Eşref Armağan - Do you know this guy?

Look at these paintings:


They would have been some [above the average] paintings, to me personally sometimes it recalls the macchiaioli style, but what makes them unique is that the guy who painted them is blind. He was born blind. He NEVER saw distance, perpective, angulation, grass, sea, sun, moon, rocks, whatever. His sight is limited to black. This person has the ability to paint what he NEVER saw, including perspective, distance, lighting and so on.
www.newscientist.com...
www.discoveryhd.ca...

A paper: "Esref Armagan and perspective in tactile pictures"
By John M. Kennedy and Igor Juricevic | University of Toronto

www.utsc.utoronto.ca...

Read about the case, and you will find out that it has nothing normal, at least according to science.

[edit on 19/2/2009 by internos]

Wow, Ill look him up, thats quite extraordinary.
Did someone tell him a roof was red (usually), trees were green? etc.
Im thinknig he must have been told colour pallats rather than pick up a tube intuitively and paint. But the persepctive is better than my nephews and nieces (up to age 12).

If it is true and no one was helping him, proof that RV exists!

Originally posted by asmeone2
If it is true and no one was helping him, proof that RV exists!

I was thinking more along the lines of past life experience..

Very intruiging. I am very impressed that a blind person can paint like that.

The sad thing is that now even a blind person is a better artist than me!

ah well Thats why I stick with photography

Nice find internos!

Thank you for sharing this fascinating story with us, I have never heard of anything like this before. And this passage in the article in NewsScientist is really something to think about:

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 was also very moved by this:

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."

Both passages from this page in the article:
www.newscientist.com...

Wow, great thread internos!! That is amazing, I agree it could be either past life experience or remote viewing. Just another 'hint' about how we know little about 'existance' .

I would have to see more of this persons paintings in order to possibly catching tale tale signs of either RV or past life.
S&F!!!

This once again proves that human awareness is not dependent on a body as widely believed.

[edit on 10-4-2009 by Skyfloating]

What a wonderful story for this Holiday Day (so pagan and so my favorite) and so much more hopeful and inspiring than what we ususally get to see around here these days.

I am going to excerpt from your first link to help folks get a clear perspective to how incredibly, technically skilled this man is:

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.

It is, by scientific standards, nothing short of miraculous. S&F!! and THANK YOU!

I'm surprised and glad to see that this story was not touching just to me. Thank you everyone for your very nice thoughts
This case is very puzzling, fascinating and moving, and i'm so happy whenever i see scientists puzzled by something that NOT, can't be explained in some quick/prosaic way: maybe it will, in the future, but so far ................


[edit on 15/4/2009 by internos]

Hiya Internos,
I read the thread a while back and, for obvious reasons, it stuck with me . There's a photography exhibition at the University of California called Sight Unseen.. All the photographers are blind or visually impaired.

The article that originally caught my attention is Blind photographers showcase work. It includes a short video showcase of some of the images. Peter Ekhert and Victoria Floyd Fludd present some compelling images.