The Argument at the Easel: What Aphantasia Taught Me About Painting

I knew exactly what Distant Storm was supposed to look like before I touched the canvas. Thirty-six by forty-eight inches of desert sky over the Grand Canyon, cumulus stacking up white on top and going steel blue underneath where the rain fell. I could see it. Not vaguely. I could see it the way you see a photograph.

Distant Storm - Oil on Canvas

That turned out to be the problem.

For months I've been trying to name why painting feels like an argument. Then I heard a neuroscientist describe a condition where people can't form mental images at all, and it reframed something I'd had backwards for twenty years.

The argument at the easel

Here's what actually happens when I paint. The image in my head is vivid and it will not shut up. Every mark I make gets measured against it, and every mark falls short, because a real brushstroke made of real paint by a real hand is always going to be less perfect than a thought.

So I keep going. I overwork it. I chase the version in my head, and somewhere in that chase I paint straight over the passages that were actually working. This is the part that stings. The accidents are usually the best thing on the canvas, the places where the paint did something I didn't plan, and I destroy them on purpose because they weren't in the plan. Then I stop too late, and what's left is technically closer to the vision and worse as a painting.

With Distant Storm I got the color right and the composition wrong. I only understood how wrong after I finished, when I started isolating sections and found that a tight crop of the lower right worked as a complete piece on its own. The painting had been trying to tell me something the whole time. I couldn't hear it over the picture in my head.

What aphantasia actually is

Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily generate mental images. It affects somewhere between two and five percent of people, and it sits at one end of a spectrum with hyperphantasia, imagery so vivid it approaches perception, at the other. Most people land somewhere in the middle. You can get a rough sense of where you fall by taking the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, the standard instrument for this.

My score from the VVIQ test

The distinction that matters, and the one I had wrong, is between knowing what something looks like and picturing it. They're separate faculties. Writing in The Conversation, researchers describe a patient known as MX, the first documented case of acquired aphantasia, who could give detailed descriptions of landmarks around Edinburgh. "I can remember visual details," he said, "but I can't see them."

He still knew. He just had no screen to put it on.

That's the crack the whole thing opens up. If knowing and seeing are different systems, then the mental picture isn't where the knowledge lives. It's a display. And a display is optional.

The animators who can't picture anything

I first came across this through David Eagleman, the Stanford neuroscientist, who devoted an episode of his podcast to it. The guest was Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. Catmull has aphantasia. The man who ran the studio that rendered Toy Story cannot conjure a picture in his head.

The example that undid me was Glen Keane, who animated Ariel in The Little Mermaid and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, and whom Catmull once called "one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation." Keane has aphantasia too. When he sat down to design Ariel, his mind was blank. He had no preconception of what he was about to draw.

Sit with that. One of the great draftsmen of the last century approached the page with nothing in his head at all.

So how does he work? He starts with what he calls an "explosion of scribbles," then subtracts and highlights until a form appears. The Beast came together the same way, by accumulation rather than vision: he copied a buffalo head hanging in his studio, then tried a gorilla's brow, a lion's mane, a cow's drooping ears that made the character less threatening. The breakthrough came when he added human eyes. Keane described the moment as "like recognising somebody you know."

Somebody he knew, and had never once been able to picture.

Why the blank page might be the advantage

The mechanism here is simple enough that I feel a little stupid for missing it.

Mental visualization happens entirely inside your skull. Drawing and painting happen outside it, in front of your eyes. When you put down a mark, you see it. That mark suggests the next one, which suggests the one after that, and the work proceeds as a conversation between your hand and the surface. As those researchers put it, you don't have to imagine.

An artist with aphantasia has no choice but to work that way. There's no internal target, so the canvas is the only source of information, and every accident is just data rather than a deviation. They can't overwork toward a vision because there's no vision to overwork toward.

I have a target. And my target is loud enough to drown out the canvas.

This cuts against a very old story about what artists are. Giorgio Vasari, writing about Leonardo in the sixteenth century, said that "the greatest geniuses...are searching for inventions in their minds, forming those perfect ideas which their hands then express." That's the model most of us absorbed without noticing: genius is an interior richness, and the artwork is a transcription of it. Keane and Catmull break the model. You can be extraordinary at making images while having no images in your head.

None of this means the aphantasic artist works without judgment. The art psychologist Rudolf Arnheim observed that a draftsperson working from memory "may deny convincingly that he has anything like an explicit picture of [the object] in his mind," and yet judges and adjusts the work "according to some standard in the mind." The standard survives. Only the picture is missing. That's the part I keep turning over, because it suggests the picture was never doing the work I assumed it was doing.

What I'm actually taking from this

I'm not going to pretend I'd trade. I like seeing things. The imagery is why I want to paint in the first place, and Storm on the Plains exists because I could see that Wisconsin sky in my head on the drive home, wind moving across the fields, weather coming.

Storm on the Plains - Oil on canvas

But I've been treating the mental image as a blueprint, and it isn't one. It's a hypothesis. It got me to the easel. It doesn't get to grade the results.

Practically, that changes two things. When something unplanned shows up in the paint, my instinct is that I've made an error, because it doesn't match. The honest read is usually that the canvas found something I wasn't smart enough to plan. The accidents aren't noise. Very often they're the signal, and I've been sanding them off for years.

And on knowing when to stop: I've been waiting for the painting to match the picture, which is a finish line that doesn't exist. A painting can only ever be itself. If I judged the work against what's actually in front of me instead of what's behind my eyes, I'd have stopped Distant Storm earlier, and I'd have found that crop while I still had the option to build the whole painting around it.

The image in my head was never the painting. It was just the reason I started.

I think there's a version of me that learns to hold it loosely, the way Keane holds a blank page. Not empty. Just quiet enough to hear what the canvas is saying back.