Successful Artist, Architect Turns His Dyslexia Into a Wellspring of Creativity; Success: Encouraged by a kind great-great-uncle and by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, Bennett Strahan views his condition as a gift.: [Bulldog Edition]

Morning sun brushes gold across the mind-stretching prairie to the east, infusing every blade of gramma grass with light. But night falls early, the sun pinched off by the jagged, deep navy edge of the Sangre de Cristos.

Here's where prairie meets the mountains, and Bennett Strahan paints the vermilion horizon backward on glass, the first step in a one-of-a-kind printmaking process.

Strahan doesn't just paint it backward--he sees it backward.

The 53-year-old artist, a Taliesin-trained architect whose career gained impetus from Frank Lloyd Wright himself, has the gift of dyslexia.

As a boy, Strahan read by holding books up to mirrors. He was treated as borderline retarded--until art took hold, with help from his great-great-uncle and encouragement from Wright. Now Strahan says dyslexia was about the best thing that ever happened to him.

"I think it has probably helped me more than any single thing I can think of," he says. "Three-dimensional thinking was what was created by the dyslexia problem. I could design these things in my head."

Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West at Scottsdale, Ariz., helped supply the discipline, structure and theory Strahan needed. He studied there from 1964-66.

And from this northeastern New Mexico town of 900, a onetime Wild West wagon and stagecoach stop, Strahan runs a multimillion-dollar architecture practice and an art gallery, the Buffalo Nickel. He paints, cans and sells pickles--and drives a 1924 Packard.

Strahan...