My struggle with visualisation. How I approach new work.

I discovered Aphantasia recently, and before I understood anything about it, I immediately diagnosed myself with it. Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. This began during a session of guided meditation. The instruction was, with eyes open, to visualise a familiar object in front of you, such as your car keys, and to overlay it onto the scene in front of you. This immediately had me worried, and not only because I don’t drive.

I had a burst of anxious thoughts wondering whether everyone else had the superpower of being able to imagine any object in any place as clearly as they could see. Furthermore, as an artist, surely, I should have a highly developed visual imagination. The best I can conjure are brief flashes of imagery in my mind’s eye.

Like most conditions of the mind, visualisation is a spectrum, with the extremes (Aphantasia and Hyperphantasia) affecting a small percentage of us. Most of us sit on the range of Phantasia here we have some degree of ability to hold an image, possibly vague or maybe detailed and vivid, in our mind’s eye. Nicolas Tesla reported being able to imagine designs, blueprints and prototypes in his head and test them there. A very vivid imagination is almost akin to a virtual reality playground.

This brief dive into this phenomenon has shed light on how best for me to operate as an artist. The early stages of the creative process have often been difficult for me, causing much anxiety and self-doubt. Images and ideas may come to me, and flash into my head, but holding or recalling them can be very tricky. Sometimes the idea doesn’t come with an image, just a sense of an object or painting. This makes it difficult for me to make use of such inspiration and can create disappointment when early drawings feel way off the initial, ephemeral idea.

Over the years I’ve found ignoring such inspiration can often be better for me. Drawing, sketching, experimenting with materials regularly, restlessly, and without aim often leads me to generate much more exciting imagery. Following my whims in the moment of creation, selecting editing, and then working from these physical images lay much more solid foundations and spark positive feelings of progress, improvement, and success.

The more I create and spend time trying to filter the products of my mind to share with the world, the more I realise very little of what happens in my head is worth holding onto. Getting things down on paper, putting them outside of yourself for assessment and critique, ignoring your thoughts, and allowing for a stream of consciousness to flow onto the page or canvas is much more fruitful and makes it a lot easier to judge the substance of an idea. It’s much harder to make a judgement of value on an idea that is within oneself and may lead us to make an erroneous self-diagnosis.