Learning How to Un-See — Cliff Guren

Learning how to think with images begins with learning how to see, or perhaps more accurately, learning how to un-see .

When we interrupt the instinctual simplifying, organizing, and categorizing processes of our brain, we create a mental space for added layers of complexity and meaning. Our thoughts become more nuanced and textured. Our senses are awakened and engaged.

But eventually I stumbled upon a trick: I would draw instead the outline of the negative space around it. Though I couldn't have articulated it at the time, what this method did was improve the quality of my looking. I would never be able to get away from my preconceptions about what an arm or a leg looks like, but the shape formed by its negative

But learning how to think with visual information (not just react to it) requires a different way of seeing, one that enables you to pause the instinctual labeling and stereotyping of the visual images you’re processing and see the individual elements in the image

The scene might call to mind a time gone by, the passage of time, and our eventual decay. But what if you shifted your focus from the barn to the background—the field, the hills beyond. What might you see? What might you learn?

Perhaps you’d notice how the native vegetation took over the fallow field in the first ten years, and the new species of tr