painting blind

[VV o n g B a]

the following paintings are by esref armagan, a turkish painter. the paintings might not look very special at first, but consider esref's background: he was born blind. and yet he incorporates color, shadow, and perspective in his paintings. it's really quite amazing if u consider how his brain has to work to paint this stuff. scientists scanned his brain and apparently he actually "sees" something while painting.

[Faithless]

That is remarkable.

Says something about the "mind's eye".

[Fireblade]

he was born blind?????!!!!!!!!!!!!

holy crap. His stuff is better than most ppl who can see. Very Awesome

[truMp]

I always wondered if blind people could see, but I dont understand how he could see such images being that he was born blind. Unless he isn't fully blind?

[nonamerasian]

I don't get it.

How does he know color if he was born blind?

It's difficult to describe a color to a color blind person, yet Armagan was born blind and produces those paintings.

That's awesome.

[YuheiCarreau]

I think it's more likely that he is like Beethoven - who was born with the ability to hear but went deaf as a child.

I would have to assume that he still has some sight. It would be nothing short of a miracle for a person who'd never had sight to produce 2-dimensional artwork, especially work that seems to have an impressionist influence.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by nonamerasian

I don't get it.

How does he know color if he was born blind?

It's difficult to describe a color to a color blind person, yet Armagan was born blind and produces those paintings.

That's awesome.

He uses his other senses, in particular, touch.

http://www.mersina.com/gallery/armagan/bio.html

He needs absolute quite when working. First, using a Braille stylus, he etches an outline of his drawing. He needs to feel that he is "inside" his painting-- in fact, when he is drawing a picture of the sea, he often wonders if he should wear a life jacket so as not drown! When he is satisfied with his drawing, he starts to apply the oils with his fingers. Because he applies only one color at a time (the colors would smear otherwise), he must wait two or three days for the color to dry before applying the next color. This method of painting is entirely unique to Mr. Armagan. He receives no assistance or training from any individual. He also learned to draw perspective.

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, later adding color. He has done portraits of the former first lady of Turkey, the current president and current prime minister.

Of course, that is easier said then done.

One way that his talent can be explained --

The touch is there -- in fact, it probably becomes very important to the blind. They probably use it in more heightened ways to develop perspective, in a sense.

You've seen in some movies where the blind person totally carresses the face of another -- getting a sense of contour and depth and smoothness/roughness. That stores somewhere in the mind.

As long as we're able to get-about, we must develop some sense of space. In that sense, we build a sense of dimension.

Now, whether he's actually forming some image in his mind, is a wonder, and raises this question, "what is "seeing" exactly?"

...
Scanning the mind's eye
Next day, and the time has come for Armagan to get into the scanner. The Harvard scientists are collaborating with scanning experts at Boston University. In addition to taking a structural snapshot of Armagan's brain and establishing if it can perceive any light (they confirmed it cannot), this morning's experiment will have him doing some odd sequences of tasks. He'll have a set number of seconds to feel an object, imagine it and draw it. But he has also been asked to scribble, pretend to feel an object and recall a list of objects that he learned days earlier.

Pascual-Leone and Amedi want to see what Armagan's brain can tell them about neural plasticity. Both scientists have evidence that in the absence of vision, the "visual" cortex - the part of the brain that makes sense of the information coming from our eyes - does not lie idle. Pascual-Leone has found that proficient Braille readers recruit this area for touch. Amedi, along with Ehud Zohary at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found that the area is also activated in verbal memory tasks.

When Amedi analysed the results, however, he found that Armagan's visual cortex lit up during the drawing task, but hardly at all for the verbal recall. Amedi was startled by this. "To get such extraordinary plasticity for [drawing] and zero for verbal memory and language - it was such a strong result," he says. He suspects that, to a certain extent, how the unused visual areas are deployed depends on who you are and what you need from your brain.

Even more intriguing was the way in which drawing activated Armagan's visual cortex. It is now well established that when sighted people try to imagine things - faces, scenes, colours, items they've just looked at - they engage the same parts of their visual cortex that they use to see, only to a much lesser degree. Creating these mental images is a lot like seeing, only less powerful. When Armagan imagined items he had touched, parts of his visual cortex, too, were mildly activated. But when he drew, his visual cortex lit up as though he was seeing. In fact, says Pascual-Leone, a naive viewer of his scan might assume Armagan really could see.

That result cracks open another big nut: what is "seeing" exactly? Even without the ability to detect light, Armagan is coming incredibly close to it, admits Pascual-Leone. We can't know what is actually being generated in his brain. "But whatever that thing in his mind is, he is able to transfer it to paper so that I unequivocally know it's the same object he just felt," says Pascual-Leone.

In his own life, too, Armagan seems to have a remarkable grasp of space. He seldom gets lost, says his manager Joan Eroncel. He has an uncanny sense of a room's dimensions. He once drew the layout of an apartment he had only visited briefly, she says, and remembered it perfectly nine years later.

We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality through our eyes. But is it? How much of what we think of as seeing really comes from without, and how much from within? The visual cortex may have a much more important role than we realise in creating expectations for what we are about to see, says Pascual-Leone. "Seeing is only possible when you know what you're going to see," he says. Perhaps in Armagan the expectation part is operational, but there is simply no data coming in visually.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a person can't have a "mind's eye" without ever having had vision. But Pascual-Leone thinks Armagan must have one. The researcher has long argued that you could arrive at the same mental picture via different senses. In fact he thinks we all do this all the time, integrating all the sensations of an object into our mental picture of it. "When we see a cup," he says, "we're also feeling with our mind's hand. Seeing is as much touching as it is seeing." But because vision is so overwhelming, we are unaware of that, he says. But in Armagan, significantly, that is not the case.

I sit across from the source of all this mystery and I ask him about the birds he loves to paint. They are brightly coloured and exotic and I wonder aloud how he knows how to depict them. He tells me about how he used to own a parakeet shop. "They come to your hand," he says. "You can easily touch them." He pauses and smiles and says: "I love being surrounded by beauty."

From issue 2484 of New Scientist magazine, 29 January 2005, page 37

[truMp]

Wait, was it confirmed that he was born blind? Cause I just can't imagine that you can "visualize" the object through touch.

[YuheiCarreau]

Originally Posted by truMp

Wait, was it confirmed that he was born blind? Cause I just can't imagine that you can "visualize" the object through touch.

It says that he learned to draw by having someone follow the lines in a drawing or photo, making a groove in the paper. Then he flips it over and feels the raised lines.

Which means that he's not a miracle worker, just a dedicated mimic. He didn't create his style of drawing or his depiction of perspective out of his imagination; he synthesized the work of other artists. This is like that old joke about the man with a talking dog - you know, What's on top of a house? "RRROOOF!" What does sandpaper feel like? "RRRRUFF!".

How does he choose paints? Do they even make paint bottles with braille labels?

I can't imagine why he taught himself to do this. What kind of artist never looks at his own work? I'm sure he can feel the texture of the paint on the page once it's dried, but that's a markedly different experience compared to using your eyes to interpret the colors, shapes, perspective, etc.

[Commando_turned_MD]

This is very impressive.