my name is Sagi man, and I'm a painter. I now live in a little town in North Suffolk with my wife, Francis. For 25 years, I've been registered blind. My desire has always been to make paintings, to make visual metaphors for my experience of reality. In the early '70s, when I was 34-35, I got cataracts in both my eyes. Then, in late '79 or '80, I had a retinal detachment in my right eye, and then my left retina detached. With each operation, my sight was getting worse and worse until an area on my cornea perforated, and the eye sort of exploded. That was the total blindness which I had been trying to prepare myself for for years. The idea of painting when you were totally blind seemed a nonsense to me. And so, when I came back from the Hospital, I remember standing in my studio and thinking, you know, now what? I thought, well, I've got this canvas stretched, ready to go, and I've got all this paint.

and my brushes, and I thought, I wonder what would happen if I give that a go. So I brushed ultramarine up there where the sky was, and I had the most extraordinary sensation. I saw the canvas go blue. I painted for about an hour, and then my daughter was sort of walking by, and she said, God, Dad, that's beautiful. So I thought, Well, there you go. There is painting after blindness. And I've been doing it ever since. Pre-total blindness, I would say I was a landscape painter, and as I got blinder, figures at touch in distance became more important. Now, what I had from painting previous paintings with standing figures in was this cardboard tube. It's the height of my wife, and that bit of blue tack marks her chin, that marks her waist, that marks her knees, and I then mark down this standing figure on my canvas, the different heights which correspond to those positions. So I begin to build up a drawing in blue Tac. Okay, now the first thing is to find myself. Now, the thing about these bits of

blue Tac, of course, is that what they are actually is coordinates. They're not all the same size, and that helps me to find myself cuz certain places I put bigger. [Music] bits. Well, I'm Christopher Beress, and this is Kagan Contemporary Art Gallery in London. And on the wall at the minute, we have paintings by Sagi Mann. Since he lost his sight, we have had three exhibitions of his work, and they've all been wonderful. We have a lot of really well-known collectors who have his work, extraordinary people like Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis. Bruce Springsteen was in the gallery last week. Beyond that, we obviously have major serious art collectors who collect Sagi. This painting is actually now sold, and I suppose prices of this size of painting is now around the area of about £50,000. They're not cozy little conventional paintings. They are edgy, dangerous. They tell stories that they're full of impact through color. I think they're very individual. It is astonishing, and I can't

really fathom it. And he is brilliant. I have to sort of reinvent painting for myself. It seems sort of more or less impossible. But if you're just determined to keep going, you know you don't need to give up. Because if your subject is your own experience, then as long as you're having an experience, you've got a subject. And that has turned out to be true even into total [Music] blindness.

Blind painter Sargy Mann: Painting with inner vision - BBC News

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