The Art of Seeing Differently: How Aphantasic Artists Challenge the Myth of the Visualizing Genius

When Matthew MacKisack joined Adam Zeman's research project at the University of Exeter in 2015, he didn't expect to be studying artists. As a cultural historian of imagery, he was brought in to work on the history of science and mental imagery.

"While we were doing that, Adam's paper identifying aphantasia came out and there was a huge response obviously to its naming and the publicizing," MacKisack recalls. "And many of the people who got in contact were artists to a little bit of our surprise."

Artists, creatives of various kinds—all reaching out to say they couldn't visualize. It seemed paradoxical. How could visual artists not be able to see mental images?

The question was compelling enough that MacKisack and his team secured funding to investigate further. What began as simple curiosity evolved into an exhibition that toured the UK featuring both hyperphantasic and aphantasic artists, and ultimately resulted in new research titled "Plural Imagination: Diversity in Mind and Making."

Today, their findings challenge one of the most persistent myths in Western culture: that great artists must be able to visualize.

The Visualizing Genius Stereotype

"I call this the visualizing genius stereotype," MacKisack explains. It's a notion that has dominated Western discourse on creativity since the Renaissance—the idea that artistic creation begins with a mental image that the artist then transfers to canvas or marble.

The assumption is so deeply ingrained that discovering you have aphantasia can feel like a creative death sentence.

"We get hundreds of emails to the Aphantasia Network from people who've discovered that they can't visualize for the first time," says Tom Ebeyer, founder of Aphantasia Network. "One of the top five most common emails I would say... the general theme is that, you know, I want to be creative or I'm an artist and I have aphantasia, maybe I can't do this. Maybe I should do something different or now I know why my peers are better artists than me."

But MacKisack's research tells a very different story.

What the Research Actually Found

Working with a small but diverse cohort—twelve aphantasic and six hyperphantasic artists—MacKisack's team made a striking discovery.

"The first kind of conclusion that smacked us in the face to begin with was that you can't tell someone's imagery experience from the work itself," he says.

The artists at both extremes of imagery experience created a vast range of work: figurative art, abstract art, sculpture, design, architecture. There was no visual signature of aphantasia, no tell-tale sign in the finished piece.

"Conversely, imagery experience imposes no limit on the kind of art that can be made," MacKisack adds. "This is the key takeaway at the outset that the kind of imagery experience one has or doesn't have does not restrict the kind of art you can make or how creative you can be."

The work was indistinguishable. But the process? That was entirely different.

External Composition: The Aphantasic Creative Process

What sets aphantasic art-making apart are the strategies artists use—strategies MacKisack groups under the term external composition.

"By which we mean they use physical references, they manipulate materials and there's often a process of discovery, a kind of exploratory process, all of which instead of visualizing the thing before you make it."

Physical Reference: Working From What's There

Some aphantasic artists rely heavily on direct observation and photographic reference.

One Dutch artist Daan Tweehuysen explained that although his work does follow a local tradition of figurative painting, he feels that his aphantasia makes him, he says, more or less constricted to observation, MacKisack notes. This led Tweehuysen to develop a photorealistic painting style.

American illustrator Stephanie Brown takes a similarly methodical approach. She draws the contents of her pictures entirely from photographs, MacKisack explains.

"She says that she'll take a scene from a story as the initial prompt, but then instead of working with what the scene evokes for her, because it doesn't evoke anything for her, she'll instead methodically work out what the piece requires."

For her piece "Fall of a King," Brown just knew it needed to take place at sunset due to the story she was basing it on. So she planned to use warm colors in the scene before she started painting.

It's deduction rather than visualization. Planning rather than imagining.

Working Mind Blind: Letting Images Emerge

Other aphantasic artists describe their process as "working blind"—letting the image emerge from the picture surface itself through a process of discovery.

London-based artist Michael Chance paints elaborate figurative scenes without physical reference material, a process he describes in fascinating detail.

"Lack of ability to visualize images in my mind is a great motivation," Chance explains. "I must physically work on a drawing or painting in order for my imagination to become visually manifest."

He continues:

"I often start a picture with no intention and certainly no end goal. It materializes in an improvisatory way. The way images, usually figures, emerge from my subconscious is akin to dreaming."

Looking at Chance's work, you can see how one element suggests the next—the curve of one character suggesting the line for another in a cumulative, emergent process.

But Chance is also careful to note:

"These visions are informed by my everyday experience and observational drawing practice structured by my artistic understanding of perspective, space, light, form and anatomy."

Skill and practice still matter. Aphantasia doesn't remove the need for artistic training—it just changes the creative pathway.

Collage as External Thinking

Australian artist Susan Baquie uses collage—combining, altering, and layering pre-existing materials—as another form of working blind.

One piece was "made in a state of high emotion in response to the news of the death of an acquaintance," MacKisack explains. According to Baquie:

"Although there were no images in my mind of the distressing events, it seems that a figurative representation of them emerged unintentionally, growing from the action of making and the subconscious knowledge of the death of the young man."

She's giving form to images externally that she cannot create internally.

The Hyperphantasic Contrast

To understand what makes aphantasic art-making distinctive, it helps to see the opposite extreme.

MacKisack describes the process of a textile artist, who has hyperphantasia—the ability to inspect mental imagery as clearly as examining a photograph."She plans the weaving of them entirely in her mind's eye before she starts," MacKisack explains.

"My weavings are the result of combining two separate warp paintings. I spend hours over days or months composing the whole piece in my mind. I've visualized the designs, the two separate paintings, make changes, rotate it to check the structures from different angles and make corrections and adjustments to the design before I put it down.'"

When she finally creates the physical piece, "the weaving and resulting image come out how I composed it in my mind."

This is what MacKisack calls internal composition—creating the entire work mentally before executing it physically.

"We're kind of less surprised by this in a way than the notion of a visual artist who cannot visualize," he admits. "And I think that surprise is felt because the notion contradicts a model of creative production that dominates Western discourse on the subject."

Glen Keane: The Aphantasic Disney Legend

Perhaps the most well-known aphantasic artist is Glen Keane, the legendary Disney Pixar animator who created Ariel from The Little Mermaid, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and numerous other iconic characters.

Keane's process illuminates exactly how aphantasic artists work.

Knowledge vs. Images

"There is a difference between knowing or remembering what something looks like and generating a mental image of that thing," MacKisack explains. "To draw it you only need to know how it looks or would look."

Psychologist of art Rudolf Arnheim wrote in his book "Visual Thinking" that:

"A draftsperson, working from memory may deny convincingly that he has anything like an explicit picture of the object in his mind. Yet as he works, the correctness of what he is producing on paper is judged and modified according to some standard in the mind."

Aphantasics retain these standards. They can give detailed descriptions of scenes and landmarks they can't visualize.

"Aphantasia may prevent the generation of mental images based on knowledge of what things look like, but that does not prevent that knowledge serving as the basis for an image made with pencil and paper," MacKisack says.

Keane can draw Ariel because he knows what humans and fish look like. That knowledge, combined with years of practice and skill, guides his hand—no visualization required.

The Feedback Loop

There's another crucial difference between mental visualization and physical drawing.

"Whereas visualization, mental visualization takes place entirely within the brain, drawing is a partly external act taking place in front of the artist's eyes," MacKisack notes. "So when you draw, you perceive the marks you make. You judge their rightness, like Arnheim says, by looking at them."

Each mark perceived suggests the next change in a feedback loop. You don't have to imagine—you respond to what's actually there.

"The aphantasic artists we spoke to emphasize this aspect of their creative process," MacKisack explains. "They would need to get something down on the paper or canvas or even start with a pre-existing image, which they then alter or erase or add to."

Scribbles to Character

When Keane draws Ariel, "he begins with what he calls an explosion of scribbles" on the paper in front of him, MacKisack describes. "He then highlights and subtracts and adds lines and deletes lines until he finds the form that he wants."

Designing the Beast followed a similar process of trial and error where he kind of added on a cow's ears. He then tried giving it human eyes and so on.

It's experimental. Iterative. Exploratory.

As Ebeyer notes:

"One of the things that I do hear from aphantasic creatives is that the act of creation is the creativity. It's like they have that reason, that cognitive idea of what they want to create and how the forces of reality will shape that kind of final output, but it's an iterative discovery process. They kind of know it when they see it."

Where the Myth Came From

If aphantasic artists have always existed and created great work, why does the visualizing genius myth persist?

The answer lies in art history.

The Renaissance Invention of the "Artist"

"In the 14th century, the actual notion of an artist emerges," MacKisack explains. "The artists wanted to separate themselves from artisans, from craftsmen. Painters and sculptors didn't want to be these craftsmen anymore, so that's about distancing themselves to have a sort of a higher status."

The model they aspired to was the poet—someone intellectual, inspired, capable of vision and imagination.

"When visual artists align themselves with poets, they too can be inspired. They too can have visions," MacKisack says. "So by the mid 16th century, it was commonplace for artists to theorize, to say that art making begins with a mental image."

The Michelangelo Misquote

The myth crystallizes in a famous quotation often attributed to Michelangelo: "I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free."

It's inspirational. It's poetic. It's also completely wrong.

"He never really said this," MacKisack reveals. "What he did say in one of his poems was this"—and here MacKisack quotes the actual verse, which translates roughly as:

"Even the best of artists can conceive no idea that a single block of marble will not contain within its excess, though only a hand that obeys the intellect can discover it."

"Quite a different thing to saying, I see the angel in the marble," MacKisack notes.

What Michelangelo actually meant was rooted in neo-Platonism—the belief that ideal forms pre-exist in a supernatural realm, and physical objects are reflections of those forms.

"At the same time as the artist executes his idea, he's really intuiting God's ideas," MacKisack explains. "So that's to say that he's discovering this perfect form within the rock."

The marble block contains these otherworldly forms, and the artist's hand, "obedient to reason, can discover" them.

"Which as I say is quite different to visualizing an angel."

From Philosophy to Psychology

Over centuries, this philosophical idea got filtered through Romanticism's concept of the gifted genius and modern psychology's focus on mental imagery.

"If we take this notion that the marble contains the statue and add claims about the power of his imagination"—his biographer frequently emphasized Michelangelo's powerful imagination to distinguish him from mere craftsmen—"plus his statement elsewhere that sculptures are made by a force of removal. And we kind of funnel that through the lens of modern psychology and romanticism's model of the gifted genius, then we end up with this recipe for thinking Michelangelo as a supreme visualizer."

This is exactly what 20th century art historians did. And it's what leads to popular depictions of artists as people with extraordinary mental vision.

"We arrive at this kind of stereotype of the visualizing genius," MacKisack says. "But all this is to say that this is what aphantasic artists challenge and it opens it up and permits multiple, diverse minds to be creative and make art."

Imagining With the Environment

One of the most intriguing theoretical frameworks MacKisack discusses is extended cognition—the idea that thinking isn't confined to the head.

"There's a really interesting theory called extended cognition, which is a kind of a cognitive theory, which says that thinking is not contained within the head," he explains. "As humans, we habitually use things, the environment, objects to think with."

Your notebook is external memory. Your phone is a repository of thoughts. "The idea is if you take them away, then the performance or the kind of thinking falls away as well."

For aphantasic artists, this concept is particularly relevant.

"What a lot of aphantasic artists are doing is that they are imagining with their environment, if you like. They're imagining externally," MacKisack suggests.

Remember what Michael Chance said about needing to physically work on a drawing or painting "in order for my imagination to become visually manifest"?

"I think if you start to think about, if we start to get away from this idea that thinking has to be done in the head, if we start to think that creative thinking can be an external process, then that allows almost the aphantasic artist entry/access," MacKisack says.

He encourages people who are newly discovering aphantasia to reframe their understanding: think of paper and materials not as surfaces to transfer mental images onto, but as tools to imagine with—shifting from internal to external composition.

The Hyperphantasic Challenge

While MacKisack's research focused on aphantasic processes, the hyperphantasic artists revealed something equally fascinating—and unexpectedly negative.

"We did a conference in 2021 called the Extreme Imagination Conference where we had aphantasic and hyperphantasic artists come together to talk about their creative process," Ebeyer recalls. "And one of the hyperphantasics... really just stuck with me is this idea that he did spend lots of time creating this perfect sculpture in his mind, but was always disappointed in the final output because it never actually matched."

The translation from internal to external isn't seamless, even with vivid imagery.

"He described this sense of disappointment because he was never able to live up to those images he had in his mind," Ebeyer explains.

It's a profoundly different relationship to creativity—and a reminder that vivid imagery creates its own challenges.

Beyond Facial Mimicry: Embodied Creativity

The external references aphantasic artists use aren't limited to photographs and physical objects.

"If you watch a video of Glen Keane and his creative process," Ebeyer suggests, "there's this really fascinating clip of him sketching out the Beast and he's thinking about the expression on his face and he's like mimicking these expressions."

Keane physically embodies the surprised expression he wants to draw. The knowledge flows from body to hand, almost bypassing the need for mental visualization.

MacKisack describes it as a bodily flow—from Keane's face physically simulating the expression directly to his hand drawing it, almost bypassing mental imagination entirely. "It's amazing to see," he observes.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Perhaps the most important message from MacKisack's research isn't about art history or cognitive theory—it's about belief.

"I think the most important takeaway from all of this is the idea that belief can be a self-fulfilling prophecy," Ebeyer reflects. "So if you're telling yourself you can't be creative or you can't be artistic because of this, that's what holds you back."

The evidence is clear: Glen Keane didn't know he had aphantasia when he created some of Disney's most beloved characters. The aphantasic artists in MacKisack's study who discovered their condition late in life had been creating all along.

"Many of our artists didn't know until it was, you know, until 2015, when aphantasia was identified. And it's just the way they work," MacKisack says. "Which means that people do this all the time and artists have always worked this way."

The barrier isn't aphantasia—it's the myth that you need to visualize to be creative.

"I think that's the thing to remember is that once we bypass that myth... more people can be more creative," MacKisack concludes.

The Real Creative Process

What MacKisack's research ultimately reveals is that creativity is far more diverse than Western culture has acknowledged.

The Renaissance artists needed to claim they worked from divine inspiration and mental visions to elevate their status above craftsmen. Romantic-era thinkers needed the myth of the tortured genius accessing otherworldly realms of imagination.

But the reality is messier, more varied, more interesting.

Some artists compose internally, spending weeks perfecting a mental image before touching physical materials. Others compose externally, discovering their creation through the act of making itself. Some draw from photographic reference. Others work blind, letting marks suggest marks. Some embody their subjects physically. Others deduce logically what a scene requires.

All of these approaches produce art. None is inherently superior.

"You can't tell someone's imagery experience from the work itself," MacKisack reminds us. "Imagery experience imposes no limit on the kind of art that can be made."

The visualizing genius is a myth. The truth is far more liberating: genius takes many forms, and aphantasic artists have been among the most creative minds throughout history—they just worked differently.

For anyone discovering they have aphantasia and worrying about their creative future, MacKisack's message is clear: the materials, the surface, the physical act of creation—these are your imagination made external.

You don't need to see it in your mind. You just need to make it real.

Learn more: Matthew MacKisack is an art historian who has researched imagery diversity and artistic production at the University of Exeter. His research "Plural Imagination: Diversity in Mind and Making" examines how artists at both extremes of imagery experience create their work. MacKisack's work continues. He's launched a new survey to gather more data about artists across the full spectrum of imagery experiences. You can find a link to the survey here.