BUDDY SYSTEM FRIENDS USE ART TO HELP EACH OTHER PAST THEIR DISABILITIES.

Byline: Susan Abram Staff Writer

NEWHALL - Theirs is a friendship forged without any formal handshakes or visual recognition.

Joe Caron lost his hands. O. Quintin DiMaria lost his eyesight.

But the men will say they have gained admiration for one another's love of the paint and the brush, of white canvas transformed into cherry trees bursting with pink blossoms, blond desert roads dotted with hunter green chaparral, and deep blue oceans that meet a magenta horizon.

``He's my hands, and I'm his eyes,'' says Caron as DiMaria visited him one afternoon. ``That's the way it works.''

For DiMaria and Caron, painting is more than just a way to pass the time through their twilight years. It has brought them together in a most unsuspecting way, with each amazed at how the other can re-create beauty without eyes to see color or hands to direct a brush. They are each other's biggest fans.

``When I found out how he painted, I couldn't believe it,'' DiMaria said.

Their friendship began five years ago at a senior adult apartment complex in Newhall.

DiMaria, 86, lives in Unit 223. Caron, 82, and his wife, Dorothy, moved into Unit 221.

The two were drawn together by the styles in which each other painted.

DiMaria, a former advertising manager for The Wall Street Journal, said he always liked to draw. On one of his walls is a detailed pencil sketching of his shiny Army boots from 1947. He took up painting seriously just before his doctor declared him legally blind in 1994 due to macular degeneration. To compromise for his visual loss of detail, his teacher at the local art school said he should try to paint like the impressionist Monet, who used dabs of blended color to suggest a tree, a flower or a lily pad. She helps him mix the paints, he said.

``Greens, blues and browns, they all look like black to me,'' DiMaria said recently as he stood in front of dozens of his paintings, mostly landscapes, he had hung on his wall. ``I can only see yellow. But my teacher thinks I paint better now than when I could see better.''

Caron lost his hands while working in a sheet metal factory in Massachusetts. He was 24.

``It was a blessing in disguise,'' he said. ``I was careless.''

Caron had always liked to sketch, too. He learned to paint reading art books by Walter Foster, but after his accident, he had to relearn how to control a brush with his artificial limbs. He holds the brush between metal clamps and moves his body as he would his wrists, to direct the acrylic paints he uses. His first painting of orchids still hangs on his wall, as do several others, mostly the faces of clowns and American Indians.

DiMaria said he admires the details he can make out in some of Caron's work, the fragile black strings on a violin, and the soft blades of grass on sand.

``It's so fascinating to watch him,'' said his wife, Dorothy Caron. ``He goes into all these different positions with his body while he paints.''

The two men don't sell their art. DiMaria has donated his to local organizations as well as to his nieces and nephews. Caron gives them away to his children.

And neither likes to dwell on what he has lost.

``What was I going to do?'' DiMaria shrugs, ``Lay down and die? Painting relaxes me.''

``It puts you in another world,'' Caron continues. ``You don't think about things that bother you.''

The two men visit frequently, often meeting in the downstairs lobby of their apartment complex for what they call an ``organ recital.''

``You know,'' DiMaria says laughing when a visitor inquires about it, ``an organ recital, as in, 'Oh, my liver hurts! Oh, my kidneys hurt! Oh, my heart hurts!'''

Dorothy Caron rolls her eyes as the two men laugh.

``It's not so funny when you've heard it a dozen times,'' she says. ``But if you've got a sense of humor about things, then you've got the world by its tail.''

Susan Abram, [phone]

susan.abram(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) Above, O. Quintin DiMaria, left, who is blind, and Joe Caron are neighbors in Newhall who, together, overcame their handicaps to revive their passion for painting. Below, Joe Caron deftly handles his brush with prosthetics.

(3 -- color -- ran in SAC edition only) O. Quintin DiMaria, above left, demonstrates with his hands how he sees the world through his disability.

David Crane/Staff Photographer