Entering The Imaginal

How often do we actually take the time to enter a painting and experience what the image is?

Engaging with an image involves observing the image, slowing your perception of the image down, and allowing yourself to be overtaken by the image and see it in a way beyond your assumptions, beliefs, and judgements.

Observing

Observation brings a fundamental knowledge of the image. By entering and observing through descriptive definitions we begin to enliven our sensory awareness and start to feel as if we are in the image. As we slowly come to embody the image, we become infused by its alien nature and we learn to go into mimesis with the image. We as children naturally observed and mimicked others to learn to be in the world. As adults, this innate knowledge goes deep into the unconscious and we just forgot what a beautiful tool it was to be enlivened by life. We can bring this art of mimesis back into use by relearning this faculty we all had as children. This article by Mike Mowbray gives an overview of the mimetic faculty:

Michael Taussig, in Mimesis and Alterity (1993) describes mimesis as invoking an “optical tactility, plunging us into the plane where the object world and the visual copy merge…”

Slowing Down

Once we have entered the image and we find ourselves somewhere, we then bring our consciousness into slow motion. We then begin to observe in much higher detail, the particulars: the colors; the textures; the smells; the sense of place. We feel into the environment/image with our bodies. Our bodies lead us, we sense where in our body this environment/image affects us. The meeting place between the image and our bodies then begin to give us new information, we can come from within the image as a painter rather than standing on the outside looking in.

Allowing

If we can allow ourselves to not bring what we know to the experience of the image and act as researchers into the unknown, a new world reveals itself to us. As we explore this unknown intelligence, the sphere between the intellect and the senses, we become sensitized to its own organs of perceptions, which is the organ of the creative imagination. What seems foreign and impenetrable now will come to meet you.