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Green Pebble Magazine
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Articles> Sargy Mann
When artist
Sargy Mann went blind almost four years ago, he didn’t succumb to rage
or self-pity. Instead, he turned to the memories and skills he had developed
during his years of gradually declining eyesight, and with these tools launched
a new phase of his career.
Sargy Mann had been painting with very little sight for nearly two decades
when, in May 2005, he finally went completely blind.
Despite this setback, he continued to paint his luminous and penetrating canvases
and today his reputation appears to be as high as ever. He has a loyal following
throughout the world, with collectors including actor Daniel Day Lewis, novelists
Elizabeth Jane Howard and Jilly Cooper, the late Sir John Betjeman, and novelist
Iris Murdoch.
‘Right up to his total blindness, he looked harder at what he could
see than most people whose eyes are perfect,’ writes his son, Peter
Mann, in a new hardcover book, Sargy Mann, Probably the Best Blind Painter
in Peckham; a collaborative venture between father and son. ‘I have
learnt a lot about ‘seeing’ from my father.’
For this book Peter photographed twenty-seven of his father’s paintings
where they hang today, in situ in the homes of the people who live with them.
These photographs span 44 years of Sargy’s life as a painter and are
supported by Sargy’s own text. The text to each picture builds into
the autobiography of a painter who was gradually going blind but who never
gave up on seeing or questioning the way he sees.
Peter has included touchingly intimate photographs of his father’s home
alongside photos of the paintings. There are pictures of the family kitchen,
chaotic and yet full of things precious to life: treasured photos, a small
painting, flowers in a window, pretty pottery, olive oil, good wine, fresh
herbs, and a grill that is dirty because cooking and eating are more important
than cleaning. These are people who enjoy sitting around the table, talking.
Sargy (pronounced with a hard ‘g’, as in Maggie) and his family
moved from Peckham to their Suffolk home in 1990 and as I enter, it is full
of the warmth apparent in the photos. Sargy is showing Frances, his wife,
how to do a slip knot, his fingers dexterous as he manipulates the string.
Later, sitting in his garden where willow trees hang their branches over the
River Waveney, Sargy explains, ‘If I had had perfect sight and then,
in 2005, I had suddenly gone totally blind, that would have been so much worse.
Goodness knows if I would have carried on painting then. The fact that I had
actually been painting so nearly blind for nearly eighteen years was a very
good apprenticeship for painting totally blind.’...
This is only a small part of the article.
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