Seeing as Experience
May 14, 2025
By Robin Colodzin
Aesthetic Joy
One of my earliest memories is of a warm, sunlit afternoon in the backyard of my family house in New Haven CT. I might have been in a hammock. Or on my mother’s lap? What I most remember is a green inch worm, suspended in mid-air, dangling lower and lower as it spun a delicate thread. I vividly remember the intensity of the green, a spring yellow-green. I remember the way it moved in the air, like a dancer. My young self was filled with awe, with aesthetic joy.
As I describe this experience, you may come up with a picture in your mind. In this moment, you are creating your unique version of what I described. And indeed, my memory and description of that long ago event is a different experience from the one I had in that moment.
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, his seminal work examining how we view art. “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.”
Our experiences reach us through our senses. Even if we share the moment with others, each person is experiencing it through the lenses of their own senses, and the distinct lens of their own awareness.
I find this reality a little bit lonely, a bit poignant. Those moments of beauty, of pain, of any sensations we experience through our bodies are to some degree separate from everyone else.
So, how do we connect, how do we share our experiences? Through language, we describe what occurs, we tell each other stories. We tell ourselves stories – about what we’ve seen and heard. We store our life in stories.
But these retellings are one step removed from that visceral moment of experiencing that comes through our senses. That moment fascinates me; like seeing that green inch worm as a child, before I had words to name or explain what I saw.
Seeing is an Active Process
Seeing is an active process. Sight is a bringing together of the input from the eye as it moves around, stimulating nerves, traveling along neurons. Our memory, our interests, past experiences, and expectations all impact what we see – not just where we choose to focus our eyes, but also how we build an internal picture of the scene.
In Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith explores the origins of self-awareness, examining evolutionary pathways in cephalopods, other animals, and humans. He describes studies of animals with less integrated perceptual pathways than ours, including one done with frogs. The frogs were taught a task with one eye covered. Then the researchers switched which eye was covered. The frogs could no longer do the task. They switched back to the initial eye, and the frog once again could do the task. This suggests there is no one inner picture of the world that is being constructed from what they see. Instead, each eye maintains its own stream of experience through distinct impulses and pathways. What then does a frog see? How does sight work for this being? (Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, pg. 89-90).
For that matter, how does sight actually work for us? If we imagine that our eyes are just cameras, mechanically capturing a world that exists outside of us, this does not really match the active experience of seeing. As we look, vision is not just reception, it is construction. When we look at an object or scene, we are creating an inner representation that is influenced not only by what we see, but also by what we expect to see and what we believe about the world.
Tactile Vision Substitution Systems (TVSS), a technology developed for the blind, uses sensors to create physical sensations on the blind person’s skin in response to what is around them. After becoming adept with the technology, people describe experiencing a sense of objects existing out in the world rather than just sensations on their body (Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, pg. 80). This suggests that perception is not tied to a single sense. From feelings against their skin, an inner picture of the world is being built akin to the one that sighted people create with their eyes. Our senses overlap and interact to build our relationship with the world around us.
Life Drawing
During my first figure drawing class I was trying to draw the model’s knee, and it looked wrong. Growing increasingly overwhelmed and discouraged, tears began to prick at the backs of my eyes.
The teacher was particularly gentle and wise. She sat next to me and together we looked at my paper and the model. She would indicate some shadow or line in the figure that might improve my drawing. She saw my tears, and she didn’t push me. But when the class met again after a break, she read to us from her book, Conversations and Uncertainty, which included an exchange of letters and drawings she had with writer and lifelong drawer John Berger. They were exploring the questions “Can we observe without measuring? Can we draw the un-measurable? What happens when the un-measurable observes us?”
In his letter to my teacher, Berger writes about swimming in an outdoor pool and looking at the clouds above him and thinking about drawing them. “The cirrus is drifting northwards towards the deep end of the pool. Afloat on my back, motionless. I watch it and chart with my eyes the pattern of its undulations. Then the assurance the sight offers changes. It takes me time to understand how. Slowly the change becomes evident and the assurance I receive becomes deeper. The curls of the white cirrus are observing a man afloat on his back with his hands behind his head. I’m no longer observing them, they are observing me.” (Conversations and Uncertainty by Amber Scoon, pg. 59).
Something in me eased. Perhaps it was the whimsicalness of imagining clouds being the observers, or perhaps it was just the patient, curious attention that Berger was describing. The tightness of trying to draw correctly relaxed enough to make space for something new. For a willingness to just be there, looking, and attempting to make my hand move in relationship with what I was seeing, to seek a relationship with what I was observing. Instead of feeling like I was failing a test, I could imagine being that long ago child, looking at the green inch worm, before I had words or was graded for my efforts. I had been trying so hard to get it right, to capture something exact. But what if drawing wasn’t about measurement or precision? What if drawing was about something deeper—about seeing in a way that allowed for uncertainty, for feeling, for presence, for relationship?
Art History and Seeing
The immediacy of experiencing through our senses is not something that words can replace. What does this mean for sharing our experiences?
We are bombarded with photographic images of the world, on the television, in our social media feeds, images of places, people, and moments. Looking at these pictures, we see other lives from the outside. They show us what something looked like, but not necessarily how it felt to be there.
Art has the potential to offer a glimpse into how someone else sees the world. What they looked at, the content, yes. But also, sometimes, a sense of their inner experience. A painting or a drawing, even if representing a specific moment, also includes the hours that the artist spent creating it. The artwork is a cumulation of marks, and of looking, over time. In some ineffable way, it includes the maker’s presence, the evidence of their seeing the world through their own senses.
I look at drawings by Giacometti, and the lines he makes that connect everything… the body in the space, the angles of the room converging, scribbling marks circling around until somehow the form emerges. I can feel the movement of his hand; I can feel his searching. I find this beautiful. Yes, I am seeing a figure in a room. But I am also seeing how his hand is always in motion. I imagine him searching for form, for connections between things, asking himself how does the top of this cabinet line up with her shoulder? How big is his head if he is close to me, and I am looking back at the rest of the room?
In Giacometti’s drawings, I don’t just see what he saw — I see how he saw.
The intensity and abundance of lines making up each element reflects a restless urgency, a seeking. I imagine he is trying to sense not only through his eyes, but also by the movement of his hand, his relationship to the room, the sitter’s relationship to the space, and the distance between and among them all.
Seeing and Subjectivity
We use our senses to interpret and experience the world around us. And yet our subjective impressions are not easily quantifiable. What does that say about our perceptions in a world where truth is most commonly associated with objectivity and measurability?
Consider drawing from observation. The measurements of things change depending on where we look. Imagine that I am focusing directly on a tree in front of me, and I am drawing a branch that recedes in my peripheral vision. If I then turn my head to look directly at the branch, the scene has changed. The length of the branch, the angle as it meets the trunk of the tree will have altered.
Now if someone went with a ruler, and measured that same branch repeatedly, those numbers would be the same each time – the branch did not change its length.
So, what is this tree that I am experiencing through my senses, that changes with each shift in my focus? What I see depends on what I am paying attention to – zooming closely in on the bark or softening my gaze to see the whole of the tree.
This tree that lives in my mind is a subjective and personal one. Commonsense suggests that this internal representation has less authority or even reality than the tree that is objectively measurable, existing independent of my senses.
But the line between a static, objective reality and our subjective perceptions may not be as fixed as we think.
Quantum Reality
Quantum physics studies the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest level, that of atoms and other elementary particles.
Carlo Rovelli describes some of the discoveries of this field in his wonderful book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. “The world articulated by quantum mechanics… does not describe things as they “are”: it describes how things “occur”, and how they “interact with each other”. It doesn’t describe where there is a particle but how the particle shows itself to others. The world of existent things is reduced to a realm of possible interactions. Reality is reduced to interaction. Reality is reduced to relation.” (pg. 134-135).
Quantum physics describes a world that is deeply relational. Observation impacts what form matter takes at the most elementary level. (For an accessible description of the classic double-slit experiment demonstrating this concept, see The Observer Effect, scroll down to the section titled “How Observation Changes Particles”).
This does not mean that we invent our own truths, that we can simply dictate the form that reality will take. It means that reality at the atomic level emerges through our entanglement with it and does not exist untouched by us.
“It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.” (Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What it Seems, pg. 135).
I do not claim to have a complete understanding of the field of quantum physics, and indeed much in the field itself remains in debate. But reading about it leaves me with a sense of wonder at the mysteries of a world that takes form as we interact with and observe it. Seeing becomes a relationship full of creative possibility.
Painting in My Backyard
I sat in my backyard many days last spring and summer, in front of a wooden board set across two plastic sawhorses, with oil paints and gessoed paper. I spent a lot of time looking and then sketching. And then painting. I was learning to see and learning how to work with oil paints. Because I spent so long on this painting, what I was looking at literally changed. The plants grew taller, the flowers bloomed and died. Within any day, the sun moved across the sky dramatically changing all the colors I was seeing from one moment to the next.
After many hours over days and weeks, I came up with a very mediocre, uninspired painting, and with an imprint in my mind of the shape of that tree, those elephant eared plants, the lines of that fence. The time I spent looking created an impression of the plants and rocks of my backyard inside of me; a relationship with this particular corner of the world that feels specific and intimate, through all its changes. The painting was simply an artifact of that relationship.
Years ago, I was a tourist at Petra in Jordan, a historic city literally carved into the rocks. A guide drove me there in a horse drawn buggy, and we talked. He pointed out the shapes that the rocks made in some places, and the history of people living in this space. As we got to know each other better, he related a conversation he had had with another tourist, who had been shocked that he had never been anywhere else, never traveled outside of the few miles between where he lived and the site of Petra. “But” he said, gesturing around us, “I know every rock in this place.”
When I needed a break from trying to paint a realistic representation of my backyard, I would pull out a second canvas. In this other painting I was not trying to create a single recognizable space. Instead, I allowed myself to just follow my attention in the moment, across multiple locations and scenes and many different instances of intimate attention. The elephant eared plants of my backyard with their purplish stems. The red bottomed boat on its side by Smith Cove. The granite rock that kept changing colors in the shifting light, whose planes had infinite cavities and crevasses. The clematis that briefly bloomed. The rivers and lines that my imagination created, as I sought connections between different elements and experiences and times. It was still seeing—still paying attention. But here, the act of looking was not about capturing a single fixed place. It was about embracing the shifting, impermanent nature of experience itself.
I think of Giacometti using his hand to explore his relationship with the room and the person that he is seeing. Of the frog whose left and right eyes have independent pathways in its brain. Of that moment with the dangling green inch worm when I was a child before I had words.
In our interactions, through our senses, we draw the world.
©2025 Robin Colodzin
Robin Colodzin’s work is inspired by the ocean, poetry, philosophy and feminism. She is an artist, a software engineer, a swimmer and an avid reader.
Robin is interested in the relationship between the sensual experience of living in our own bodies, and the ideas we generate about bodies through the social world. She is curious about the private lives we share with no one, and the social creatures we become in relation to others. Where do they meet?
Her most recent solo exhibit was ‘Embodied’ at The Copley Society of Art in Boston, which she created a monograph of, including some writing about the inspirations behind the work.
Robin resides and works on Cape Ann, with a studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Bibliography
Berger, John: Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Lord, James: Giacometti Drawings, New York Graphic Society, 1971.
Rovelli, Carlo: Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Riverhead Books, 2016.
Scoon, Amber: Conversations and Uncertainty, Atropos Press, 2017.
Quantumglyphs: “The Observer Effect — How Observing Changes Reality,” Medium. https://medium.com/@quantumglyphs1/the-observer-effect-how-observing-changes-reality-0202abadcaf8
Robin Colodzin
One of my earliest memories is of a warm, sunlit afternoon in the backyard of my family house in New Haven CT. I might have been in a hammock. Or on my mother’s lap? What I most remember is a green inch worm,