Throughout his life, Sargy Mann (1937-2015) had a fascination with the nature of visual perception and a desire to make paintings that could communicate his experience of the world. Described by The Guardian as “the blind painter of Peckham”, he was diagnosed with cataracts at the age of 36 and eventually lost his sight, but never stopped painting.

“It can give the viewer what he would not see were he in the place of the artist. It can give him something essentially and qualitatively different from that, something he could never experience except through the medium of that particular painting. It can give him what the artist saw or imagined. This, I believe, was what John Betjeman was getting at when he once said to me, ‘art is shared experience’.” In 1996, Sargy Mann explained in his “Shared Experience” essay what fascinated him so much about painting. An English painter born in Kent in 1938, he was a teacher for almost thirty years and a writer with a fine critical sense. He wrote many essays about his subjects of predilection: visual perception, painting and above all the great painters of light, such as Monet, Cézanne, and particularly Bonnard. In line with these great figures, Mann’s last artworks combine the virtuosity acquired through time with the ability to let go, touching the essence of things. In his case this is all the more true: the paintings that best convey a scene in a vibrant and luminous way – as he experienced in front of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings – are those he painted blind. He knew it and fully embraced it: “In 1989 Moorfield’s Eye Hospital registered me as blind, not partially sighted, but blind, as the sight that I had was so poor – it was just a small peripheral spot in my left eye – but to my astonishment and even more the astonishment of the ophthalmologists I was making very good use of it.” He eventually went totally blind in 2005, after a trip with his son Peter to Cadaqués, in northern Spain, and thought this was the end of his painting. Yet, “A few days later, mooching about my studio and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life – some sort of sculpture I supposed, although I had little enthusiasm for this – my head again flooded with the Cadaqués subjects and I thought, well what is to be lost I might as well have a go. I played through the Cadaqués subjects in my memory – chose the most luminous and felt the canvas, thinking about what would go where, what the main divisions of the rectangle would be. Then with excitement, but probably more trepidation, I put ultramarine on a brush and painted the top right hand corner of the canvas and I had one of the most extraordinary sensations of my life. I saw the canvas go blue. It wasn’t a projection, it wasn’t me remembering what it was like, it was a percept for sure, but a percept clearly created somewhere in my visual cortex. I carried on painting for an hour or more and then when my daughter was passing I said, ‘What do you think?’ ‘God Dad, that’s beautiful.’ ‘Great but can you see what it is?’ ‘Well yes I think so … that looks like Peter on the left across a little table with sky and hills and sea through a window behind him and then bright sun coming through an open door on the right and reflecting off the sea.’ She had described my subject perfectly. So perhaps there was painting after total blindness, after all. Over the next year, or eighteen months, I painted all the Cadaqués subjects. I largely forgot that I was painting blind – this was simply once again what I did.”

However, as you can see, losing sight was just another step in Sargy Mann’s artistic journey. 

He undertook to ‘see more’ thanks to painting well before going blind, following the master impressionists and post-impressionists. He wrote about a drawing by Bonnard: “The different ‘weights’ of line and tone measure the contrasts at their different distances and one begins to ‘see’ the bright greens and greys of this busy, sunny day in early Summer.” In an essay about Raoul Dufy, he explained: “As with Matisse, [Dufy’s] use of colour was an attempt to get nearer the truth – the truth of light – not turning his back on it.” Years later he wrote to André Lhote, “You refer to my struggle for colour, and rightly so, since all my life has gone into this. But I should like to be fully understood, and, to be quite sure that I am, I should prefer your saying, ‘my struggle for light’, which is the soul of colour. Colour without light is lifeless. What I have always been after is an order of colour, of physical colour as it comes from our tubes, an order that makes those tubes yield light. Without light forms fail to come to life, colour alone being not enough to make them stand out. We perceive light first of all, colour afterwards.” This ‘struggle for light’, Mann made his own, almost obsessively, looking for keys to understanding in his painting as well as in other painters. His passion for Bonnard guided him towards a sensitive and playful understanding of light and colour: “How did he paint those momentary intimate encounters on the street or in the cafes; cats on the point of stealing a sardine off the dinner table; and above all the effects of light, lasting perhaps a minute – even a few seconds?” he wonders. “He drew incessantly at any time and anywhere and these drawings are one of the wonders of the visual arts. Seldom more than about 4 by 6 ins in size and on any old rubbishy bit of paper to hand – many are on squared maths paper, others on flimsy numbered sheets from invoice books – they are packed with wonderfully diverse but harmonised information about light, form, space, incident and colour.”

More than anything, Sargy Mann was obsessed with this particular idea: how painters teach us to see. He invited the readers of The Artist magazine, for which he used to write, to look closer at Cézanne’s paintings: “The irony here, as with all of Cezanne’s mature painting, is that most interested viewers respond to its decorative unity, see how beautiful it is but never look long enough, or with sufficient openness for the patterns to transmute into the real prize: Cezanne’s experience of reality.” He also wrote in the same article entitled “On Cezanne”, as a kind of personal note: “He did not see the world in consistent linear perspective, or in a predictably ordered tonality. But he did see colour and form and distance.” This way of painting a scene thanks to colour rather than perspective made a huge impact on him.

Paradoxically the loss of sight gave him access to what probably Bonnard, Monet or Cézanne could see or feel, an experience of light and colours beyond the immediate perception of things. A world opened up to him where colours could express themselves fully, where they complemented each other in an obvious and brilliant way. The preeminence of sensation over the model preached by Bonnard, Mann was able to put completely into practice, forced to rely only on his sensations. “In a funny way, Mann’s blindness set him free,” sums up Olivia Laing.

That’s what is so touching about his late artworks, he did not see them the way we do, yet he offers the viewer a unique visual experience. These canvases could only be painted because he lost his sight. They are what they are, magnificently infused with light, precisely because of that. Martin Herbert rightly points out: “Mann didn’t – couldn’t – paint from what he had seen, couldn’t find a subject he wanted to paint from memory, and took up a novel approach. He would paint Frances, his wife, as she sat in a chair in his studio. He learned the position she was in by feel and, he said later, his long-trained visual cortex translated for him, turning three dimensions into two from where he was. He marked her shape out in Blu-Tak on canvas, and infilled them in colours – notably, and progressively, not necessarily colours drawn from reality but freer, intensely songful colour harmonies.”

This is perhaps the most precious lesson that Sargy Mann offers us, how he embraced his own path without fear or preconceptions, in this, accessing a form of pure freedom. “Dad didn’t judge the world with a lot of preconceived ideas,” his son recalls. “It was that attitude that allowed him to carry on and to see the value of what his blindness revealed. And that’s what he wanted to share.” 

His paintings will remain a unique example of a talented painter who revealed himself as a master colourist, playing with colour in a free and intuitive way, but with a truth all his own. His passion for light and ‘painting with light’ will guide him throughout his career, as if he took for himself this sentence that Bonnard once addressed to a young painter: “Light is our god, young man, one day you will come to understand this.” His latest paintings reflect this understanding, and even more so his liberation from the painted space, proposing a radical treatment of it, extending the path opened by Bonnard before him.


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