Artist Greg Block began an unexpected journey after encountering a rare eye infection that could have derailed his life, but instead has left him with a new perspective.

Block, who graduated from Soroco high school in 2009, was at the Buell Theater in Denver near where he lives when he first noticed that something was wrong with his right eye.

“I thought my contact lens was crooked or older and that I needed to change it,” Block recalled. “I kept rubbing my eye and trying to clear off the vision, but it didn’t work. It just felt itchy and weird, so I left the show about halfway through to go home and change my contact and clean it out.”

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Block didn’t panic at first, and when his sister told him that his nephews had pinkeye he figured that he also had it. His nephew’s conditions cleared up the following week, but he said his right eye remained itchy and red, and the condition seemed to be getting worse.

“After two weeks I woke up one morning and couldn’t see anything. Everything was just bright and white and all I could make out were shapes,” he said, adding that he thinks he got the infection from showering with his contacts in his eyes. “It was very scary, so I walked the six blocks to see my primary doctor. I didn’t feel good driving because everything was really bright. In my good eye I could see clearly, but it was so blindingly bright that I felt like I was out on a glacier in the bright sunlight.”

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The doctor attempted to clear up the infection with prescriptions that included antibiotics and antivirals, but it had no impact as his vision continued to deteriorate.

He was finally able to convince doctors to scrape the tissue on his cornea and send it to Utah for testing. When the test came back positive for acanthamoeba keratitis — a rare eye infection caused by a type of amoeba that affects the cornea, the clear front covering of the eye — Block said he was elated to finally know what was going on with his eye.

“Finally, the monster under the bed, we could see it,” Block said. “It was like the scariest movies, the ones where you never see the monster, you never see the killer, and it’s just like darkness and shadow and mystery. The moment you see the shark in ‘Jaws,’ it’s just not as scary because … once you can see it, then you can fight it.”

Fighting it meant a treatment protocol using a compounded pharmacy drug because nothing is manufactured or on the market for acanthamoeba keratitis, due to its rarity.

“We had to go to the compound pharmacy and have them mix together this chlorhexidine compound,” Block said. “I was told to take a drop of this in my right eye every hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the infection cleared up.”

He continued to follow the routine for four months gradually increasing the time between the eye drops until, eventually, the doctors told him the amoeba was gone. Vision is in his left eye has returned, but he has been forced to wear an eye patch.

In March he underwent a corneal transplant, which required 24 stitches that need to be removed slowly every month. The final stitches will come out at the start of the year, after which, he will need to wait three months for that surgery to heal.

Following that will be a cataract surgery to replace a lens that was corroded by the chemicals he had used in his eye for the treatment of his AK.

Greg is hoping after completing the final surgery next March, or April, he will be able to see clearly.

Through the past 14 months, even when he was more comfortable in the complete darkness of the basement of the home he owns, or the garage where he has continued to paint — even when he could not see the canvas or the strokes of his brushes.

“I painted every day,” Block said. “I painted for 20 minutes, and then took an eye drop, and then would paint for 20 minutes again before I took another drop. I was in a dark garage, listening to music and just spattering paint on the floor.”

He said he would paint without shoes so that when he felt the paint splatter on his feet he would know he was missing the canvas.

“I would walk around the perimeter of the canvas with my toes touching it, so that I could feel where it was, and I knew it was down there,” Block said. “It just felt good to move and to listen to music and to know that marks were being made, even though I couldn’t tell what they were going to look like. Then I would turn a 40-watt incandescent bulb on eventually and see what had happened, and the next day paint over it. It was a practice that I really needed.”

Slowly over time, Greg’s vision improved, and his sensitivity to light in his left eye got better.

“My left eye’s fine now, and it’s all okay,” Greg said. “Lord knows plenty of people have gone through many worse things … I really do relish the opportunity to adapt and to relearn what I thought I knew.”

He said the experience has influenced his art, and his approach.

At first, he was reluctant to start painting realistically again with only one good eye, which limits his depth perception.

“I don’t have the ability to triangulate and see how close things are,” Block said. “I still can’t pour coffee into a mug without spilling it all over the place. I constantly miss”

For a number of weeks, he attempted to lay out the palette, before realizing he was squeezing the tube of paint in completely the wrong place, and he wondered how he was going to put a brush stroke in the right place on a painting.

Then a friend told him about Bill Owen — a classic Western painter and a classic rodeo cowboy who spent his whole life painting representational Western landscapes and cowboys.

“He lost his eye in a rodeo accident … and he stopped painting for two years because he didn’t think he could paint with one eye,” Block said. “Eventually he found the courage to do it again, and if you look at the paintings he did afterward, I think they’re even better.”

Greg figured if Owen could learn how to do it, he could too. Compensating for the issues with his eye, he has become much more intentional and has since learned how to place his brush on the canvas by matching the shadow and the tip of the brush.

“I found that, like, just after three hours of painting the way that I normally did, I forgot that I was just looking through one eye,” Block said. “It just felt like I was back home and comfortable and lost in the painting once again.”

Block said he also found a new appreciation for more abstract work, and he would like to think he is working those bigger concepts into his realist work now.

Block’s family moved to Steamboat Springs in 1997, and he graduated from Soroco High School in 2009. He lived in the area until 2017 when he bought a home in Wheat Ridge.

His art can be found at multiple locations — Gallery 1261 in Denver; Sanders Galleries in Tucson, Arizona; Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago; and FoR Fine Art, a Montana gallery in both Whitefish and Bigfork.

The Jace Romick Gallery in Steamboat Springs will also feature his art in its January show.

More recently Block has also been dealing with injuries he suffered after being hit by a car in the Denver area while riding his bike to pick up his truck from a repair show near his home. He said he is excited to get his vision back, and is looking forward to getting off crutches, but instead of getting mad about the issues he has faced, he is slowing down and taking in the world that surrounds him.

“I have learned to be okay with myself, with Greg, rather than to pin all my sense of self-worth into what I can achieve in the studio,” Block said. “I tell myself I don’t have to finish this section today. I don’t have to show all over the country and stuff like that. If I can do what I love and make things that I think are beautiful, then I know I’ll be happy.”