The more I think about it there are several types of imagination and drawing can engage directly with all of them. In fact drawing can be the process that shapes the imaginative idea and gives it reality. It is no accident that the patent office is filled with drawings of inventions, as it is those drawings that give ideas their authenticity, a drawing of a concept being often the first time that we can see if an idea appears realistic.
So perhaps it's worthwhile exploring how we might think of different types of imagination, and as I do so, it's also worth remembering Bruno Latour's insistence that there are no actual divisions between things, simply constantly shifting connections, so as I write I will probably flit from one type of imagination to another, so that eventually a woven fabric emerges that is made of imaginative strands, so as you read try to let your own imaginations flow between the sentences and imaginatively unearth for yourself more ideas as to what our imaginations might be.
Reproductive Imagination:
- The reproduction of a memory or of a glimpsed experience is a very problematic process. The information is sometimes hardly there and you have to tease it back into existence. This is why it is an imaginative activity, as you have to 'fill in the gaps' in order to make the memory or experience coherent and communicable to other people. How do you visualise a previous experience? How can you reproduce something that will only ever have been experienced by a perceptual apparatus, which we know is limited and incredibly selective? Drawing gives you the ability to find a shape for a mental image of something you have experienced in the past; you can't take a photograph of that past event, but you can draw something that helps to show what you experienced. It is an iterative process and one that gets easier the more drawing you have done. So how does it work? We are very good at making comparisons between things, we can very quickly spot whether something is more like something else than not. So if I draw two images of a dog I once had, I can look at them and decide which one is closer in appearance to how I remember that dog. I can then draw another image of the dog and compare it to the selected best fit from the first two drawings. This one will either be a better or worse fit. The process can go on for as long as it is needed, which is why this process is about finding an image, you need to look hard in order to discover what is revealing itself. Another way to approach this is with an easily adjusted material such as pencil or charcoal; what you can then do is rub out and redraw, rub out and redraw, each time looking at and critiquing the drawing as to whether or not it is beginning to reproduce something of the original experience seen. You need a certain confidence to do this and some experience of drawing, because if you are looking for a certain level of verisimilitude you need to be able to control formal elements, such as the construction of a convincing space to fit the experience into, the ability to control tonal values in order to give a convincing idea of the way the experience was lit, etc. The more experience the drawer has, the more a memory can be rebuilt convincingly. But it is important to remember that it is through imaginative play and the manipulation of materials that these images evolve, there is no direct access to a memory. There is though another type of related image; eidetic images are more like vivid emotional snapshots, that form spontaneously in response to significant life experiences. As Magsamen and Ross, (2025, p. 44) state, 'They differ from memories, dreams, guided visualisations, or symbolic images in that they are concrete imprints in our minds of real and factual historical events.' The image isn't a copy of what was experienced, but its not made up. 'You are envisioning a picture in your mind that reflects an emotional state.' (Ibid, p. 45) Because these images are more emotive, they are often the ones that we are most fascinated by, especially as they emerge out of the subconscious mind. Seeking to capture the fleeting momentary glance, such as the one made by Michael Taussig in his notebook, under which he wrote 'I SWEAR I SAW THIS', can be another way that the reproductive imagination works.
Michael Taussig's notebook
The mental replaying of what was experienced is very complicated, because the brain is constantly processing information and deciding whether or not it is useful or not. So we often find that the mind is stripping down experiences into essences. In my own experience, I often find myself when drawing, lost inside the processes of looking for veracity in terms of 'reproduction' and have come to a conclusion that nothing is ever accurately reproduced or exactly copied, therefore it is the process of looking that stimulates the imagination, not the thing being reconstructed. I can imaginatively reframe eidetic experiences and as I do I look for veracity in some sort of confirmation that the image that is arriving makes sense in terms of how images make sense.
Drawing made after experiencing a body scan
A print developed from the image above
I made a drawing as soon as I was able to after having a body scan after an accident. It was as you can see very sketchy but the essential idea was there, in fact enough of an idea for the drawing to be used later as the framework around which I would develop a print. Long after the event, I can now sort of trace the image back and think about where the visual idea emerged from, and in my case I think that it was derived from my many visits to the British Museum's Egyptian collection, my being wrapped around by the architecture of the scanner, feeling in my visual mind, like an entombed mummy. In trying to quickly reproduce an experience, it was the imaginative enfolding into my visual mind another image seen many years before, that enabled that image to emerge.
Creative Imagination:
This type of imagination goes beyond imaginative recall and involves generating novel ideas, concepts, or solutions. It's the ability to combine existing knowledge and experiences in new and original ways. You could argue that the Surrealists' praise for the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont, were in recognition of his ability to push imagery to extremes by bringing together objects and ideas in ways that broke our traditional way of thinking about them. This is the passage that was often put forward as an example of how Lautréamont's creative imagination worked.
'I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft spot of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!'
Comte de Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror, Canto VI, Verse 3
A sketchbook drawing done from a composed object
Baba Yaga's hut
An A0 size drawing done from a composed object
I then went on to make a ceramic version.
Ceramic object
The final ceramic object still echoes the Baba Yaga's hut image, but it also refers to the other artist's image of her brain in a nest, the final ceramic closing in my own mind a mental image gap between a bird's feet and a bird's nest. This animist 'portrait' of an artist, was prodded into being by the juxtaposition of two things, their coming together creating a new thing that hopefully says something else about the human condition.
I suppose the classic format for this type of imaginative encounter is an exquisite corpse drawing.
Yves Tanguy, Victor Brauner. Figure. 1934
Perceptual Imagination:
This form of imagination shapes how we interpret sensory information and how we perceive the world around us. It involves the mental processing and organisation of sensory data, influenced by past experiences and expectations, but primarily focused on imaginatively thinking about how we see.
Cézanne is the role model that I was introduced to many years ago as the artist to explore if you wanted to understand the perceptual imagination. He was perhaps the first artist to make work that was centred on a worry about how he saw. Seeing for Cézanne was not about reproducing what was out there, it was an imaginative answer to a question. This insight opened a door to Modernism and his example of dogged visual research is one that artists like David Hockney and myself still find inspiring.
Cézanne: Still life
More recent investigations into the nature of our nervous system now include an understanding that our emotional responses are an integral component of our perceptual system as a whole. This I would argue, opens out possibilities for the development of visual inventions, that take the form of models of how we perceive. Through the development of inventive ways to shape visual ideas in relation to what we see, artists can help others to intuit what it is they are shaping as they themselves see.
The energy fields of looking at a weathered concrete surface embedded within a sea defence
Image made from looking at footage of an out of focus soldier in the background of news footage
David Abram however argues that imagination is an attribute of the senses themselves. It is not for him a separate mental facility, it is he states...'the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given'. I read this as a way to think about the intuitive aspect of imagination. Abram suggests that this is all about the participation of our senses in the phenomenon of life. He is interested in magic and magic creates its effects via either the law of similarity, which involves imitative or mimetic magic or the law of contact or contagious magic. Both approaches seek links of some sort between one thing and another and it is in the looking for these links that once again the imagination is triggered. In the case of the image of the soldier above, it might take a little while to 'see' the soldier, but if you look to the top of the image and cut out from view the large blob that takes up most of the space, you should be able to see a ghost like head wearing a helmet.
Triggered imagination
Artists have used all sorts of devices to trigger imaginative invention. Michelangelo would look at clouds and see ideas for sculpture in them, Leonardo could see landscapes in the fetid moss covering of an old toilet wall, Max Ernst would make frottage rubbings and see Surreal images starting to emerge from the swirls of wood grain and other surfaces that he took rubbings from. If something is not quite fixed, is halfway between one thing and another, the mind will make decisions as to what these things might be. It's an old flight or flight survival mechanism, if we had to go back each time and look at a situation to check what it might actually be, the chances are that any threat would have time to actualise and in a time of great danger, kill you. So mechanisms evolved that made fast decisions based on small amounts of information, better to run away from a perceived threat, even if it wasn't actually real, than to not run away from a real threat.
Max Ernst: Frottage 1925
There is no harm in running away from a shadow that looks like something. The shadow can be used to trigger a range of ideas, from hands looking like a bird in flight or a rabbit, to the fact that it also casts an image that can in certain projections be a likeness. This apocryphally lead to another type of invention, one that demonstrated one way of how drawing could capture a likeness of something.
Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine “The Invention of Drawing,” Etching: 1773
Much of this type of visualisation is mentally rehearsing the possibility of an event, which activates the same areas of the mind/body as real-life situations would do. This process it has been argued (Robson, 2025) refines neural pathways, enhances motor control and strengthens preparedness. By simulating challenges and practicing outcomes in our minds, we can better manage how we think about possibilities, i.e. not over worry about them and improve our performance in both physical and mental tasks, simply because we have been practicing making responses to possibilities.
Structured imagination
Structured imagination is a type of very organised logical thinking, that is designed to create invention by the imposition of a logical iterative process. A classical example is François Blanciak's 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms'. As you can see from the images below, Blanciak provides us with what have been called by Ian Bogost, 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms. An exercise we used to set on the old Leeds art foundation course was to explore how many variations of interacting basic forms you could draw. For instance take a pyramid, a cube and a sphere, Then think of as many ways as possible they could be interpenetrated to make new forms. Blanciak's forms are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order or end to the series. No one thing is more important than another, but each one raises possibilities for future actions.
From 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms' by François Blanciak.
In Ian Bogost's, book 'Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing', he introduces the idea of 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms.
In each of these cases a logical encounter instigates a process whereby ideas are generated by the implementation of iterative thinking.
Cultural imagination
- This type of imagination refers to the shared narratives, beliefs and values that shape a culture. It influences how individuals within a culture perceive the world and their place within it. One of the easiest ways to illustrate this is to put examples of the art of different cultures next to each other.
Sardar Visava Singh of Sandawalia with his courtiers: Chajju: 1800-1810 Opaque watercolour and gold paint on handmade paper pasteboard
Jan de Bray:The regents of the Leproos, pest en Dolhuis in Haarlem 1667 Oil Painting
Utagawa Kunimaru (1793-1829) Woodblock print
One issue that comes out as soon as you put images together from different cultures is how much the preferred materials of making are also shaping the imaginations of the time.
Religion can of course be an important shaper of ideas,
Tantric art: Rajasthan: Unknown artist and time
Enso Circle: Japanese Zen
The cultural imagination of the western world is a fast moving one that is shaped as much by technological progress as by old belief systems and cultural histories. The dominant culture, that of the USA is, as is often the case historically, a dominance based on economic and military power.
It seems a not very uplifting or positive way of finishing a post on the imagination to conclude with an image of Donald Trump. However if I look at my own experience of trying to imaginatively think about things lately, my concentration levels are falling, my mind is constantly pre-occupied by news of his actions, making it very difficult to get lost in any imaginative world that he doesn't inhabit. In terms of the imagination being rooted in hominoid responses to an ancient landscape full of dangers and it's role in opening out new alternatives to support an ability to make decisions as to how we engage with the things we encounter, it is as if he totally dominates that landscape. In my imagination, news of his actions can represent a threat to me or an opportunity for something good to happen. When I meet other people, the conversation always seems to at some point include people's reactions to what he is doing, so I suspect I am not alone in finding him dominating my psychic imagination, his image now fighting the earlier dominance of Micky Mouse as a symbol of the USA.
The cultural imagination can be like a blender, sometimes you steal, sometimes you just feel it in your bones
References
Abram, D. (1997) The spell of the sensuous London: Vintage
Magsamen, S and Ross, I, (2025) Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform us Edinburgh: Canongate
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