Faded Images, Not Necessarily Negatives
My mind’s eye is legally blind. It bumbles around like someone lost in a strange house on a moonlight night when all the power is off. In the spectrum between hyperphantasia (being able to visualize in vivid detail) and aphantasia (being completely unable to visual within your mind) I’m only one two skipping steps away from aphantasia. I can sometimes conjure up a faded ghostlike image of a beloved face, or a fugitive flash of color. I recall static pictures I have seen often with more clarity than moving targets, but it’s always poor substitute for the vision of my physical eyes. I suppose I’m lucky I have the ability to visualize at all, but according to my reading, people with full-blown aphantasia still manage in the world just fine. The brain, clever bugger that it is, compensates. People with aphantasia count for about 2% of the population. Some people with the condition also report other sensory problems like being unable to hear music in their head. I can sing the lyrics to every Beatles song, but only if I hear the music being played. I cannot conjure it in my head or even imagine what it sounds like, though on occasion music will just start playing randomly, as if it was in some back room somewhere. And some people with aphantasia report being bad with remembering autobiographical details, which brings this all to my point.
My inability to visualize well is why I think I hoard photographic images, particularly family photos. It is how I remember my own life. It is how I connect again to a scene, a memory, or even a beloved. My memories are word stories narrated in my mind and illustrated with shadowy half-images. Opening up the photo album or the stored images on my smart phone allows me to put vivid pictures to the stories, and brings memories into sharper focus, or even fills in gaps where, without the visual reminder of a photo, I don’t remember at all. I don’t recall when I realized that I was different from other people and that the images in their heads were more vivid than mine, but it was a slow strange realization, particularly as a visual artist.
I dream vividly in beautiful technicolor, like a movie, but as I awake the colors run and the pictures fade until, upon full consciousness, I can no longer remember the images, and even the narrative of the dream slips away unless I narrate the story to myself in words. My dreams are wild and surreal, great fodder for surreal paintings, except I can’t visualize them later. I think that’s why I can’t paint abstractly either. I need a physical reference in front of me to create marks on paper with any degree of confidence. I can’t visualize the work in advance. If I have an idea it’s in the form of a narrative and then I have to find physical objects to represent then ideas. Drawing or painting a face, landscape or an animal from a reference, either photographic or in the studio, allows me the freedom to express myself because I look hard at what is in front of me. I look and look until I see more than what there is. The colors and vividness of my dreams leaks out onto the canvas when I’m distracted by the physical act of observation. My mind becomes delighted with the marks I make, unplanned and spontaneous, within the representational framework.
When I close my eyes and try to remember my past, it’s like I’ve looked into the sun and image has been burned away. Painting from my family photos allows me to ‘see’ the memory again, but this time not just with my mind’s eye but with my pencil and all the emotions and colors that it draws from me, uncensored.
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