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Friday 5 December 2008

Sargy Mann: Probably the Best Blind Painter in Peckham

The sweetness pictures can add to life

John McEwan on the new book by Peter Mann and Sargy Mann

Mann makes light of his afflictions: the absurdity of continuing to teach when dependent on the white stick; the corneal oedema obliged him to take a hair-dryer to galleries as a visual aid.

In 2002 a corneal transplant improved his sight for the first time in 30 years but joy was short-lived. In 2005 what he had been ‘dreading for so long’ finally happened. A second retinal detachment made him totally blind.

The miracle is, you would never know any of this from the paintings, except a vase of flowers painted double to contrast the difference made by a cataract. Even more surprising is the growing freedom which finds its ultimate expression in the paintings he has done since 2005. He provides an explanation: ‘Seeing is subjective, you see in your brain, and I always saw at my best when I was painting’.

His release from the strictures of the puritanical ethos of the Slade, where he was taught, has been indebted as much as anything to holidays in brighter climes. Mann is emphatic that he is a painter of direct visual experience, not ideas. But there may be a profounder freedom in the latest untrammelled celebrations of colour. Searching for a sheet to lighten the chair in a 2007 portrait he suddenly thought: ‘You don’t need the sheet, you won’t see it anyway, you can make the chair any colour you like.’ And with the guiding help of his walking stick and blobs of Bluetack he did. This was a ‘terrific breakthrough’.

As a painter he has had an instinctive and practical liking for foreground shadow, which he admits, in an uncharacteristic flight of self-analysis, may have had something to do with hiding as a child, especially from his father, with whom he did not get on. It must make the apparently cloudless relations with his own children all the more precious. The latest paintings are portraits with no landscape excuse for foreground shadow.

This instructive book may be directed at painters but has an inspiring and comforting message for us all. It fits neatly between Renoir, My Father and The World Through Blunted Sight by Patrick Trevor- Roper, who illustrated his patient Sargy Mann’s cataract picture in the second edition.

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