A Blind Painter

The picture you are looking at was painted by a man who has never seen a tree. He's never seen a person carrying a pail. He's never seen a mountain or a flower. He's never seen anything, because he was born without eyes!

Esref Armagan, a Turkish painter, has turned the art world on its ear. I first saw him as part of a Discovery Channel special called, The Real Supehumans. They interviewed him and showed several of his paintings. It's crazy to watch him do this stuff because he has nothing to reference, but he dips his fingers in the paint and proceeds to knock out some really impressive stuff:

... So, we ask, how do you know how long these poles should be as they recede? I was taught, he says. Not by any formal teacher, but by casual comments by friends and acquaintances. How do you know about shadows? He learned that too. He confides that for a long time he figured that if an object was red, its shadow would be red too. "But I was told it wasn't," he says. But how do you know about red? He knows that there's an important visual quality to seen objects called "colour" and that it varies from object to object. He's memorised what has what colour and even which ones clash. - xoom