Beiruting News

Mariam Paré isn't your average artist: instead of using her hands, she paints with her mouth.

She didn't always create her masterpieces that way. While sitting in the passenger seat of a car at a stop sign, gunshots erupted on the nearby sidewalk. Bullets flew through the window. A stray round struck a 20-year-old Mariam in the back of her neck and as she explains on her website's blog, her life was changed forever.

"For the rest of her life Mariam would be a quadriplegic; permanently unable to walk and with significant loss of function in her upper extremities," reads the blog. "So began a new life."

The woman who dreamt of making a career in art lost movement in her hands. So, during rehabilitation, she learned to improvise. She learned to write using a pencil in her mouth and slowly retaught herself how to paint that way, too. She needed to.

"She felt all the knowledge was still inside of her, wanting to be expressed," the blog continues.

Seventeen years after the accident, Mariam is now known as a mouth painter. And a talented one at that. Early this October, she shared a photo of James Bond she mouth-painted with Pierce Brosnan himself.

Check out the video of her journey above and some of her pieces she's posted on Facebook below.