Sargy mann biography of christopher

As a young man, Sargy Mann was a keen sportsman, drummed in a jazz band with Dudley Moore, and played a mean game of chess – even when blindfolded. But it was as a painter that he made his name. Diagnosed with cataracts at the age of 36, he eventually lost his sight completely, but as he explains to Laura Barber, he has always been interested in different ways of seeing

Growing up, my sister was the artistic one. My great passion was sport and I wanted to be a professional footballer or cricketer. The school we went to was very liberal – the kind of place where you didn’t have to go to lessons – and I barely spent any time in the art room. Though I remember once wanting to draw a man chopping down a tree: I stood in front of my mother’s full-length mirror and swung a walking stick so I could get the action right. It was the first time I’d ever drawn directly from nature, and tried to understand something by really looking hard.

I left school at 16 and was apprenticed to Morris Radiators in Oxford to become an engineer. After my somewhat unworldly childhood, the world of the factory was totally mysterious to me. I was a terribly self-conscious boy, and rather scared of people. But I began to develop a bit of an arty personality. I loved jazz and had a big record collection; I used to go to the university jazz club and even played in the university band when they needed a drummer. I’d occasionally draw the musicians and dancers too, but I didn’t begin taking my art seriously until I moved to London.

I’d decided I wanted to read for a maths degree, but I needed to have A-levels so I enrolled at Hammersmith Poly. Instead of attending lectures I’d go to the Natural History Museum and draw. I met an art student there and one evening, he came back to my flat where my drawings were all over the walls. He said I ought to be at art school and, in that instant, I

Sargy Mann

Six years on from his death, the life and legacy of the blind artist is revisited in a new exhibition. STEVE PILL celebrates his visionary paintings and remarkable will to create

The opening minutes of Peter Mann’s wonderful 2006 film about his late father, the artist Sargy Mann, are something of an emotional rollercoaster. Opening on a black screen, we hear a recording of Sargy’s gentle, otherworldly voice confirm that it is 30 May 2005 and today marks “the end of vision”. His eyesight had been deteriorating for more than 30 years, following cataracts and retinal detachments, and he had awoken to experience total blindness for the very first time. “I presume I won’t be painting any more pictures,” he says, seemingly in a state of shock.

Before one can even begin to contemplate the sheer injustice of an artist being robbed of his most valuable sense, his voice begins again. Nine days have passed and Sargy describes “the most perfect, soft summer morning” as he settles down to paint. He had one last primed canvas on his easel that he decided to complete as a form of closure. Fast forward a little and his voice is brighter again as he reveals “it’s 12pm and I’ve just had, I don’t know what, the most remarkable hour and a half’s painting of my life I should think.” A painted memory of a hotel bar in the Spanish town of Cadaqués, the evening light bouncing off the Mediterranean, came together more easily than he could ever have hoped. “Although I am totally blind now, I just see the canvas changing colour when I put the pigment down on it,” he says. “I wonder, maybe I can paint? I quite enjoyed doing it, I must say.” Sargy’s whole life was full of these modest yet revelatory moments. He treated his diminishing sight not as a disability but rather a prompt to look harder and feel more; the inability to draw direct from life became a license to imagine and invent. In

This text was written by Sargy Mann in the final weeks of his life. It was first published in the exhibition catalogue of the exhibition ‘Final Paintings’ which was at Cadogan Contemporary in June 2015, two months after the artists death. An edited version of the piece was also published on the BBC.

When, in 1960, I went to Camberwell School of Art, at the age of 23, I encountered inspiring painter teachers, notably, Dick Lee, Euan Uglow and Frank Auerbach but also there were important others. In their different ways, they told me that they could not teach me to draw and paint, but that through practicing drawing and painting, I would find I saw more and better, and as the years progressed I found they were right.

Although their paintings looked and were made in very different ways, they seemed to me to have something important in common, which was a commitment to some real physical subject, external to themselves, existent in the outside world, that they were trying to understand and experience in the most intense way possible, and which they were trying to celebrate and preserve in some communicable form of metaphor – the painting or drawing they were making. True to their different personalities and the different teaching theyhad received, they each responded to different aspects of the external world, and they made different coloured metaphors, painting in different ways. Even if one hadwanted to, one could not attempt to copy more than one of them at a time. Copying them was certainly not what any of them would have wanted, but as they were so influential, it was always a danger.

Through following Dick Lee, I became more sensitive to the ambient light bathing everything I looked at; through following Euan Uglow I became more sensitive to the particularities of coloured form in the light and space that those forms and I were in; and most dramatically, through following Frank Auerbach, I became much more intensely

We returned to Suffolk at the end of May for my birthday, with about a dozen possible subjects. It was a perfect sunny day with the whole family present, but the next morning I woke with a pain in my left eye and when I asked my wife to look, she said: "Oh my God, it's bleeding!" An ulcer had perforated and my eye had, in effect, exploded. It was what I had tried to prepare myself for - total blindness, and therefore, I had always assumed, the end of painting.

A few days later when I was mooching round my studio, wondering what I would do with the rest of my life - some sort of sculpture I assumed, though I had never had much feeling for it - my brain again flooded with all the wonderful Cadaques subjects and I thought, "Well, I wonder, what's to lose?"

I took a canvas, a plastic chair and my painting trolley out into the sunny garden, chose from my memory one of the subjects, felt the canvas, imagining as intensely as I could, and thought: "Here goes." I put ultramarine on a brush and started painting the top right hand corner of the canvas and I saw it go blue. It wasn't a memory it was a percept, though not one such as you would have. But, as I reflected later on, "Why not?" My dreams, even though I am totally blind, are perceptually immaculate.

I painted for about an hour and then asked my daughter, who was passing, "What do you think, darling?"

"Dad, that's amazing! It's beautiful."

"But, can you see what it is?"

"Well, yes I think so. It looks like a little table, bottom left, with Peter sitting on the other side of it in front of a large window, with sky, distant hills and dark blue sea. And then on the right, an open doorway with low sun flooding towards you, reflecting off the sea."

It was a perfect description of my subject. So perhaps there was painting after total blindness, after all.

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