As he struggled with learning to function without his hands, Dennis was inspired not to give up by a boy at the orphanage.
The boy went into Dennis’ room and asked if he could learn how to draw from Dennis.
“He put the pen in his mouth and started writing. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ ” Dennis said.
He was determined to teach himself, and he did.
After his arms were amputated, Dennis maintained use of both his elbows. To write, paint and eat, he balances the pen, brush or spoon in the joint. A month ago he was given prosthetics, but he rarely uses them. He says they interfere with his art.
“I have hands, they’re just shorter,” Dennis said. “If you’re not thinking about it, it’s like the same thing you’re doing with a pen.”
Dennis was adopted at age 10 and taken to Angola. He attended Lake Shore Central schools. He graduated from high school a year ago and is now on scholarship at the Buffalo Arts Studio. There, he gets to learn from professional artists and to try out new media. He paints murals on walls and sketches in his notebook.
“I want to combine my heritage, I want to combine my beauty and the beauty of people and the beauty of the world [in my work],” he said.
It was his biological father who introduced him to art.
“My dad gave me a bucket of paint and a wall, and he told me
Dennis said. He has been addicted since.
Roseann and John Davies, the family Dennis now lives with, noticed his talent and introduced him to Joanna Angie, director of the studio. John Davies knew of the program because make his wall very colorful,” he was the chief engineer of the Tri-Main Building, where the studio is situated.
Angie, who is now Dennis’ mentor, is pushing him to dream big. She sees art school in his future, but he can’t achieve that until he becomes a permanent resident of the United States, something he is working on with Angie’s help.
“He needs to find a creative outlet, and he’ll find that,” Angie said. “We really don’t know what he’ll become; it’s Ray’s choice. He’ll explore a lot of different things because he always tells me, ´I want to try this today. I want to try that today.’ ”
Angie sees Dennis’ past as a strength.
“I like survivors,” she said. “I like people who have made it against the odds. I admire that.”
Diane Falzone, Dennis’ counselor at the Buffalo and Erie County Workforce Development Consortium, admires him for his strength.
“You don’t meet him and say, ‘Poor Ray,’ ” Falzone said. “You meet him and admire him.”
Dennis doesn’t want pity, and he doesn’t want his art to be known because he has no arms.
“I don’t like being thought of as disabled,” Dennis said.
Angie says that at the studio, Dennis’ art is admired because he is gifted — not because he has no arms. He was admitted based on talent.
