Parting words from an artist of rare vision
Painter Sargy Mann did not live to deliver the TED talk he spent his final months preparing. This is what he wanted to say…
Not long before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the autumn of 2014, the painter Sargy Mann was invited to give a TED talk. Mann, then 77, was told by doctors that he had only weeks to live. In the event he survived for more than half a year, and he devoted much of that time to working out what he might say to a TED audience.
The subject of his talk was to be a distillation of a lifetime's thinking about painting and visual perception. Mann, who I first wrote about in the New Review in 2010, found it hard to know quite where to start; he had, in a unique way, lived these issues for many decades: he was not just a wonderful and much coveted artist, he was also, for a large part of his painting life, completely blind.