Jamie Banks

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

The houses and churches were painted with such glittering colors that he thought he was inside a picture when he entered them.

Kandinsky the painter believed that the aim of art was to transmit the artist’s uniqueness and inner vision, which necessitated the elevation of objective reality.

He would subsequently reflect on this encounter: “The brochure advised me that it was a haystack. I had no idea what that was. This non-recognition was excruciatingly distressing for me. The painter, in my opinion, had no right to depict incoherently. I had a distinct impression that the painting’s subject was absent. And I was surprised and perpl

“The keyboard is color, the eyes are hammers, and the heart is a piano with several strings. The musician is the hand that plays, feeling one note or another in order to create vibrations in one’s soul.”

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