The Mind's Eye - Part II

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Still Life with Apples Vincent van Gogh

One of the tricks John and I used to try when we weren’t able to fall asleep was to picture in our minds a simple subject—an apple, for example—and then to visualize drawing it—running a pencil over the shapes of the apple, sketching in the light and dark values, envisioning the color shifts from warm to cool. It was a wonderful way to focus our thoughts and shepherd them away from all the distracting ones that tend to flood the brain at the end of a busy day.

We take for granted our human ability to form images in our minds. It serves an important function when we are learning letters and symbols and in tracking landmarks when navigating from place to place, for example.
Some people, though, suffer from a condition called aphantasia, the inability to create images in the mind. It has been called being “blind in the mind” or having an “image-free imagination”. For an artist it seems almost inconceivable! The oppos…