Seeing is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

-Jonathan Swift

 

If you look at a person, a landscape, or a painting that happens to be in front of you, it doesn’t mean that you actually see the visual stimulus. Placing your eyes on something is not the same as perceiving, feeling, intuiting, disambiguating and illuminating it. You see with your brain which particularizes the images and interprets the shapes, colors and textures. You also see with your emotions and with the experiences from your past, which inform you.

How you perceive, also depends on your moodprint that day, that hour or minute. As Perceptilly replies to Spunktaneous’s question in THE WORLD OF GLIMPSE:

“Do I see gold as you do, Perceptilly?

Well, Spunktaneous…

I have a Master’s Degree

In Meta-luster-cology.

I can glean a glitter from a glow.

Name all the lusters there are to know.

“But Spunktaneous, I don’t know how you see gold…or pink…or any hue. Only you know. The colors you perceive are entirely you, and each time you look, they’re different. Depends on your moodprint which affects the glow you give to a color.

Viewers of a painting, might perceive it quite differently from the artist who created it. Individuals see according to their own life-views and their own capacity for allowing imaginative and perceptual fluidity into their moodprints. As Henry Ward Beecher said, “every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” The same can be said of the viewers who see the painting according to their moodprints at the time.