AlYousif lost his sight fully in 1992. Rather than stop working, he taught himself braille and used it to label his colours, marking tubes and materials so that he could continue to choose and place them with precision. The stencil and watercolour works that followed, made between 1992 and 1995, are without precedent in his own practice or, so far as is documented, in the wider history of the region's art.

Made by feel, through stencils that let him control edge and form without the aid of sight, these works trade the fluent line of the etchings for a more deliberate, tactile mark-making. Colour, chosen by touch and memory, becomes the primary carrier of feeling. The period was short, but it was pivotal: honoured in Sharjah in 1995 as a pioneer of the Gulf's fine arts, AlYousif used these years to prove to himself that blindness would be a change of method, not an ending.

These four years are best read as a search. Every technique tried here was a test of what a blind artist could still control, and the search ended in 1996, when he returned to a medium he had used only occasionally since 1969. What he found in linoleum is the subject of the next chapter of this catalogue, the linoleum prints.