Page 34 - South Mississippi Living - November, 2024

ARTS
Shades
story by
Cherie Ward
photos courtesy of
Grady Byrd
Grady Byrd.
Artist
Artisan Grady Byrd Sees the World as a Palette
Master illustrator Grady Byrd sees the world a little differently and
that uniquely detailed vision has served him well as one of the most prominent artists on the Gulf Coast since 1970 - despite being color blind.
As a youngster growing up in Bogue Chitto, Louisiana, Byrd fell in love with drawing and painting and that’s when someone noticed his color scheme was a little off. Soon after, Byrd underwent a vision test and it turned out, he had a color vision deficiency known as Color Blindness, the inability to distinguish certain shades of color.
“I was told, ‘You can’t be an artist
because you can’t mix colors the right
way, but you can be an illustrator’ so from then on, I aspired to be an illustrator,” he said explaining he can see red, blue, and yellow, but secondary and tertiary colors
are indistinguishable. Following his art aspirations, Byrd transferred to a high school in Jackson and garnered an art scholarship to Mississippi College.
“But I kind of wanted to see the world, so
I joined the Marine Corps,” he said, adding he was a staff artist for Leatherneck magazine. “That was my dream, dream, dream job,” he
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34 | November 2024
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