When Turkish blind painter Esref Armagan first started to paint, absence of visual acuity was never a hindrance. There were times when he painted the sea and thought he'd need a life-jacket to save him from drowning.
Cut to contemporary Israeli artist Roy Nachum, who believes vision is only one such barrier which obstructs the perception of art.
In his most recent art works, Roy Nachum based in New York, has incorporated Braille into paintings to expand on the possibility of making art accessible to the visually impaired.
He also uses Braille as a metaphor for those who take visual experiences for granted and will lead audiences to explore their existential apprehensions.
Roy first experimented with the visually-impaired as his muse in the series of artwork titled 'Fire'.
"I collaborated with a group of individuals who are visually impaired to create a series of interactive painting. Each solid canvas, textured with Braille, has a frame that I burned until the wood formed a charcoal-like surface," Roy told PTI in an email interview from New York.
As his collaborators ran their fingers from burned frame to painted Braille, they left their fingerprints as an evidence of an actual physical contact with the paintings. Till date, this series of works remain unfinished but keep evolving with physical contact.
To understand blindness better, Roy even blindfolded himself and lived without a sense of sight for seven days.
"It was a difficult and an intense experience but I learned a lot myself and it affected my art. In life, we all tend to lose sight of what is important from time to time. It takes us extraordinary circumstances to remind us what's important but we eventually tend to revert," he says.
