There is something peculiar about the way we fall in love with paintings. We can walk through a gallery surrounded by hundreds of images and feel almost nothing, and then suddenly, without warning, one particular painting stops us. We look at it for longer than we intended to. Perhaps it is the expression on a woman's face, a particular shade of blue, the way light falls across a landscape, a strange symbol hidden within the composition, or simply an atmosphere we cannot quite explain. We may not know the artist. We may not understand the symbolism. We may not even know what we are supposed to be feeling. Yet something in us has already responded. The painting has remained still whilst something inside us has moved.
I think this is one of the most fascinating things about our relationship with art. We often speak about paintings as though they are objects that exist independently from the people looking at them. We discuss technique, composition, colour, brushwork, historical significance and monetary value. We ask whether something is beautiful, whether it matches our home, whether the artist is established, whether the piece is technically impressive. Yet beneath all of these considerations is something much older and far more intimate. Human beings have never simply created images to decorate empty walls. Long before galleries existed, our ancestors painted animals onto cave walls, pressed ochre-covered hands against stone, carved figurines, decorated their bodies, fashioned jewellery from shells and bones, painted pottery, embroidered symbols into textiles and created objects that carried meaning far beyond their physical materials. They made images during rituals, around death, during initiation, celebration and ceremony. They surrounded themselves with symbols long before anyone separated art from spirituality, psychology or ordinary life. The human being has always needed somewhere for the invisible to become visible.
Perhaps this is why art can affect us so deeply. A painting gives physical form to something that previously existed only within consciousness. Grief becomes a landscape. Longing becomes a woman standing at the edge of the sea. Desire becomes colour. Rage becomes movement. Tenderness becomes light. The unconscious, which rarely speaks to us in neat explanations, suddenly has an image through which it can communicate. We often imagine that language is the highest form of human expression, yet there are experiences for which language arrives too late, too clumsily, or not at all. There are feelings we can sense inside the body long before we can name them. There are memories that exist more vividly as atmosphere than as narrative. There are forms of knowing that arrive through sensation, image, intuition and symbol. Perhaps art has survived across thousands of years because human beings have always known, even before psychology gave it terminology, that the psyche speaks in more than words.
This is particularly interesting when we consider memory. We never stand in front of a painting with an empty mind. We arrive carrying our entire history, even the parts of it we cannot consciously remember. A particular colour might remind someone of their childhood bedroom. A landscape might resemble the place where they once felt safe. A particular face might unconsciously resemble someone they loved. The smell of oil paint might transport someone back to an art classroom. A field of flowers might awaken a memory of a grandmother. A dark forest might evoke fear for one person and profound safety for another. The painting itself has not changed. The viewer has brought another world into the encounter.
This is where art becomes psychologically fascinating because perception is never entirely passive. We do not simply receive the world as it is; we interpret it through the frameworks created by our previous experiences. Our memories, expectations, emotional states, cultural associations and relationships all participate in what we notice and what we overlook. Two people can stand before the same painting and experience entirely different realities. One may see loneliness where another sees freedom. One may see a woman who has lost everything while another sees a woman who has finally escaped. One person may see darkness and another may see sanctuary. The canvas provides the image, but the psyche participates in creating its meaning.
This is one of the reasons I believe our attraction to particular artwork can sometimes tell us something about ourselves. We often say that we simply “like” a painting, as though aesthetic preference were entirely superficial. But attraction can be more complicated than that. Sometimes we are drawn toward qualities we already recognise within ourselves. Sometimes we are drawn toward qualities we have suppressed. Sometimes we are drawn toward qualities we desperately want to develop. A woman may find herself repeatedly drawn toward paintings of wild, untamed feminine figures during a period in which she is learning to stop abandoning herself for other people. Someone emerging from grief may suddenly become fascinated by paintings filled with darkness, not because they want to remain in darkness, but because they have finally stopped being afraid of it. Someone who has spent years making themselves smaller may suddenly begin choosing enormous, vivid, unapologetically colourful artwork. We may believe we are decorating our homes when, psychologically, we are sometimes selecting visual reminders of who we are becoming.
This is where the unconscious becomes particularly interesting. Jung understood the psyche as far larger than the conscious personality we present to the world. Beneath our everyday identities exists a vast interior landscape containing memories, instincts, fantasies, archetypal patterns, emotions and aspects of ourselves that have not yet been fully integrated into consciousness. Whether or not one accepts every aspect of Jung's theory, the broader insight remains compelling: we are not completely transparent to ourselves. There are parts of our psychological life that influence us before we understand them intellectually. Dreams are one example. We may wake from a dream carrying an emotion that remains long after the narrative has disappeared. A symbol can operate in a similar way. We may encounter an image and experience recognition before we have any conscious explanation for it.
This is why symbols have appeared everywhere human beings have left traces of themselves. The serpent, the moon, the sun, the tree, the ocean, the cave, the bird, the spiral, the eye, the hand, the circle: these forms have appeared repeatedly across cultures, although their precise meanings differ according to historical and cultural context. A serpent may represent danger in one tradition and healing or transformation in another. A moon may evoke femininity, death, cycles, mystery or simply the memory of looking at the night sky as a child. Symbols are not simplistic psychological codes where one image always equals one meaning. They are more like doors. They open into different rooms depending on the person, culture and moment in which they are encountered.
Perhaps this is why I have always been fascinated by symbolic art. It does not tell us everything. It leaves space for the viewer to enter. A literal image gives us information, but a symbolic image gives us possibility. A woman standing beside a river can simply be a woman beside a river. Or she can become the threshold between one chapter and another. The river can become time, grief, purification, movement, surrender or the impossibility of returning to the same place twice. The woman can become ourselves. Or our mother. Or the person we were before heartbreak. Or the person we hope to become. The image remains the same while meaning continues unfolding.
Colour participates in this process too. We often speak about colour as though it were merely decorative, but colour carries memory, cultural meaning and embodied association. Red can feel like blood, desire, anger, danger or vitality. Gold can feel like sunlight, wealth, divinity, warmth or sacredness. Black can feel like grief, elegance, protection, mystery or the unknown. Blue can feel like water, childhood, distance, peace or melancholy. There is no universal emotional dictionary that can tell us precisely what a colour will mean to every human being because our relationship with colour is partly written by experience. The same shade that makes one person feel safe may make another person feel deeply uncomfortable. We do not simply see colour. We remember through it.
Perhaps this is why some paintings feel as though they possess an atmosphere. We walk into a room and before we have consciously analysed the composition, something about the image has already altered our internal state. We may feel softened by one painting and unsettled by another. We may feel curious, nostalgic, energised, mournful or strangely peaceful. This does not mean the painting literally contains an emotion. Rather, the visual arrangement becomes an invitation to our perceptual and emotional systems. The artwork gives the psyche something to respond to.
The phenomenon of pareidolia reveals something similar. Human beings are extraordinary pattern-recognition organisms. We see faces in clouds, figures in shadows and familiar shapes within random arrangements. Our brains are constantly searching for significance because detecting patterns has always been essential to navigating an uncertain world. Artists can work deliberately with this tendency. A partially obscured face can become more compelling than a perfectly revealed one. A figure looking away can create more psychological tension than one staring directly at us. A shadow can resemble a body without ever becoming one. The ambiguity forces the viewer to participate. The brain begins completing what the artist has deliberately left unfinished.
There is a peculiar kind of attraction that does not feel like admiration. It feels more like recognition. You look at something and think, I don't know why this feels familiar. Sometimes it is because the image resembles something from our past. But sometimes it seems to belong to a deeper category of experience. We can feel nostalgic for places we have never visited, for historical periods we never lived through, or for versions of ourselves that never quite existed. A painting of an old room can make us homesick for a childhood we did not have. A landscape can make us long for a place our feet have never touched. A portrait can awaken grief for a version of ourselves we left behind years ago.
This is where art enters the territory of the imaginal. It's no surprise the paintings we love rarely feel accidental. We may tell ourselves we chose a certain painting because of the colour, the face, the strange little symbol hidden somewhere in the shadows, the way the light touched the body, but sometimes I think something deeper is choosing before we have found the language to explain it. We are drawn towards images that carry something we have buried, something we have survived, something we are aching to become. A painting can hold the woman we used to be, the woman we lost, the woman we are slowly remembering how to become. It can sit quietly on our wall while we change beneath its gaze, witnessing the grief, the tenderness, the rage, the becoming. We don't always choose the artwork that looks most like us. Sometimes we choose the artwork that knows us. Is this why certain paintings feel less like decoration and more like coming home to a part of ourselves we thought we had to?
Endless love,
Nymsera