SpeakOut Intermediate - Unit 1 - The Blind Painter

S = Sargy Mann F = Frances C = Christopher Burness S: My name is Sargy Mann and I’m a painter. I now live in a little town in North Suffolk with my wife Frances. For twenty-five years, I’ve been registered blind. F: ‘Duck!’ S: My desire has always been to make paintings, to make visual metaphors for my experience of reality. In the early seventies, when I was thirty-four, thirty-five, I got cataracts in both my eyes. With each operation my sight was getting worse and worse, until the eye sort of exploded, and that was the total blindness which I had been trying to prepare myself for, for years. The idea of painting when you were totally blind seemed a nonsense to me, and so when I came back from hospital, I remember standing in my studio and thinking, you know, ‘now what?’ I thought, ‘Well I’ve got this canvas stretched, ready to go, and I’ve got all this paint, and my brushes, and I thought, ‘I wonder what would happen if I give that a go.’ So I brush ultramarine up there where th