Ever seen Esref Armagan’s paintings? Neither has he.
THE MIND’S EYE
If you looked at Turkish painter Esref Armagan’s portraits of trees, skies, a fish playing a cello, or even former U.S. President Bill Clinton, you would never guess that the painter was born without eyes—meaning he’s not simply blind, he has no eyes.
Born in Istanbul in 1953, Armagan grew up in an impoverished family and never went to school. But for as long as he can remember, he loved to draw, and he’s developed his talent over the years. So how does he create his paintings?
• First, Armagan learns as much as he can about his subject. He touches it (if possible), reads up on it, asks his friends to describe the colors and the shading, and, in some cases, he draws a rough portrait of the subject.
• Then, with a picture firmly in place in his imagination, he draws a raised “map” of the subject on a piece of paper using a Braille stylus, a type of pen with a sharp point used for etching.
• When Armagan is ready to begin painting, he uses the fingers of his left hand to “read” the map, and dips the fingers of his right into quick-drying oil-based paints that are always arranged in the same order on his palette. Throughout the process, he keeps one hand on the map and one hand on the canvas until he knows the piece is complete. On some paintings, he forgoes the 3-D map altogether and just paints from “memory.”
Armagan’s works have garnered praise in galleries across Europe and in New York, and not just because they were painted by a blind person, but because they’re actually good. (According to many art critics, he’s better at some techniques, including using perspective, than most sighted painters.) “No one can call me blind,” he says. “I can see more with my fingers than sighted people can see with their eyes.”
Art critics aren’t the only ones interested in Armagan’s unique talents; neuroscientists are studying his visual cortex, the part of the brain that makes sense of the information streaming in from the eyes. Why study Armagan’s visual cortex when he can’t see? Because of a phenomenon known as neural plasticity—the brain’s ability to adapt to its own unique limitations.
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For example, when a sighted person tries to remember the image of something he’s already seen, he uses his visual cortex, but to a lesser degree than when he’s actually looking at something. Scans of Armagan’s brain, however, reveal that when he paints, his visual cortex is extremely active. If you were to put a scan of a sighted person who is looking at an object next to a scan of Armagan’s brain while he’s painting an object, they would look very similar. Only a trained neuroscientist would be able to spot the clues signaling that Armagan never actually looked at the image.
According to Professor John M. Kennedy, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Toronto at Scarborough: “Mr. Armagan is an important figure in the history of picture-making, and in the history of knowledge. His work is remarkable. I was struck by the drawings he has made as much as by his work with paint. He has demonstrated for the first time that a blind person can develop on his or her own pictorial skills the equal of most depictions by the sighted. This has not happened before in the history of picture-making.”
Kennedy is one of several neuroscientists who believe that their studies of Armagan will change what we know about how sight works, and may one day be used to help blind people learn to “see” the world just as well as Armagan does.
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