Aylesbury: Man vows to keep painting despite going blind

Adrian Paternoster, 31, from Watermead in Aylesbury, was urged to take up painting last year to boost his morale when doctors told him he was losing his sight due to a rare eye disease.

Adrian enthusiastically started painting in pastels and then acrylic on canvas before generously giving his artwork away to strangers.

But just months after he began, Adrian was told that painting was straining his eyes and accelerating his sight loss.

He was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare inherited disease which causes cells in the retina to break down slowly over time.

Adrian said: “The doctors told me it wasn’t good news, and the art is making me strain my eyes which will cause them to deteriorate further unless I stop.

“(But) I won’t let it push me off the path that I’m on. Even when I lose my sight (entirely), I will keep creating art.

The 31-year-old is continuing to paint his colourful works of art using a technique which is less demanding on his eyes – pouring the paint onto the canvas.

Each piece takes him around two weeks to complete and he said he will leave them around Buckinghamshire for strangers to find for as long as he can.

Adrian began to notice he had a problem with his vision when he began bumping into things and knocking glasses over while working in a care home in 2021.

He said: “My colleagues would laugh about it and say, ‘This isn’t you, what’s happening?’ but the clumsiness became frustrating.

“I would put something down and then not be able to find it like a magician had taken it away from me.

“When I used to cycle to work, the headlights of the cars were so dazzling that I was riding off the pathway and onto the road because I couldn’t see.”

He was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease that his parents had both been carriers of, in January 2022, and by March he had been forced to leave his job as a care worker after becoming blind in his left eye.

Adrian had been a keen portrait sketcher in his late teens and had once wanted to be a tattoo artist, so after he left his job his wife Louise encouraged him to get back in touch with his former passion.

“After I left my job, my wife went to Hobbycraft and bought a canvas and some pastels as she thought I would be able to smudge the colours together.

“She said, ‘Tomorrow, I want you to sit on the balcony and look out on the lake towards Watermead and do your art.’

“I’m so glad I listened to her because it made me so happy and calm and allowed me to switch off from everything else that was going on.”

READ MORE: 'We are overwhelmed': Community raises £5k for shopkeeper after violent robbery

When Adrian completed his first artwork two months after the diagnosis, it brought him so much joy that he decided he wanted to share it with others.

 He left it in his village of Watermead in the hopes that someone else would get as much joy out of seeing it as he had in creating it, and, to his delight, the woman who found the painting did reach out to him praising his “amazing” community spirit.

“She left me such a moving message saying that she and her children had been through so much over the last year and finding my piece made it all go away.

“She said it was amazing to see kindness in the world still and described it as an amazing thing for the community.

“I realised that bringing that reaction to people was important, so I decided to carry on leaving my work (in the area).”

Adrian now leaves his artwork in towns and cities around the county whenever he goes on a day trip with his wife in the hopes that many others will find and keep them.

He is now officially registered as blind but said losing his sight had made him “more determined to show that you can still do the things you love with vision loss – and I like to make people happy”.

Adding: “I’d be lying if I said the thought of completely losing my sight wasn't scary. Using the vision I still have in my right eye, I study the paint and identify shapes, adding the details by filling in the gaps with my imagination.

“I usually set my timer for an hour and stop whenever it goes off or when my eyes start stinging – one piece usually takes about two weeks now.”

Nevertheless, he is now optimistic about the reach and influence his work could have.

“I want the younger generation to know that nothing has to stop them from achieving what they’re passionate about.

“I’d love to display my artwork in the Tate one day, as that was my dream as a child, but I’d also just be humbled to carry on doing what I’m doing while I still can.”