Do watch this very interesting 30-minute video documentary called Sargy Mann. To do so, you have to click on the underlined name “Sargy Mann” below the picture:
Sargy Mann from Peter Mann Pictures on Vimeo.
I came across it in an article in last Sunday’s Observer, but I first came across Sargy himself in about 1972, when I started at Camberwell Art School, in London. I never knew him well. He was one of several of my painting teachers; a quite intense 35 year-old with black-rimmed pebble glasses who invariably wore a blue French artisan’s jacket and carried a portable easel. For some reason, he lived with Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard on the other side of London. He’s mentioned in passing in Martin Amis’s dental autobiography Experience.
At the time I was there, Camberwell was a school that taught its first-year students not much more than learning to draw from life. The school thought it was the best way into the visual arts; to Camberwell, it didn’t matter whether you ended up as a conceptual artist or a glass blower or a stage designer drawing was the tool you needed. I still believe that’s the best way. Sargy was only interested in painting. He thought art was about looking and seeing, but in colour: learning to see colour relationships (from life). He was especially keen on the Impressionists, Bonnard and Matisse: peering over the portable easel he painted violet-coloured oils on small pieces of board while his students learned to see. I remember one afternoon he got very excited on the Thames embankment when he saw a double reflection of the sun; first off the windows of a building and then bounced back to us off the river. He hardly had time to comment on it and get it down before it was gone again.
Sargy had terrible, blurry eyesight — rather like Monet, if I’m not mistaken — but after I’d been at Camberwell for a year, he had a cataract operation. He was very worried, he didn’t quite know the effect it would have on his work; but he coped and the paintings became clearer and bluer. Later, his eyesight deteriorated again, and by 2005, during the making of the film, he ceased to be able to see at all. But he didn’t stop painting; and that’s what the video is about, because he isn’t just sploshing on random patches of random colour. It shows that if you paint from life every day for fifty-odd years you will have enough painting information stored in your brain to be able to continue working after you go blind and, what’s more, you’ll continue deriving satisfaction from working. Who knows: like Sargy Mann, your work may even improve…
A Bad Guide 
The first architect I knew was colour-blind.
Some years ago I read the interesting memoirs of a well-known Parisian auctioneer. In one episode that particularly struck me, he went to the apartment of a collector who showed him rooms with walls covered with paintings, which he (the collector) commented on in great detail. But some of the described paintings were missing, with blanks on the walls where they had once hung! The auctioneer (who had met his share of crazies) was puzzled, but did not want to interfere with the fluent commentary of the perhaps deluded collector. Before he left, he managed to speak to the man’s long-time housekeeper, who revealed to him that the owner had been blind for many years, and was now financially strapped, so that she (unbeknownst to him) had sold some of the paintings, but he knew his collection so well that he could still describe all of the paintings in loving detail, happily unaware that some of them were no longer on his walls.
I hadn’t heard of a colour-blind architect, though I don’t think it’s an insurmountable problem. Architects aren’t usually well-trained in using colour and are unwilling to practise on their buildings, which is one reason why grey and white get used so often, I think. Jim Stirling used bright colours quite successfully in combination with the less-saturated colours of natural materials.
m-l, that’s a great story. I thought you would be interested in the way the brain seems to compensate for the loss of sight in a highly-trained see-er. I know that young, profoundly deaf people seem to rewire the parts of the brain they use to communicate, but that’s something they do when they’re young. In this is a case, someone’s using his stored-up experience of sight to keep working, rather as if it were a savings account at the bank that he could now draw money from.
My colour-blind chum eventually made his career in looking after ancient buildings: Scottish castles and the like.
In fresher chemistry labs I had another colour-blind chum. To do a titration he had to call for the assistance of a demonstrator to tell him when red had blued.
“The wine-dark sea”. Homer could never tell acids from bases.
Remember the sculptor Тамара Куренкова as herself in Russian Ark, with a detailed knowledge of all the paintings, although a Rubens isn’t quite where it’s supposed to be?
Wow. Thank you for that, M! I hadn’t even heard of it. Now I’ll try and get hold of a copy, it sounds fantastic.
Yes, it’s definitely worth the time. A nearby memorable scene is the ballerina Алла Осипенко, also as herself, saying she shares a secret with Rembrandt’s Danaë. It looks like it’s on YouTube, but try to find the DVD to get a big enough screen. The Glinka Mazurkas probably sounds like crap, too, with their audio compression.
I’ve ordered the dvd from Amazon uk.
I haven’t yet gotten to Custine’s travelogue (Russia’s Alexis de Tocqueville — or maybe Russia’s Fanny Trollope). I’m sure other regulars here have read it.
Oh that looks great, I’ll get that too (£4).
Extremely interesting, Artur. Puts me in mind of our earlier discussion re. Paul Wittgenstein’s continuing to play piano after losing his right arm.
Where there’s a will there’s a way of course plays into any such situation, the triumph of pluck over luck & c.
Drawing and painting were the great pleasures of my life once. Then I had a stroke, vision was affected. But I was able to draw and paint pretty much as ever.
Then I developed a tumour on the mid joint of my right thumb (I am right handed). That proved a far more serious impediment than vision problems, and effectively put a halt to the painting and drawing.
So for me it was touch and feel, more than sight, that proved, in the event, the more important.
Have you heard, I wonder, of the Turkish painter Esref Armagan?
Here is the case of an artist, blind from birth, who’s evidently not much bothered, in the making of his work, by being totally unable to see.
He works, as the video shows, entirely by touch and feel.
Which confirms the conclusion I have drawn from my own experience.
Where there’s a will there’s a way of course plays into any such situation, the triumph of pluck over luck & c.
Guitarists always tell the story of Django, except for metalheads who tell of Iommi. But the celebrated session guitarist Tommy Tedesco had a stroke, and pluck didn’t especially win.
(I actually saw the Russian Ark at a cinema. I loved it, but I was sympathetic to the criticism of my companion that you come out at best whistling the paintings.)
Well, of course Nature can be cruel, Des. But one thing about Veggie-tude, it always hates to expose its roots.
Artur, the video about the blind Turkish painter ought to interest you as an architect. It comes down to challenging the fellow to “do” Brunelleschi. He comes off reasonably well, at that.
I don’t know about Tony, Des. In the words of Ozzy Osbourne:
Tom, thanks for the amazing video.
There are two parts of this subject: there’s the question of how the brain works when it sees and imagines space, and then there’s the question of how you think when you’re making a painting. Esref Armagan is pretty important for the first part, but he’s never seen any colours and he’s never seen any paintings, so I’d say he doesn’t tell anybody very much about the second. I found the psychologist and the voiceover very pretentious. Neither Brunelleschi nor the Baptistry in Florence have got anything to do with what Armagan can tell anyone, and for all those people to converge there so that Armagan can feel his way around the Baptistry — and then to give Armagan a small model of an extruded octagon to feel the shape! Couldn’t he have done that in Turkey? — is absurd. The psychologist obviously doesn’t know anything about Brunelleschi, the Florentine renaissance or the history of the principles of perspective, so it’s too bad he got involved and messed it up.
django
Off topic (just today I could watch the Sargy Mann’s video, and I haven’t read all the comments yet) but look what I found in an Argentinian blog about politics: the blogger went to Oslo and was thrilled of finding your Prime Minister or Chief of Goverment (I don’t know how they call its title) buying milk at the supermarket. That’s something completely unusual to us.
http://seminariogargarella.blogspot.com/2010/11/jefe-de-gobierno.html
Dearie, That’s a wonderful video! I like watching them play, and I like them best all together, not doing solos.
Julia, I very much like seeing the Prime Minister buying milk. One good thing in Norway is that they don’t have servants, people — not all, but most — do their own dirty work. When I lived in the US, the press would ask their president how much a pint of milk cost and he would have to know the answer or be judged “out of touch with the real people”. But it was all an act, and everyone knew it. In those days (the ‘eighties), many people said they’d rather the president concentrated on running the government rather than buying groceries; now we know it’s possible to do both.
Julia, our Prime Ministers in Britain used to live a pretty ordinary life – travelling by tube in London, for example, or walking to the House of Commons – until the Irish terrorists in the 70s put a stop to it. As for the public, you could stroll along Downing Street and pose for a photo at the door of Number 10.
But would the PM bring you out a cup of tea and a biscuit?
I think not.
You can’t imagine how envious I (we) are!
Going back to the swimming pool … (I can only make you envious of our climate now. Am I too obvious? Not a big deal, though, or at least is clear that this has nothing to with us as a country)
I know, I know : “I am / we are” :-(
Norway’s king Olav, the father of our current king, famously said “Bodyguards? Me? I have four million bodyguards.” But we’ve slowly come to accept that that sort of bodyguards can’t stop the lonely looner.
Norway has had designated residences for the statsminister, but for more than a century they’ve all resisted moving in. Since the murder of Swedish PM Olof Palme in 1986 there’s been much discussion of how the PM living in a residence would improve security (and ultimately save taxpayer’s money), since there would be no need to make another house into a fort for every change in government. Still, the egalitarian principle is strong and they’ve resisted it. As time went by it became clear that the designated residence was unfit for the purpose anyway. Finally, I think with the murder of Anna Lindh in 2003, Norwegian politicians gave in and had a new residence built in connection with one of the older residences. The current PM moved in there two years ago. But apparently he still takes his bodyguards out shopping.
When I used to take my daughter to school when she was small I often used to meet the crown prince of Norway, who lives close by, driving his son the two-hundred metres to the school in a tiny, two-seater (Norwegian) electric car. Followed by a carful of bodyguards in a huge black Volvo SUV.
“I have four million bodyguards”
I love that :-)
Our last presidents do not use so many bodyguards, or were frightened by his own people, but never, ever, went to the supermarket or took their children to school, I think.
Well, Artur, about the Artagan performance, all one can say, perhaps, is “That’s show biz”.
(Still trying to wrap my own blind spot around the curious, possibly octagonal conception of the restoration of the dignity of Black Sabbath. That should be even harder than visualizing the Baptistry. After all, the Baptistry existed in the first place.)
Twenty-five years ago my wife met a Palestinian girl who had been astonished that when she was a fresher in Cambridge she shared a weekly “supervision” (i.e. a teaching hour for a pair of undergraduates, conducted by one College Fellow) with Prince Edward.
To be honest I am also amazed that Prince Edward was admitted to Cambridge, on merit or (which is surely more likely) otherwise.
My understanding is that it’s not unknown for royal families to get unearned Oxbridge places. I heard of an African case that occurred in the ‘seventies, but everyone knows that Prince Charles wasn’t exactly Albert Einstein either and yet he got a degree from Trinity College, the smartest (in both senses) college at Cambridge. The king of Norway went to Balliol, and, nice man though he doubtless is, no one accuses him of being an intellectual.
I do think that even Oxbridge must have drawn the line at the king of Sweden.
The Dutch royals have mostly the decency to study domestically, although their masters’ dissertations are more embargoed than is otherwise usual. (Kronprins Willem Alexander would need to be surrounded by a great deal of darkness before he stood out as bright, it is generally understood.)
Prinsess Madeleine of Zweden studied art history, and did a dissertation on “stuff we have in our sommer house”. While I seem to remember that her brother – whose name I neglect – was recently in the news for not actually completing any of the many courses he had started.
Well I don’t envy your monarchies, though certainly I do envy your sense of humour …
“a dissertation on “stuff we have in our sommer house” ” ! :-D
Isn’t it wonderful to have your research field so at hand?
A few years ago I went to an exhibition of Dutch Golden Age painting at the Queen’s Gallery, round the corner from Buckingham Palace. It was very good, and they hadn’t felt the need to borrow anything.
Prince William studied What Granny Keeps Upstairs In The Attic at university — not that I’ve got anything against the military learning about art.
In 2003 I went to Copenhagen for the International Conference on Historical Linguistics, which takes place in a different place every two years. I had already attended two or three before, and apart from historical linguists nobody else was particularly interested. Not so in Copenhagen: because some of the great pioneers of the discipline were Danish, we were treated to one reception after another, to a long and learned welcoming speech by the deputy mayor of the city, and even to the presence of a royal princess at the main lecture!
@tom
Thanks for that Esref link, that was a very engaging video.
How are you AJP, we miss you!
Here are two Uruguayan goats
I think my previous comment went directly to spam because of the 3 photo links I added.
Here are the links one by one (goats from Uruguay dedicated to you and your three beauties)
Another one:
And this is my preferred:
Julia, thank you for the delightful Uruguayans. The little one must be very young; if I remember correctly, they start to get horns when they’re only a couple of weeks old. I like the horns on the big one: they stand straight up, whereas on ours they slope downwards.
I’m sorry I haven’t written anything recently, nothing seems to have been happening here that was worth commenting on. I’ve been quite caught up in reading about the Wikileaks, but it’s depressing to see how bad everyone is, and I might have to stop!
You’re welcome! I’m glad you like them.
So this little one is very very little!
I think it is.