This is not a late style so much as the answer to a question the artist had been asking since 1992. The four years of stencil and watercolour work that followed the loss of his sight, gathered here as the braille years, were a search for a technique a blind man could command completely. In 1996 he found it in linoleum.

He had cut lino before, occasionally, from 1969 onwards, and that earlier familiarity is the point: the block could be read with the fingers, the cut edge felt as it was made, the composition held in the hand rather than in the eye. Where paint had to be identified by braille labels and placed on a surface he could not check, the linoleum block told him at every moment what it had become. It gave him back the one thing blindness had taken from his practice, which was the ability to know what he had made while he was making it.

The 306 works catalogued here, every one of them made after 1996, return to the folk memory of the narrative oils - pearl divers, dancers, weddings, the courtyards of Muharraq - but rendered now in the bold black-and-white contrast that cutting demands, patterns simplified and intensified by working blind. The Al Dana Award, the Annual Fine Art Exhibition's highest honour, came in 2001, and in 2004 Albareh Art Gallery gave the work its own exhibition, More Than Meets the Eye. These prints are now held in museum and foundation collections across the region and beyond. They are the work by which he is best known, and they were made entirely by touch: his means, as he understood it, of going on speaking to a world he could no longer see.