Esref Armagan

Turkish artist Esref Armagan has been blind, or close enough as makes no difference, since birth. Yet he creates images like this, this and this. If that last one doesn't give you a "you have to be kidding me" moment, I doubt anything will - but this brief bio makes it clear how this is achieved:

He has also developed his own methods of doing portraits.     He asks a sighted person to draw around a photograph, then he turns the paper over and     feeling it with his left hand, he transfer what he feels onto another sheet of paper

While this could be considered to be "tracing", some of his other work is not done from photographs and exhibits a sense of perspective, humour and imagination. Hell, he even knows about depth of field. According to this New Scientist piece, his work may offer us insights into how we construct mental images.

My suspicion is that Armagan can create a spatial model of the the world, of how the objects in a scene are related to each other, in much the same way sighted people do. I doubt there is a blind person in the world who doesn't understand what "behind you" means, language permitting. And given that, composing a 2D scene from a model of the things in it doesn't seem that big a stretch of the imagination. The use of color and technique on the other hand is a little more difficult to explain.

(I found this via Viewropa.)

(Update: reading the NS piece properly instead of just skimming, I find that my stunning insights are not that insightful. The NS piece covers the whole spatial model/composition thing and quite a bit more. RTFA!)

Comments

[Joan]

For more than 10 years I have been working as Esref's voluntary manager because I am so convinced of his unique abilities. I am open to answering any questions about his painting. It is even more interesting because he is uneducated. His mind (as his paintings) is brilliant and his talent is endless.

[Bradley Dean]

Joan, where can we find copies of Esref's work for sale?