Eşref armağan biography channel
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Dear Artist,
Recently there has been a bit of excitement around the painter Esref Armagan. The 51-year-old native of Istanbul, Turkey, has been blind from birth. Researchers at Boston University and the University of Toronto have been analyzing his work, trying to dig into and understand his thought processes. They bombard him with questions and subject him to brain scans while he paints. His work, which could be characterized as naïve or primitive, nevertheless shows some use of perspective and other sight skills. So you get an idea of what I’m talking about, see below for samples of his work.
Butterflies
Acrylic
by Esref Armagan (b. 1953)
For the blind, being able to draw objects such as cups, fish or hammers is one thing. For these tests Armagan used the “Sewell raised-line drawing kit.” This device leaves a Braille-like line that can be felt with the fingers.
Being able to visualize and paint distant scenery in colour is something else. It’s safe to say that a tactile understanding of objects such as cubes, cones, spheres, etc., go a long way toward building a “hand’s eye” picture. “A house is like a box,” etc. Just as a sighted person looks out and sees, the blind reach out and feel, and this produces a similar understanding of the forms in our world. But Armagan’s
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Painting in representation Dark: Esref Armagan, Slow Artist's Post
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Esref Armagan: A blind Turkish painter who sees through his fingertips
Seeing through fingertips
At as young as six years old, Esref Armagan refused the idea of not knowing what the world looked like, of dying without ever “seeing” the world, and went to his father for help.
His father, Nazim Armagan, began to introduce him to various objects and teach him concepts like roundness, sharpness, etc.
“To get to know shapes and objects, a blind person must be able to hold it in their hands,” Armagan said, explaining that it was the only way to perceive the object from all six directions – top, bottom, and so on.
“If the object cannot be wholly examined at once, then the picture in the mind’s eye is disconnected, incomplete and inaccurate,” Armagan added.
So, when it came to things he could not hold, his father would give Armagan models.
It all began with a butterfly, when his father gave Armagan a paper butterfly to understand what the insects were shaped like.
While holding it, Armagan had the idea that he could try to draw the shape – a test to see whether he accurately perceived how objects looked.
He placed the paper on a surface that caved in under his pencil, using the relief method, so he could perceive t