Jamie Banks

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

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.

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.

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

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

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