“[…] & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.” — William Blake, Jerusalem, plate 71, lines 18–19.
Sometimes I return to a painting and notice something that had previously escaped me. It may be a detail; at other times, the entire image seems to arrange itself differently. A form I readily recognised becomes uncertain, while a neglected area begins to hold the composition together. The painting has remained the same. What has changed in the way I see it?
Part of the answer concerns how visual experience takes shape. Light reflected by objects reaches the retina, where photoreceptors convert it into electrical signals. After initial processing in retinal circuits, visual information travels through the optic nerves and several brain relays before reaching the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe. Processing continues across interconnected regions that contribute to the perception of form, colour, movement and space.
This description might suggest a linear journey. In fact, information travels in both directions between levels of the visual system. Attention, context and expectations influence the processing of incoming signals. The experience of seeing takes shape through this continuous activity, in which sensory information is selected, related and interpreted.
Blake’s words interest me precisely as we approach this question: what relationship exists between the world we contemplate and the inner life in which it becomes experience?
In Jerusalem, the statement belongs to a poetic and spiritual vision. For Blake, imagination has a scope that the ordinary meaning of the word can scarcely accommodate. It is the place of a reality of which the mortal world appears as a shadow. In the preceding lines, a person carries their own heaven and earth within them. Inner life thus acquires the dimensions of a world.
It would be inappropriate to read these lines as an anticipation of a neurological theory. Yet we can retain their question and bring it to our own experience. When we say that we see a landscape, a face or a painting, how much of what we experience belongs to the thing encountered, and how much to our participation in that encounter?
Research on visual mental imagery shows that imagining and perceiving involve partially shared neural mechanisms. This overlap raises the question of how we distinguish an evoked image from one produced by an external stimulus. Nadine Dijkstra and Stephen Fleming have shown, under experimental conditions, that subjective signal strength contributes to this distinction. The proximity between perception and imagination can therefore be studied without assuming that the two experiences are identical.
In the experience of painting, I find it important to recognise that looking has a history. We have learned to recognise certain forms, attend to certain differences and overlook others. We approach a work with images we have encountered, things we have read, memories and questions. Sometimes we become aware of them only when the painting prevents us from pursuing an interpretation that had seemed natural.
I recognise, for example, the outline of a flower. I follow it, but part of the painting resists that reading. I return to it. I notice a direction I had ignored, a continuity between two colours, an overlap. I begin to see differently and realise how quickly I had turned a first impression into a certainty.
Here, the participation of imagination becomes easier to notice. It allows us to try out relationships, evoke what is absent and pursue a possibility before we can name it. Yet the work retains the power to correct us. Its material, the distribution of colours and the relationships between forms support or resist our interpretations.
Research in neuroaesthetics describes artistic experience through interactions between systems involved in sensory and motor processing, emotion and evaluation, and knowledge and meaning. The model proposed by Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian is useful precisely because it allows these dimensions to be considered together. What we know about a work, what we perceive and what we feel can participate in the same experience.
Studies by Edward Vessel and his colleagues add a relevant observation: particularly intense aesthetic experiences can involve regions of the default mode network, associated, among other things, with autobiographical memory and processes relevant to the self. These findings suggest that encountering an image can engage our relationship with our own lives. They leave open the content of that encounter, which differs from person to person.
Perhaps this is one of the difficulties, but also one of the riches, of the dialogue between art and neuroscience. We can study the conditions of an experience and identify processes and correlations, yet lived meaning also calls for the account of the person looking. An image may bring a memory to the fore or unsettle a conviction without this being immediately visible from outside.
In my own practice, I recognise this participation of imagination while I work. Sometimes I begin with a fairly clear intention, but what appears on the canvas changes it. A mark shifts the balance, a colour calls for a different expanse, and a form becomes possible where I had not anticipated it. I learn to follow what happens and to accept that understanding may come after the gesture.
The finished painting retains something of this process, but its encounter with another viewer opens relationships I do not know. A personal experience has acquired a material form, accessible to someone else. Before it, another memory and another imagination begin to work.
I therefore return to Blake with the question still open. What we contemplate meets us from outside, yet becomes present to us through an inner activity in which our entire past participates. Art sometimes gives us a rare opportunity to notice this activity: we observe how we recognise, how we assume, how we return and how our way of looking changes.
Some images continue to occupy us long after we have moved away from them. We return to them in thought and gradually discover how what we have seen connects with our own memories, emotions and questions.
