Nothing can stop a person with innate artistic abilities, not even the absence of functioning limbs. 50-year-old Steve Chambers is a perfect example of this. The artist from Norfolk, UK, paints breathtaking sceneries using only his mouth. It’s simply amazing how such accurate strokes can be achieved while holding a paintbrush with one’s teeth.

Chambers, who suffers from arthrogryposis syndrome, has been disabled since birth. His arms lack muscles and the joints in his legs are stiff. While many people in his condition struggle to perform daily tasks, Chambers began painting at a very early age. He says it didn’t take him very long to get the hang it. “To me using a paint brush with my mouth is like you using your hand to pick up a spoon.” He started off by using his mouth to hold a pencil, which according to him wasn’t actually difficult because he didn’t know anything different. However, he did get frustrated as a kid when he couldn’t get the effects he wanted while drawing.

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41-year-old Huang Guofu, from Chongqing, China, has learned to master the paintbrush with his mouth and right foot, after he lost both his hands in a childhood accident.

Huang Guofu lost his arms in terrible electric shock accident, at the tender age of four, but that didn’t stop him from following his dreams, and at age 12 he began painting with his feet. The talented artist remembers that in the beginning, his artworks didn’t look at all like what he intended to paint, but as the years went by his skills improved considerably. Huang quit his studies when he was 18, as his father was very ill and he needed to make money for his treatments. He started travelling to other Chinese cities, creating beautiful paintings on the side of streets and selling them to passers-by.

It was during his art travels that he began using his mouth to paint, after hearing some comments that painting with one’s leg isn’t very elegant. He put a brush in his mouth and started painting. During a trip to a city in China’s Sichuan Province, Huang Guofu met Hu Guoui, a woman who quickly fell in love with his strong will and artistic talents, and the two got married in 2000. Since then, she has become his assistant, carrying his canvas and tools, whenever he needs to paint a scene on location.

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True talent and artistic calling can’t be contained even by the most severe physical handicaps, and Doug Landis is the perfect example. Using only his mouth, Doug creates some really extraordinary artworks.

Doug Landis was paralyzed from the neck down, after an awful accident, during a high-school wrestling match. The before over-active kid, too busy to pick up a pen and draw, discovered his talent when he saw the drawing of a house, on a Christmas card, and thought he could do it himself. He redid the drawing a few times, until he developed his own style.

Using his neck to guide the pen across a sheet of paper, Doug has created a series of drawings that earned him a number of awards, at the shows and exhibits he attended. Each artwork takes the artist between 40 and 200 hours of work, depending on the size of the project. For his famous “Vanishing Breeds”, the artist imagined his work drawn by hand, then watched photos and videos of the animals, in order to see the fur and muscles, and only then began the actual drawing. Just like Peter Longstaff , the foot painter, he is a member of the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists Association.

To learn more about Doug Landis’ amazing mouth art, and purchase some of his artworks, check out his official site, www.mouthart.com.

Photos are copyright of DOUG LANDIS

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