Eşref Armağan

Biography

Before he takes up the brush, Eşref Armağan says, he needs complete silence. He first pictures the whole painting in his mind, and only then goes to the canvas.

He was born in 1953 in Istanbul, into a poor family. He was blind from birth. He received no formal education. He had to learn about the world through his other senses, above all touch, and on the questions that interested him he often turned to his father, Nazim Armağan. His interest in how the world is put together awoke when he was about six. By some accounts he began drawing and painting in childhood.

He has worked in oils for about thirty-five years. He first marks the outline, pressing a braille stylus into the paper or canvas, or laying down a line with a rope coated in a sticky substance. Then he applies the paint with his fingers. Each layer has to dry before the next colour goes on, or the colours would smudge. He has no assistants and makes the paintings alone. Some of them use linear perspective, including one-point and two-point perspective.

He explained his aim in an interview with the television channel Al Jazeera: to prove that he can draw by touch. Moving into abstraction would, in his view, have been easier, but then critics would have said that he simply paints things as he feels them, and the skill of getting past blindness would have gone unnoticed. To my mind, this calculation explains a good deal about his choice of subjects: he paints what a sighted eye can check.

In 2004 Armağan was the subject of a study of perception carried out by the psychologist John Kennedy of the University of Toronto. Its conclusion was that blind and sighted people both use perspective projection when they make and use tactile pictures, and that drawings by blind people include freehand parallel, one-point and two-point perspective. In 2008 he was studied by Amir Amedi and Alvaro Pascual-Leone of Harvard, who were interested in neuroplasticity. Brain scans showed that Armağan’s visual cortex was active while he drew and hardly responded at all to verbal memory tasks. Pascual-Leone had already found earlier that braille readers use the same area of the brain for touch. The researchers also observed activation of the region responsible for recognising objects when he felt them with his hands. An article about him appeared in the magazine New Scientist.

His work has been shown in more than twenty exhibitions in Turkey, Italy, China, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. He has appeared several times on Turkish television and in the press, and on programmes by Al Jazeera, the BBC and ZDF. An award-winning documentary, “The Colors of Darkness”, is about him, and he is also discussed in the documentary “Real Super Humans”.

In 2009 Volvo invited Armağan to paint its new S60 before the model was released. He walked around the car, feeling the hood and the side, and painted it on a road in three-quarter view. The work was filmed for a series of videos on Volvo’s Facebook page. He has also taken part in exhibitions for Art Education for the Blind, an organisation that helps blind people gain access to art.