Blind Artists: John Bramblitt, Eşref Armağan and Others

Blind artists are painters, sculptors, photographers and other visual artists who are blind or have low vision, and most of the ones in this article work through touch, texture and memory. This article starts with two painters. John Bramblitt, from Texas, lost his sight in 2001 and paints over raised lines he can feel, telling colors apart by the texture of the paint (Bramblitt). Eşref Armağan, from Turkey, has been totally blind since birth and draws in perspective, which researchers at the University of Toronto have studied (Kennedy & Juricevic, 2006).

Below is how they and four other artists work, each detail credited to the artist's own words or to the article or study that reported it, and where you can see their work. Every source was checked on October 29, 2026. This article sticks to visual artists; for blind musicians, writers and scientists, see famous blind people.

Key points

• Raised lines are a starting point. Bramblitt draws outlines in white paint, lets them dry, and follows the raised edges with his fingers to fill in color.
• Paint texture can work as a color code. Bramblitt describes white oil paint as thick like toothpaste, black as runny and gray as in between.
• A painter born blind draws in perspective. Researchers found that Armağan's drawings of cubes used foreshortening and convergence, techniques usually linked to sight.
• Touch also carries direction. The researchers' explanation: touch tells you which way objects lie, and that is the basis of perspective.
• Some painters lost their sight mid-career and kept going. Sargy Mann painted with his fingers and Blu-Tack markers; Keith Salmon paints how he now sees a place.
• It isn't only painting. Michael Naranjo sculpts with his left hand and no tools; Pete Eckert takes photographs using sound, touch and memory.
• Their work is in galleries and collections. Naranjo's sculpture is in the Heard Museum, the White House and the Vatican.

Blind artists at a glance

These are the methods each artist describes, not one "blind technique": every artist works differently. The details and sources are below.

Who is John Bramblitt?

John Bramblitt is a painter based in Denton, Texas. He lost the last of his sight in 2001, while he was a student at the University of North Texas, and that is when he turned to painting (The North Texan, 2009; Bramblitt). He went on to graduate with honors. His official site says his work has sold in more than 120 countries, that he has received three Presidential Service Awards for his art workshops, and that he works with museums as a consultant on programs designed to include everyone (Bramblitt). He has given talks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (bramblitt.com), and he wrote a book about his life and art, Shouting in the Dark.

He is wary of the label in this article's title. At his first shows he didn't tell anyone he was blind, holding closing parties instead of openings so his blindness wouldn't change how people saw the paintings. He has written that he considers himself a blind artist no more than a brown-haired or blue-eyed one (Bramblitt FAQ).

How does John Bramblitt paint?

Bramblitt works mostly in oil paint, because each color has a slightly different texture. He first draws the outline of the picture in white paint. Once it dries, the lines stand up from the canvas, and he feels his way along those raised edges to fill in each color (The North Texan, 2009). "I see with my hands," he told the university's magazine.

The paint itself tells him which color is which. In a 2024 radio interview, he described thick white paint as being like toothpaste, black as runny and gray as somewhere in between, which lets him control color by touch alone (Radio IQ/WVTF, 2024).

For portraits, he builds a picture of a face through touch, and he paints people he has never seen, including his wife and son (Bramblitt). He has written that the idea that blind people get an accurate picture of a face just by touching it is a myth spread by movies and TV. His own system, which he calls Touch to Sight, usually gives him a full 3-D picture of a face in under five minutes (Bramblitt FAQ). To paint the skateboarder Tony Hawk, he met him to study his face (The North Texan, 2009).

He also paints murals, measuring the wall in advance. One is on the Williamson Road overpass next to the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, where he also led a free workshop (Radio IQ/WVTF, 2024).

Who is Eşref Armağan?

Eşref Armağan (often written Esref Armagan) is a Turkish painter, born in Istanbul in 1953 (TRT World). He has been totally blind since birth (Kennedy & Juricevic, 2006). Al Jazeera, which made a documentary about him, calls him one of the few blind commercial painters in the world: he taught himself to draw by touching and copying carved shapes, his paintings sell internationally, and he mentors visually impaired children (Al Jazeera, 2022).

He started young. As a child he was often taken to his father's engineering workshop, where he scratched pictures into cardboard with a scribe, a sharp tool for marking metal. His father guided his hand over the lines and described what he saw, and the family gave him feedback (Hayhoe, The Conversation, 2018). He moved from colored pencils to oil paints, and then to acrylics, because oils took too long to dry (same source).

How does Eşref Armağan paint?

Armağan's methods turn lines into something he can feel. He draws by pressing a pencil into raised relief paper, and on canvas he has traced outlines with a sticky rope. He memorizes the order of his paints (TRT World). A 2008 study describes him drawing on a raised-line drawing kit, a rubberized tablet that makes lines he can feel, and painting with his fingertips (Amedi et al., 2008).

He paints in layers with his fingers, letting each layer dry before adding the next, so he can feel what he has made so far. Before he starts, the whole painting, colors included, is already composed in his head; he calls it strictly a matter of memory (Hayhoe, The Conversation, 2018). For color, he draws on years of asking sighted people and showing them his work, plus touch and sound: he links red with the feel of something hot, and compares the way a sound fades with distance to perspective (same source).

Can a blind person draw in perspective?

Perspective means drawing things smaller as they get farther away, and making parallel lines, like the edges of a road, come together in the distance. It's often assumed you can only learn it by seeing. Armağan's drawings say otherwise. John M. Kennedy and Igor Juricevic, researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough, asked him to draw cubes. His drawings showed foreshortening (sides drawn shorter as they turn away) and convergence (parallel edges drawn closer together with distance), in roughly one-point perspective (Kennedy & Juricevic, 2006).

In a chapter about him, they also describe a house he drew in two-point perspective, and write that his drawings deserve to be in the major museums of the world (Kennedy & Juricevic). Their explanation is that touch, like sight, tells you the direction of objects, and direction is the basis of perspective.

Brain scans add another piece. In the 2008 study, by researchers at Harvard Medical School and other institutions, areas of his brain normally associated with vision, including the primary visual cortex, became active when he drew, compared with when he scribbled (Amedi et al., 2008). The paper refers to him only by his initials, EA; Kennedy and Juricevic report the same finding about him by name. For what people who are blind do and don't see, read what blind people see.

How do blind artists paint?

There is no single method, but the same tools come up again and again in the artists' own accounts:

• Raised lines. Lines you can feel are the starting point for Bramblitt, with dried white paint (The North Texan), and for Armağan, with a pencil pressed into relief paper (TRT World). It's the same idea behind tactile graphics, the maps and diagrams made to be read by touch (how tactile graphics are made).
• Texture as a color code. Bramblitt tells oil colors apart by how thick or runny they feel (Radio IQ/WVTF).
• Markers on the canvas. Sargy Mann marked the areas he wanted to paint with blobs of Blu-Tack (The Guardian); Armağan has used a sticky rope to outline shapes (TRT World).
• Touching the subject. Bramblitt studies faces by touch (Bramblitt); Michael Naranjo once touched Michelangelo's David (Santa Fe New Mexican); Pete Eckert asks to touch sculptures in museums (Pete Eckert).
• Memory. Armağan composes whole paintings in his head (Hayhoe); Eckert plans each photo using sound, touch and memory (Pete Eckert).
• A sighted second opinion. Mann's wife, Frances, checked tone and value for him (The Guardian); Eckert asks sighted people for feedback before making large final prints (Pete Eckert); Armağan learned about color from what people told him (Hayhoe).

Pictures made out of braille characters are a separate topic; for those, see braille art.

Painters who went blind: Sargy Mann and Keith Salmon

Some painters worked for years with sight before losing it, and kept painting.

Sargy Mann (1937–2015) was a British painter who taught at Camberwell, his old art school, for 20 years. In 1988, at 50, he was registered blind and had to give up teaching, and by 2005 he was totally blind (The Guardian, 2015). He painted with his fingers, marking with blobs of Blu-Tack the parts of the canvas he wanted to cover, while his wife, Frances, checked tone and value. In 2005 he said the paintings he had made since 1988 were better than the ones from when he had sight, and he titled a book about his work Probably the Best Blind Painter in Peckham (2008) (same source). Cadogan Gallery in London notes that he also used dictaphones, and that his paintings of Cadaqués, in Spain, were the first he made after losing his sight completely (Cadogan Gallery).

Keith Salmon, born in Essex, England, in 1959, studied fine art at Shrewsbury and Falmouth. From around 1989 his sight deteriorated quickly, and he is now registered blind. He works from a studio in Irvine, in Ayrshire, Scotland (Keith Salmon). Working in oil paint and pastel, he says he records not what he sees but how he now sees his surroundings: thick paint, scraped back and rebuilt, and drawings made of many colored lines woven together (same source). He can see only part of a painting while working on it. Hillwalking is central to his work, and he has said a mountaineering course for blind and visually impaired people opened up his art too (Wellcome Collection, 2020). In 2009 he won the Jolomo Scottish Landscape Art Award by unanimous vote (Keith Salmon), and in 2016 he worked with Microsoft on soundscapes so blind visitors could "hear" his paintings (Wellcome Collection, 2020).

Are there blind sculptors?

Yes. Michael Naranjo, born in 1944, is a Tewa sculptor who grew up in Santa Clara Pueblo and Taos, New Mexico, the son of the potter Rose Naranjo (Nedra Matteucci Galleries; Santa Fe New Mexican, 2016). In January 1968, in Vietnam, a grenade took his sight and most of the use of his right hand. Recovering in a hospital in Japan, he asked a volunteer for modeling clay and made a small figure with his left hand (Nedra Matteucci Galleries). He has sculpted from clay for more than 40 years, using his left hand and no tools, and works in bronze; he is known for figures of animals and Native dancers (Santa Fe New Mexican, 2016). The surfaces are textured, and viewers are encouraged to touch them (Nedra Matteucci Galleries).

On a trip to Europe in 2001, he touched Michelangelo's David from a special scaffold set up at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. He founded the Touched by Art Fund, which pays for school field trips to art museums, and in 2016 he was chosen as a Santa Fe Living Treasure (Santa Fe New Mexican, 2016).

Can blind people be photographers?

Yes. Pete Eckert, a photographer in Sacramento, California, trained in sculpture and industrial design and, by his own account, didn't take photography seriously until he had gone totally blind. It started when he found his late mother-in-law's 1950s Kodak, which had an infrared setting (Pete Eckert). He says he "sees" each shot very clearly, using sound, touch and memory. He shoots, develops the film and makes contact prints himself, then gets feedback from sighted people before making the large final prints (same source).

Where can you see art by blind artists?

The best place is each artist's own site or gallery:

• John Bramblitt: bramblitt.com, with his paintings, workshops and talks. His mural is on the Williamson Road overpass in Roanoke, Virginia, next to the Taubman Museum of Art (Radio IQ/WVTF).
• Eşref Armağan: we couldn't find a working official website. Al Jazeera's 2022 documentary about him is Painting in the Dark.
• Sargy Mann: Cadogan Gallery in London, which shows his paintings and exhibitions.
• Keith Salmon: keithsalmon.org, which lists his exhibitions and the public collections that hold his work.
• Michael Naranjo: Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe. His work is in collections including the Heard Museum, the White House and the Vatican.
• Pete Eckert: peteeckert.com, with his shows, awards and press.

If you're blind or have low vision, it's worth asking a museum before you go whether it offers touch tours or described tours.

Where Braillito fits

Touch runs through most of this work: raised lines, the texture of paint, shapes felt with the fingers. For reading, touch means braille (how blind people read), and braille is learned. Braillito, our app, teaches the braille cells in lessons with exercises you play, with lives, levels and a daily streak: 59 lessons in 8 worlds in English. It also has a translator, a dictionary and a cell builder. It is meant for anyone learning the code, such as sighted parents and teachers of a braille reader (learning braille as a sighted person) or adults who are losing their sight (learning braille as an adult).

Braillito is a subscription with no free version; depending on the plan, it starts with a free trial or a discounted first period, if it's your first subscription (is Braillito free?). Get Braillito.

Frequently asked questions

Who are some famous blind artists?

Two blind painters people often look up are John Bramblitt, in Texas, and Eşref Armağan, in Turkey. Others include the British painters Sargy Mann and Keith Salmon, the sculptor Michael Naranjo and the photographer Pete Eckert.

Can blind people paint?

Yes. The painters in this article use raised lines, the texture of the paint, markers on the canvas and memory to find their way around a picture, and some ask a sighted person to check colors or tone.

How does John Bramblitt tell colors apart?

By touch. He mostly uses oil paint, where each color has a slightly different texture: white is thick, like toothpaste, black is runny, and gray is in between.

Was Eşref Armağan born blind?

Yes. The researchers who studied him describe him as totally blind since birth. He taught himself to draw and paint.

Can someone who was born blind draw in perspective?

Armağan does. University of Toronto researchers found that his drawings of cubes used foreshortening and convergence, and concluded that touch also tells you which direction things are in, which is the basis of perspective.

Did Sargy Mann keep painting after he went blind?

Yes. Registered blind in 1988 and totally blind by 2005, he kept painting with his fingers and Blu-Tack markers, and said his later paintings were better than his earlier ones.

Are there blind sculptors?

Yes. Michael Naranjo, a Tewa sculptor from New Mexico, lost his sight in the Vietnam War in 1968 and has sculpted from clay ever since, with his left hand and no tools. He works in bronze.

Can blind people take photographs?

Yes. Pete Eckert became a photographer after going totally blind. He plans each shot using sound, touch and memory and asks sighted people for feedback before printing.

Where can I see art by blind artists?

On the artists' own sites and at their galleries: bramblitt.com, keithsalmon.org, peteeckert.com, Cadogan Gallery in London for Sargy Mann, and Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe for Michael Naranjo.