Thoughts

When I return to John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing', I can see how his ideas resonate with the way I make and understand my drawings. Berger wasn't just analysing paintings; he was dissecting the politics of perception—how we inherit ways of looking, how we internalise them, and how images both shape and reflect the world we live in.

Reading his work has clarified something I've felt intuitively for a long time, that my drawings aren't simply representations. They are examinations of how I see, neurologically, emotionally, and psychologically. My practice reveals a way of seeing that is often non-linear, fragmented, hyper-focused, or unstable. Berger gives me a framework to articulate this, not as a flaw or limitation, but as another constructed gaze worth understanding.

Berger begins with the claim that "seeing comes before words." Vision, he argues, is primary. Interpretation comes later. This immediately resonates with my own experience of making work. In several posts, especially https://www.laurensimons.art/post/drawing-2 and https://www.laurensimons.art/post/thoughts-1, I write about the precognitive nature of my perception, how I anchor myself through routines, how disorientation settles into the body, how drawing becomes a way to restabilise my senses. When I draw, I'm not translating language into image. I'm letting immediate perception (patterns, edges, rhythms) guide me. My drawing are not illustrations of ideas. Instead they are records of how my eye and attention move through the world. In this way, my practice mirrors Berger's insistence that seeing is active, not passive. I draw the way I perceive: urgently, attentively, without imposed coherence.

One of Berger's insights is his description of the gendered gaze: "Men act and women appear." He argues, women in art have historically internalised the gaze turned upon them. They become the observer and the observed. While my work isn't focused on gendered representation, I can see the observer and the observed peaking through. In https://www.laurensimons.art/post/drawing-7, I write about splitting: seeing red, black and white thinking, the oscillation between extremes. This internal state creates a split between versions of myself—the one who feels and the one who evaluates, the on who acts and the one who monitors. This is more than emotional turbulence; it is a way of seeing myslef from multiple conflicting angles at once. When I draw myself and then write over that drawing, I make visible this layered, sometimes adversarial relationship. I am both the subject and the examiner.

Berger's analysis or reproduction (how images change meaning when removed from their original context) has been an interesting read when thinking about the process of splitting in this BOW. In https://www.laurensimons.art/post/drawing-4, I cut my own drawings in half and asked someone outside my practice to reassemble them. This act destabilises authorship and intention. My work becomes fragmented, re-ordered, re-contextualised by a gaze not my own. Meaning shifts with arrangement, exactly as Berger describes when a painting is cropped or relocated.

Reading through Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' has helped clarify that my drawings aren't only about what I depict, but about how I perceive. They reveal a way of seeing shaed by neurodivergence, emotional intensity, and a desire to understand through visual means.

Berger opens the question: Who taught you to see this way?

My work responds: This is simply how I see.

In this sense, my drawings become a form of reclaiming. They transform subjective vision—fragmented, tender, unstable precise—into something shareable. They turn a private perceptual logic into visual formations

This is my articulation of a different, deeply personal way of seeing.

• John Berger, “Ways of Seeing by John Berger,” www.ways-of-seeing.com, 1972, https://www.ways-of-seeing.com.