Priča o britanskom slikaru koji je danas potpuno slep, i o neuroestetici, odnosno istraživanjima profesora Semira Zekija u vezi sa načinom na koji ljudi, pa i umetnici, vide svet oko sebe. Man je počeo da gubi vid u trideset osmoj godini života, i vremenom je potpuno oslepeo, ali je nastavio da slika, iako ga je to koštalo mnogo, mnogo napora. Priča je poprilično neverovatna, i svedoči o tome koliko malo poznajemo svoja čula, svoje sposobnosti i način na koji doživljavamo vidljivi svet, i umetnost u njemu.
Citat:Mann's distinctive vision, born of generously attentive looking, began to be tinged that same year by the growth of cataracts in both of his eyes. He was only 36 and for months went undiagnosed. The change in his sight he greeted with artistic curiosity: "my world had become greyer and hotter," he recalls. "I was a human spectroscope such that I could see that a sodium streetlamp was monochrome because it only had an orange halo whereas a car tail light of the same colour had a spectral halo…" He'd read about Monet's cataract operations before he had his own and what he was most interested to discover was whether he had colourless cataracts or the yellowy-brown ones that had progressively informed the changing palette of the Impressionist at Giverny. Would he, like Monet, see the world saturated in blue again after the operation? To his joy he did, and his painting for a while reflected this new cobalt dazzle. Mann's eye problems were only just beginning, however. By the time he gave up teaching in 1988, and began working full time as a painter – by now with a wife, his former student Frances Carey and their young family to support in south London – retinal detachments and corneal ulcerations had diminished his detailed sight to almost nothing.
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In some senses he believes that Sargy's blindness, following from an intimate understanding of colour, is a kind of release. "I've been talking with him for many years now and one thing is that since he has become completely blind he doesn't always give a damn exactly what colour he makes an object. In the process he has come up with brilliant colours. Normally we associate different objects more or less with different colours. A lemon immediately invokes yellow, say. But with him it doesn't matter so much." As a result, he suggests, the "sighted viewer is intrigued by unaccustomed colour juxtapositions and aesthetically mesmerised by them."
Memory of colour is what we all use, all the time, to fill in the world between the lines of form; artists have always sought to liberate themselves from those conventions and look again. "I have always argued that the worst thing that can happen to the artistic brain is self censorship," Zeki says. "As soon as your brain starts telling you that you can't have a tree that is blue then you stop being able to paint trees. Picasso, of course, was always dreaming of something like the same thing, of forgetting how to look at the world. He said it was easy to paint like an adu|t but much more difficult to paint like a child. In some ways, certainly in terms of colour, in response to his blindness, Sargy has approached that freedom."
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