Making paintings accessible to people with visual impairments, and offering them the pleasure of painting. This is the goal of the Maris method invented in 2009 by Liku Maria Takahashi, painter, sculptor, art theorist, teacher, martial arts teacher and president of the World Diversity Art Society. The texture of a Maris work, made with sand of different granulometry and fragrant essences, allows blind people to ‘see’ the shades of color and the painted shapes.
Liku Maria Takahashi’s path
After graduating from Tokyo Zokei University specializing in sculpture in 1993, Liku Maria Takahashi’s artistic research focused mainly on sculpture until 2008. In 2009 she invented the Maris method, developed to make paintings accessible to people with visual disabilities and thus offering him the pleasure of painting. In 2010, the artist started the Maris Art Project, which developed with the publication of the Maris World Standard Table (revised in 2014), the creation and exhibition of works, and the presentation of the project at various institutions, including Perkins. School for the Blind in Boston (Massachusetts) and seven museums in New York in 2011. The following year, the Japanese artist started the Maris National Flag Project with which, in addition to traveling exhibitions and workshops, Takahashi people from different countries approached art made with the Maris method. He recently won the 118th Concours Lépine, an international competition of intellectual works, held in Paris. In 2019 she was a guest at the XII International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence and this year she was selected to participate in the London Biennial of Contemporary Art.
What is the Maris method
The Maris method is a form of multisensory painting. It is the first painting method in the world designed to be accessible to anyone, regardless of visual ability and age. The works of art created with the Maris method can be appreciated through visual, tactile, and olfactory elements perceivable through the senses. For this we use grains of sand available in ten granulometries corresponding to as many colors and fragrances with ten values of chromatic brightness and olfactory intensity. A sort of braille of painting that also allows those who cannot see to perceive not only the shapes and their outlines, but also the colors and shades.
La Maris World Standard Table
Through the sand grain sizes in the Maris World Standard Table it is possible to identify ten levels of color brightness: the larger the grain size of the sand, the darker the color tone associated with it. In addition, each shade is paired with a specific fragrance. Once you have learned the simple rules of the Maris World Standard Table, anyone can begin to try their hand at painting with this technique that allows to overcome physical barriers that prevent or impair the involvement of people with visual disabilities in the creative and cognitive process, and allows people to overcome even the cultural barriers that prevent, in whole or in part, the appreciation of art from a different tradition.
Il Maris National Flag Project
Launched on the day of the closing ceremony of the London Olympics (2012), it is a project that included numerous theoretical-practical seminars to offer children and adults the opportunity to learn easily and in a fun way the principles and technique of the Maris method. . Working together, the participants painted the flag of a country other than their own with the Maris technique and at the same time wished happiness to the people of the country in question. With this project, Liku Maria Takahashi completed all the flags of the nations of the world, including the flag of the refugee nation created for the contingent of refugees who competed in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
The exhibition at the Chieri Textile Museum
Recently, this artistic method arrived in Italy with the exhibition “The Maris Method: art synaesthesia for different abilities” which took place at the Chieri Textile Museum in Turin. In addition to two of his famous Zebras and a selection of the Flags of the Maris National Flag Project (2012-2019) made by children and adults from all over the world, the Maris World Standard Table will be exhibited, showing the correspondence between different sand grains. , essences and shades of color. On that occasion, the ceremony for the awarding of the “Rainbow Shuttle” Award of the Chieri Textile Museum was also held, which expresses the will of the Chierese Foundation for Textiles and Textile Museum to enhance talent in its many expressions linked to the world of textile arts. Liku Maria Takahashi was awarded the award “for having distinguished itself in combining a multisensory language of unprecedented conception with textile art, its suggestions and cultural intertwining so as to stimulate creativity and create a communion of intent between people of all where is it”.
The artistic workshops
In the days following Takahashi’s award ceremony and the inauguration of his exhibition (18, 19 and 20 July) at the Textile Museum in Chieri, artistic workshops were also held using the Maris technique, reserved for children and adults with visual impairment identified by the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired of Turin. The participants reproduced with the Maris technique a textile design created in the 1920s by Studio Serra & Carli in Chieri, a stylized plant motif, to be precise a blue Clover, of which the Textile Museum preserves the mass on graph paper in its historical archive.
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