absolutely amazing! But I suspect that this ability varies widely from
person to person. They'll find out a lot from studying this man. But I doubt
that everyblind person has the same ability because abilities vary from one
person to another.
Miriam
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From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
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To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Senses special: The art of seeing without sight
Articles separated by +++
Senses special: The art of seeing without sight
Artist Focus
Esref Armagan
"I started painting when I was five or six ... I think of myself as an
artist ... and I will probably die drawing," says Esref Armagan, a
congenitally blind figurative artist from Turkey. Art Education for the
Blind, Inc. organized Mr. Armagan's one-man art show in New York City this
past May.
Mr. Armagan has been working for the past 35 years. As a child and young
adult he never received any formal schooling or training; he taught himself
to write and print. He paints primarily in oil. First, using a braille
stylus, he etches an outline of what he will paint. 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,
allowing each color to dry before adding the next. He receives no assistance
or training from any individual. He has learned to draw perspective, and,
also, developed methods of doing portraits. For more information and images
of his remarkable work, go to
www.armagan.com
[Image, titled "Boat with Fish" is a oil-color painting. The upper half of
the painting is dominated by a large, green sailboat , with blue sky and
white, gray and dark blue clouds behind the boat. In the lower half, two
fish swim in water that is divided into three colored areas: red, blue and
brown. The fish look up at the boat.]
+++
Senses special: The art of seeing without sight
By Alison Motluk
New Scientist Thursday, January 27, 2005
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524841.700
IT IS an odd sight. A middle-aged man, fully reclined, drawing pictures of
hammers and mugs and animal figurines on a special clipboard, which is
balanced precariously on a pillow atop his ample stomach.
A half-dozen people buzz around him. One adjusts a towel under his neck to
make him more comfortable, another wields a stopwatch and chants
instructions to start doing this or stop doing that, and yet another
translates everything into Turkish. A small group convenes in a corner to
assess the proceedings. A few of us just stand around watching, and trying
not to get in the way. The elaborate ritual is a practice run for an
upcoming brain scan and the researchers want to get everything just right.
Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blind painter,
cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering.
The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek
inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures
that the sighted easily recognise and even admire. He paints houses and
mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of
these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear
how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?
Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person
can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental
images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up
mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How
much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the
layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually
do?
Armagan was born 51 years ago in one of Istanbul's poorer neighbourhoods.
One of his eyes failed to develop beyond a rudimentary bud, the other is
stunted and scarred. It is impossible to know if he had some vision as an
infant, but he certainly never saw normally and his brain detects no light
now. Few of the children in his neighbourhood were formally educated, and
like them, he spent his early years playing in the streets. But Armagan's
blindness isolated him, and to pass the time, he turned to drawing. At first
he just scratched in the dirt. But by age 6 he was using pencil and paper.
At 18 he started painting with his fingers, first on paper, then on canvas
with oils. At age 42 he discovered fast-drying acrylics.
"He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but
he's never seen any of these things"His paintings are disarmingly realistic.
And his skills are formidable. "I have tested blind people for decades,"
says John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, "and I have
never seen a performance like his." Kennedy's first opportunity to meet and
test Armagan in person was during a visit to New York last May, for a forum
organised by a group called Art Education for the Blind. Armagan, who is
something of a celebrity in Turkey, has become used to touring with his
canvases to the Czech Republic, China, Italy and the Netherlands. What made
this visit different was the interest shown by scientists both Kennedy and a
team from Boston.
Kennedy put Armagan through a battery of tests. For instance, he presented
him with solid objects that he could feel a cube, a cone and a ball all in a
row (dubbed the "three mountains task") and asked him to draw them. He then
asked him to draw them as though he was perched elsewhere at the table,
across from himself, then to his right and left and hovering overhead.
Kennedy asked him to draw two rows of glasses, stretching off into the
distance. Representing this kind of perspective is tough even for a sighted
person. And when he asked him to draw a cube, and then to rotate it to the
left, and then further to the left, Armagan drew a scene with all three
cubes. Astonishingly, he drew it in three-point perspective showing a
perfect grasp of how horizontal and vertical lines converge at imaginary
points in the distance. "My breath was taken away," Kennedy says.
Kennedy has spent much of his career exploring art from the perspective of
blind people. He has shown that people who are congenitally blind understand
outline drawings when they feel them just as seeing people do. They
understand and can draw in three dimensions. In fact, blind children develop
the ability to draw, he has found, much as sighted children do but all too
few blind children ever get the opportunity to explore this ability. Even
knowledge about perspective, he has come to believe, is acquired in similar
ways for both. "Where a sighted person looks out, a blind person reaches
out, and they will discover the same things," says Kennedy. "The geometry of
direction is common to vision and touch."
Lines and one-liners
It is the night before the Boston team's first brain scan. Armagan is
sitting at a long table at an inn, entertaining everyone with one-liners,
trying to explain how he does his artwork. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, the Harvard
neurologist who invited him here, and Amir Amedi, his colleague, are
challenging him with more and more complex tasks. Draw a road leading away,
says Pascual-Leone, with poles on either side and with a source of light
underneath. Armagan smiles confidently.
He uses a special rubberised tablet, called a "Sewell raised line drawing
kit". This device allows him to draw lines that rise off his paper as tiny
puckers, so that he can detect them with his fingertips. And so he draws the
road and the poles: one hand holding the pencil, the other tracing along
behind, like surrogate eyes, "observing" the image as it is being laid down.
A minute or so later, the picture is done. Pascual-Leone and Amedi shake
their heads in wonder.
So, we ask, how do you know how long these poles should be as they recede? I
was taught, he says. Not by any formal teacher, but by casual comments by
friends and acquaintances. How do you know about shadows? He learned that
too. He confides that for a long time he figured that if an object was red,
its shadow would be red too. "But I was told it wasn't," he says. But how do
you know about red? He knows that there's an important visual quality to
seen objects called "colour" and that it varies from object to object. He's
memorised what has what colour and even which ones clash.
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.
"We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality through
our eyes. But is it?"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: "John M. Kennedy, Chair, Department of Life Sciences, University of
Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, ON M1C1A4, Canada"
kennedy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: "Art Beyond Sight Theory and Research"
art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research@xxxxxxxxxx Cc:
accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: [Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] art by
Esref and others
Date: Monday, September 26, 2005 7:36 AM
Morton Heller wrote:
Hi All I just looked at the Art Beyond Sight web site, and it is fantastic.
I check back there frequently, but not often enough. I was especially
interested in the fine art produced by Esref Armagan. I wish that I had been
able to attend his reception when he had an exhibit recently. Does anyone
know how he does it? I am a Mac user, and could not view the video on the
site. Does he use raised-line drawings before adding pigments? This is what
I would expect from the paintings. Does he have any useful light perception?
Regards, Morty Heller
Dear colleagues, last night I had a telephone conversation with Joan Eroncel
and asked her about Morty's email. She said Esref used to make raised line
drawings before colouring his pictures. Now he adds the colours directly to
the surfaces without the preliminary step of making the raised drawing . He
has no useful light perception. Medical opinion is that he never had light
sensitivity. John
From: "John M. Kennedy, Chair, Department of Life Sciences, University of
Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, ON M1C1A4, Canada"
kennedy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: "Art Beyond Sight Theory and Research"
art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research@xxxxxxxxxx Cc:
accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: [Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] art by
Esref and others
Date: Monday, September 26, 2005 10:02 AM
Lisa Yayla wrote:
Hi, I was just reading Oliver Sacks book An Anthropologist on Mars and
wondered Could drawing be divided in three parts. 1. the inherent, that
which is "hardwired" in everyone includes eg math, information component
need (contours need in the same way one needs vitamins, as a component for
development) Contour perception likely has a great deal that is hardwired
2. the intake: senses Yes: And do notice some development occurs for sure,
though much is hardwired (eg sensitivity improves, some shapes become
familiar)
3. the output:ability to draw, coordination Yes: And do notice that we
could become more and more coordinated but stay at the same level in drawing
(eg using true form and parallel projection) or we can shift levels (eg
using convergent lines to show receding parallels) while still being rather
rough in our coordination. In this way sophistication is distinct from
coordination.
John
