Esref Armagan: the artist with no eyes

Esref Armagan is a Turkish artist who was born without eyes. As a blind artist, you would expect him to sculpt in clay or to carve wood, to do something very tactile that doesn't require eyes.

But Armagan is a walking X-File, and he does something that shouldn't be possible. He paints. Representational paintings. Using color. And perspective. His buildings look like buildings, his trees have green leaves and his skies are blue. Against all odds, his Bill Clinton somehow looks like Bill Clinton.

It seems like this has to be a hoax. But the man either has eyes or he doesn't, there's no faking that. He has been put to the test many times, and apparently the impossible is true: he has no eyes, and yet he paints. In the video below we watch him at work, carefully finger-painting as the cameras roll. Later he is led to the Baptistry of Florence, Italy, where he feels the building's corners and is then able to sketch out a crude representation, using correct perspective, as a crowd watches.


So, he can feel a building's shape, and draw it. That makes some sort of sense. But how does Armagan paint imaginary monsters, or fish playing the violin? How does he know to make reflections in water?

I gather that his artistic process involves a lot of memorization. From talking to people, he learned that the sky was blue. Then he figured out that his blue paint had a certain smell. So, when he paints skies now, he knows which tube of paint to grab. He was told that bananas are yellow and watermelon is red, and he combined that knowledge with his own perception of how bananas and watermelons are shaped to paint a plate of fruit. Every time he touches paint to canvas, his mind is remembering a million little things and putting them together in extraordinary ways. From the words he's heard, the colors he's smelled and the objects he's touched, he is able to form a vision he can share with the world.


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