This painting is called ''Wishful Thinking''.
''The mirror doesn't lie.''
Well, maybe the mirror doesn't, but we often do.
When we look at ourselves in a mirror,
we may think that what we see is a
true reflection of what we are seeing.
But it isn't.
It may be true-ish but not accurate.
How so?
Eyes are not ''lenses'' and the ''camera house''
is not a brain.
''Vision is an active neurological and biological
reconstruction of data edited and interpreted by our
brains as to fit in with our belief systems and
our sub-conscious and conscious reality.''
There was a time in my life when I suffered
with Anorexia.
Having been skinny all my life, I ignored friends
when they began telling me that I was getting
''too'' skinny. I had noticed that my clothes were
getting really(!)comfortable but I seriously did
not think of myself as ''too'' skinny. I put my skinniness
down to working all hours of the day, raising a son
and being a good spouse.
I looked at myself in the mirror and could see
that I was slim, but skinny? Nah....
Until one day when I was trying on a new T-shirt
in a changing room and suddenly could see
how my clavicle bones were protruding through
the cloth of the T-shirt.
Once I could see the shoulder bones sticking out
I could also see that it was the same with my knee
and hip bones. I decided to go to a doctor.
Standing on the scales I realized just how much weight
I had lost. Not only weight, I was also losing hair.
The doctor told me to stand in front of his mirror
and then he sternly said: ''If you do not put on weight
immediately your body will shut down and you will die.
You need to go and see a psychologist. NOW.''
I did.
*
This image is called : ''Looking thru a Kaleidoscope.''
I love Kaleidoscopes because basically you are
looking at the same mirrors all the time, but by
rotating the coloured bits in front of the mirrors the
image changes and is never exactly the same again.
Now imagine that those bits have words on them.
(Words that are words that you think when you see
yourself in the mirror.)
According to those in the know, when we do this
we often tend to focus on negative words
rather than positive ones.
When we look at ourselves in the mirror,
we do so through many layers of different biases,
but also through stuff we've read on social media
and things people may have said to us.
Bias examples:
Weight, age, beauty, confirmation, stereotyping,
etc. etc. etc. and many more types of biases.
Trying to find a way to say that eyes are not
''cameras'' I finally arrived at this:
''Vision is an active neurological and biological
reconstruction of data edited and interpreted by our
brains as to fit in with our belief systems and
our sub-conscious and conscious reality.''
(Think about it and you may like me suddenly
get that you have never actually seen your
face with your own two eyes. Only reflected.)
''When you look in the mirror,
see a friend not a critic.''
(Remez Sosson)
about the images: Top: acrylic on large canvas
Kaleidoscope: Water colour on paper
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