← The Good Ship Illustration
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- [00:24]
A
Hello, welcome. We are excited to talk about. How do you say it properly?
- [00:30]
B
Elephantasia. I say with all authority, yes, Aphantasia.
- [00:36]
A
That's the one. All I can think of is Elephantasia,
- [00:38]
B
because I'm hating it.
- [00:40]
C
Helen's infected us with her version of the word. But yeah, we keep getting conversations about Aphantasia on, well, particularly in the Facebook group, because in one of the. Well, in the. Find your creative voice, there's an exercise in there that involves imagining things. And in pitching book, there's childhood memories and recalling things and sort of drawing. Drawing from your inner mind. And it always provokes conversations about, I can't see anything. And a lot of people didn't know, and we didn't know what it was until some wise shipper said, oh, it's called Aphantasia, where there's nothing in your visual mind. And we're just like, this is so fascinating.
- [01:21]
A
There's a good diagram, isn't there, where it's like load of apples and one of the apples on one side is bright red and shiny and then the spectrum goes from, like, goes gray, less visible, to black. And that's like the spectrum of how many elephants are in Eutasia. How fantastic you are.
- [01:41]
C
But I think it's everyone's on the spectrum of Aphantasia. Some people just see a black screen in their mind and they. Even if there's things they. They know really well, like their bedroom, they perhaps can't remember it and put that picture in their head. Some people can roughly sketch out the shape of their bedroom and where the bed is, but they can't see the color of the bedspread or where the window was. And then other people have really super vivid imagery like you would have when you were a child and you were scared of monsters under the bed and you really actually knew what the monster looked like. He was so vivid that your feelings and terror were provoked by the power of your own visualization. And I think, obviously as adults, you lose that intensity. But some people have really super powerful visual memories, which apparently is called eidetic memory. So my wise husband told me.
- [02:33]
A
Is that like photographic memory?
- [02:35]
C
I think it is. Or it's ultra vivid. You can do all the details.
- [02:39]
A
See, I can't do all the details, but I do see things in my brain. And we were talking about this before, like, when you read a book, like a fiction book, it's like plugging your brain into a film for me anyway. And I see the film, like, see the book in my mind, but. And that's what really confused me about Aphantasia. Like, are they people? Are these people reading and just not seeing anything?
- [02:59]
C
My daughter says she doesn't see anything when she. She loves fiction. And I said to her, can you see anything? And she said, no, but the story. I can feel the story, but I don't have pictures when a space or a person is being described. And she's a. She's an interior and spatial designer by trade. There are so many creative people with Aphantasia. They just work differently.
- [03:22]
B
I think what's so amazing about it, what's really interesting is trying to. We've spent the morning, the three of us, trying to describe how we remember things. And it's so hard and you want to get into somebody else's brain and have a poke about and go, it's like that. What do you mean? It's really hard to describe how you remember things? Because I think memory is part emotion, part and part visual. I think I remember things more if I've got a big emotional connection to it, like my childhood bedroom and things like that. But I don't think I remember every single thing in the bedroom and exactly how the books were piled up. I think I have a good visual memory, but not like. Not like a photographic memory.
- [04:05]
A
Yeah.
- [04:06]
B
And I guess everybody's on a spectrum, aren't they?
- [04:08]
A
And little things will trigger my brain. So, like, I went into my daughter's school and the carpet is the same from when I was there. And I must have looked at the carpet a lot because I looked at it, I was like, whoa, that's my whole childhood in the carpet. Or like, I can remember the wallpaper at my granny's house because it was beside the bed and you'd be looking at it in the morning. It had the little formula you lumped and you could pick them off.
- [04:26]
B
Yeah, yeah. I remember bedspreads. You remember candle wick bedspreads, where you could pluck the little bits of tufty fluff out of them. I remember the color of that and the feel of that. I remember going to my grandma's and it was always cold upstairs because she had no heating. And the bedspreads, those candle wet bed spreads would feel heavy because they were sort of damp from the cold. Like, I remember all of the feelings around it, which helps plant the visual memory. And I just. You know, I have a good friend, Scott, Scott Robertson, who is a fine artist and he has Aphantasia and we've been talking about it a lot and he says he has all the emotional memories. He has emotional memories of houses and rooms and places he's been, but no visual memory. And there's one particular painting that he did he usually paints from. So if he paints a figure, it's like a stick man, because he doesn't try to make it real, but he tries to put the emotional impact of what he's trying to say into that figure. Anyway, there's one painting that he's done that's quite unusual because it's a scene near where he lives and. And it's the beach with the beachside cafe, which is like a little white 1920s building. But also to get from the beach, there are those steps, you know, how you walk up. So how do you describe those steps off the beach? They're sort of scary, aren't they?
- [05:50]
A
Yeah, they're like a pebble, dashy concrete. And it's a bit like you go in as an enclosed space and you go up the sidey stairs.
- [05:55]
B
They're all damp and you know that the sea has been in them and dragged all of the seaweed and the bits of sticks and stuff into there and seaweed and stuff. And they smell funny. They often smell of wee and they're sort of weird, creepy space. Also, all of the sound of the sea and the wind stops when you get between the steps.
- [06:15]
C
It's like a dead space.
- [06:16]
B
Yeah, it's a weird space. Yeah. So in his painting, everything is like a diagram, you know, like, you would just draw a strip of yellow sand, a strip of blue sky, the building. But he's drawn the steps, and all there is is this, like, dark gray square that represents the bit you walk into to go up the steps. And that gray bit, like, seems to sink right back in the landscape, like. Like beyond the building, beyond the horizon, like, really deep. And it just gives you that weird, like, ooh, that feeling of being in those steps. So that painting is just about the feeling. The rest of it is like a diagram. And he has aphantasia. And it. It's like it charges his painting with something better than if it had been very realistic. Do you know?
- [07:03]
C
Yeah. Rather than externally representation. What's quite funny, that when you're describing a painting painted by someone with aphantasia and asking us to picture.
- [07:12]
A
Yeah. So clear.
- [07:14]
B
Yeah. I wish I could get in other people's brains and see what they see.
- [07:19]
C
Well, I think that children's book illustrators, you can say not many of them will have aphantasia, because they can. I always look at the Imagination in children's books with the scenes and the characters and the invention. And I think my brain doesn't have that.
- [07:34]
B
Yeah, but people creation from lots of places, don't they? Like I couldn't make a whole background scene entirely from memory. I'll have a memory. I'll have been to a place and think, well, I'll set it that place. Because that seems about right. And they're all decide it needs to be like a market square or something. And then I'll google it a bit
- [07:55]
C
and you do a mental collage.
- [07:57]
B
Do like a mental collage. Get rid of the Google images and then try sketching it. Sketch it a few times till a version feels right, you've made it. But it's definitely not entirely, oh, I've been in a market square. I know exactly how that looks. But our Alice seems to have that. Alice seems to have a, a really, really good memory for details.
- [08:19]
C
She said she lies down at night. Sorry I was giving away your sleeping secrets. But she said she can create whole scenes in her mind when she falls asleep. And I used to be able to as a child. I'd create woodland animal scenes to calm myself down when I was probably five or six. But I think that dries up a bit as you get older or after 30 years in an illustration career where you had to visualize for things that you didn't necessarily want to draw but that would. You could put a concept together and they needed certain elements in this concept, like, I don't know, a factory or something. You wouldn't, wouldn't be an item that you would want to draw, but you have to learn to draw it. So you collage these things, as you said, from Googling and from other reference and you create something from all these different bits of mental collage, which means you're no longer building your, your mental palace. What do they call it?
- [09:08]
B
Your mind palace.
- [09:10]
C
Your mind palace of imagination is getting slack and lazy.
- [09:14]
B
Do you think that's what happens?
- [09:16]
C
I think if you're not inventing scenes in your head or picturing things, you must be able to strengthen your imagination muscle by thinking.
- [09:26]
B
I think I have a good memory for places that meant a lot and I could draw things. Places that really, really hit home. Like some of the accommodation I lived in when I was at art school, like I can remember it incredibly well. But then other places, like when we do art club and we do 10 second animal and somebody tells us the name of an animal in the comments and we try and draw it in 10 seconds because most of those animals I've not met, just glanced at them. I've seen photos of them on Google and they don't have a big impact. I cannot remember what they look like. I mean, the, the drawings are a disaster.
- [10:05]
A
You mustn't have an emotional connection to Stutz.
- [10:08]
B
You're right.
- [10:09]
C
The constrictions of 10 seconds really doesn't.
- [10:12]
B
Yeah, that doesn't. But if I was. If I was to want to draw a stoat, I would think, oh, they're like long and thin with a leg on each corner, but. And maybe brown. But I'd have to go and Google
- [10:24]
C
it because that's data, isn't it? Like a lot of people with Aphantasia say, they will draw things by talking themselves through the facts of a thing. So they'll describe the room verbally and they'll draw from their own verbal prompts, which we do to a certain extent. If It's a stoat. 10 seconds.
- [10:42]
B
What about a bike? Can you draw a bike from your memory?
- [10:45]
A
I can draw a funny bike from memory.
- [10:46]
C
Yeah.
- [10:46]
B
I can draw a wonky unrideable one, which is fine. Then that's the other thing is maybe some amount of Aphantasia is actually really useful because it makes your drawing of a bike very much you.
- [10:58]
C
Yeah.
- [10:58]
B
Rather than a diagram of a perfectly rideable bike.
- [11:02]
A
People don't want a clipart bike picture. They want your wobbly human hand bike,
- [11:07]
C
your weird memory of a bike.
- [11:09]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [11:10]
C
That's the other thing that popped up when I was talking to my daughter about Aphantasia. She was saying that an employer of hers who is in. In the sort of UX design world, he was saying a lot of digital designers and user experience kind of people have Aphantasia, but they make for really good outcomes because they trial everything. They can't see it in their head, so they actually have to do it over and over again. So there's lots of iterations of anything and you could apply that to an illustrator easily. There's lots of different versions until you get it right. Whereas the person who sees it clearly in their head again, oh, it's that I'm not going to do anymore. That's it, it's done. And he said they are really difficult to work with because they're very stubborn and have very set ideas that it was right because they saw it.
- [11:56]
A
So it's actually a benefit to have Aphantasia because you're going to try out, you're going to externalize more design ideas.
- [12:02]
C
Yeah, exactly. Because you're prepared to look at lots of different ways of doing it and refine it over and over again. But for all of it, this kind of different imaginations or different ways of arriving at a creative outcome are so interesting, aren't they? Because some people might have only observational outcomes. So those creative illustrators, let's say, for example, to keep it relevant in. Can only work if they can draw it from life or from a picture. Perhaps they can't collage things together in a false space so they can only work observationally. And some people can only draw entirely from imagination and don't want the problem of a photographic reference to interfere. And then other people draw things that don't even exist. Like Leonora Carrington and her weird creatures that no one's ever seen. Like where do they come from? That level of imagination that. That isn't based on a visual memory of something you've seen?
- [12:55]
B
I find that really hard just to make something up.
- [12:57]
C
Yeah.
- [12:58]
B
Completely make something up. I really rely. I love drawing from life and I love somewhere in between, which is like draw it. Put the. Draw it from life. Put the drawing aside and then draw it from my memory of the drawing from life. Or look at a Google image quickly get rid of it and then draw it while the memory is in my mind. Not draw from the photo. So I'm somewhere in the middle. And I definitely do not like trying to make something up. Can you? Trying to make something up from scratch on a piece of paper is just.
- [13:33]
C
Yeah.
- [13:33]
B
Impossible. Those Leonard Nora Carrington images. But I really like the. I really like it if I know a place well and I remember it. To do the exercise that you set in the freak flag course of changing the angle. So imagine you're up above. I can do that. So I must be able to hold something in my brain. My brain holds something.
- [13:53]
A
Something going on. Yeah, there's something going on in there.
- [13:55]
B
Because I can look at a room and then imagine being at a different angle and drawing it. I love doing that. Yeah.
- [14:01]
C
Or even a basic exercise. If you're listening to this and thinking, what are they on about? This is really. Have I got aphantasia. The usual one is picture an apple and then change the color of the apple. Look at the apple from underneath. Hanging in a tree. Look at it. Can you see it in a fruit bowl?
- [14:16]
B
But there's Some people imagine a line drawing. Some people like a line around an app. Some people remember, imagine a colored apple just like a cartoon apple. I don't imagine. I imagine a Real apple. Like a real one on a fruit bowl or something.
- [14:30]
A
Mine's a real one in a fruit bowl.
- [14:32]
B
Is it?
- [14:32]
C
Yeah.
- [14:33]
B
Yeah.
- [14:33]
C
I don't imagine a representation of an apple.
- [14:35]
B
No, me neither.
- [14:35]
C
See the reality of the thing.
- [14:38]
A
Unless you say to me, imagine an A level drawing of an apple. And then I would see, like a shaded graphite apple. Yeah, but what about the thing, you know, when people. There's funny idioms and things people say. Like. Like finding a needle in a haystack. I have the thing where I will see a haystack and someone finding a needle and I'm like, that's funny. It means looking for something that's tricky to find. But recently somebody was saying, it's not normal to do that. Like, it's not normal to actually literally see the thing.
- [15:06]
B
I see it maybe because we're visual people.
- [15:08]
A
That's what I was thinking. Maybe. Maybe it's a visual thinker problem because I'm. I have to, like, see the funny visual and a bit. Oh, yeah, but that means that. Yeah, it doesn't literally mean.
- [15:18]
C
My favorite one is they say they see that Japanese people, when they hear Western speakers, say, bear with me from, you know, receptionist at a company. Imagine a giant bear with his arm round the receptionist.
- [15:31]
A
That's why it's taking a long time, because there's a bear with their headphones
- [15:35]
C
on at the same time. You know, I think I'm probably. I'm sure lots of people must think of it that way.
- [15:39]
A
Like, let's not beat around the bush, like somebody's whacking their bush.
- [15:42]
B
I know I heard somebody the other day say that for most of their life, they thought a handbag was a ham bag.
- [15:51]
A
Amazing.
- [15:53]
C
I think it really relates to music as well in that thing that I could play a few instruments when I was younger, but I could only play from the sheet music. I could never set myself free and play by ear or compose. Maybe I could compose a bit, but I didn't really bother to try. And I think composing is creating something from your imagination, isn't it? So if that was drawing, that's the comparable version. The other Midway version is, you know, maybe a teenager with a guitar and knowledge of three chords and a favorite song that they try to replicate. So they're playing by ear. And a lot of those people, like my husband said I could never read music. I can now, but for 20 years I played guitar and piano, and with no knowledge of sheet music or the ability to read music, I was like. But used to play all these Amazing things. And that was just by ear. It really relates so closely to drawing, doesn't it? Whether you can be set free with no reference to draw from, and you're just drawing from the memory in your head. But Aphantasia is sensory, isn't it? There's taste, hearing. Yeah.
- [16:56]
A
They talk about smells as well.
- [16:58]
C
Yeah, that. It covers all of those. I can't remember what things smell like.
- [17:02]
B
Oh, I can. Oh, yeah, yeah. Bread, freshly baked bread, coffee.
- [17:07]
A
Or even when it's, you know, it's just rained. What's that called? Petrich.
- [17:10]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [17:10]
A
It's a good smell.
- [17:11]
B
Yeah.
- [17:12]
C
Am I supposed to smell it or do you know? I can't smell it, but I can think of how it is.
- [17:17]
A
Well, like barbecue smell, you know, when you've got smoke in your hair and all.
- [17:20]
B
See, that's when I want to get in your brain, because maybe I'm just thinking of what the smell is, but I can.
- [17:26]
C
Yes.
- [17:27]
B
I just want to get in there and see what you mean. What do you mean?
- [17:30]
A
I feel like I could definitely conjure up smell.
- [17:31]
B
Smells. Yeah. I think I can. I mean, I can't literally smell coffee when I think of it, but I. I know. Yeah. Maybe I can smell it when I think of it. Yeah.
- [17:41]
A
Oh, there's that thing, like if you think of a lemon and think about biting a lemon and your mouth starts watering.
- [17:46]
C
I'm gonna go later, try and conduct that. That experiment. And then it's getting close to synesthesia as well, isn't it?
- [17:53]
B
I think I had that when I was a child.
- [17:55]
C
Yeah.
- [17:56]
A
What?
- [17:56]
B
Wow. Everybody I knew had a color or I knew what day of the week they were.
- [18:01]
A
Oh, that. Yeah. That's a thing, isn't it?
- [18:03]
B
Yeah, I had that as a child.
- [18:04]
C
And words had color.
- [18:06]
B
Yeah.
- [18:07]
C
And sounds had type of lines and patterns and textures and numbers.
- [18:11]
A
Thursday is friendly.
- [18:13]
B
Yeah. What do you think?
- [18:15]
C
Is that? Because that's a good party night as a student.
- [18:18]
A
No, it's just a good sounding word.
- [18:20]
B
Friday is navy blue. Friday is navy blue. My granddad was mustard.
- [18:25]
C
I remember really feeling all those rational adult life, I think, washes a lot of that away again, like having the memory of the monster under the bed and the ability to have synesthesic thinking. Marion Duchar always tells me she has synesthesia. She still has it quite strongly.
- [18:42]
B
Oh, does she?
- [18:42]
C
Yeah, I think. Will you tell us somehow whether. I don't know, make it.
- [18:48]
A
Make an Instagram post about it, because everybody will be interested. But tag us so we can read it if you've got synesthesia or Elephantasia
- [18:54]
B
or
- [18:58]
C
it's just, you know, the creativity that comes out of all the neurodiversity of our brains. And I think initially, if you have Aphantasia, you think, well, that's it. How can I be a visual creative person? But there are so many. There's an entire community of Aphantasia creatives. If you look online and the work is really interesting and it isn't a closed door to creativity at all. It's actually a different way of bringing things about, a really interesting way. Where do you think you are on the spectrum of Fantasia on a 0 to 10? Is 1010's shiny red apple eidetic memory.
- [19:38]
B
Oh, maybe 7. I don't know because I can't get in the brain of a 0 or a 10, but I don't think I'm a 10. Maybe because I do need some visual reference for stuff. So maybe a seven. Don't know.
- [19:54]
C
You know your childhood memories. Floating dog, ghost in the Glasgow block of flats. You'd have to go on Helen's childhood memories.
- [20:01]
B
Oh, yeah, that. That was. That's actually not. The floating wolves were a dream, recurring dream. But the brief, that was actually a brief for somebody else's text and it was a block of flats. So I set it in those Red Road flats in Glasgow that I'd visited the loads of times when I was at art school because I had friends who lived in there. But I did have to Google searches of the interiors of the Red Road flats.
- [20:25]
C
Yeah.
- [20:25]
B
And I also did some drawings of wolves from memory because I'd drawn wolves in real life in the past. And then. Oh, then I had to look at that really brilliant drawing by the famous woman patient of Freud who saw wolves in a tree. Do you remember that? There's all these white wolves floating in a tree. A very famous patient of Freud. And which is really weird because my dream was white wolves as well. So I kind of kept looking at that and remembering wolves and Googled wolves. So it was a mixture of a dream, emotions, memory, Google search.
- [21:08]
C
And what did we do without Google before? I just.
- [21:10]
B
Yeah. Oh, I kept loads of books. Did you used to buy. I used to buy loads of Brilliant Inside 1940s and 1950s books of black and white photos and I used to just store them all on my shelves as reference in case I needed to draw a child or I used to look specifically for pictures of children, photographs of children in books. Yeah.
- [21:31]
C
I remember photocopying loads and loads of stuff. I'd have those Big box files with tons of random pictures I couldn't organize. It could be fireworks or a stripper or, you know, or a dog or just a weird photo of a room or a space that had a strange atmosphere. And then. Yeah, the books are time life books.
- [21:49]
B
Yeah.
- [21:49]
C
Which had all those very kind of concrete images of countryside or.
- [21:54]
A
So you had to make your own Google images.
- [21:56]
B
Yeah. You had to have a stash or try and draw from memory more.
- [22:00]
A
Would you get a commission bit? Sorry, I can't draw that. I haven't got a book.
- [22:03]
B
No. Really? Really? Yeah. There's loads of books I turned down because, like. Well, I don't know how to draw that. I can't imagine how to get into it. Some. Some of my memory drawings are literal memories, though. So the one in the 1980s, red and white heart bedroom is entirely from memory. No reference. Because I just that that room was my favorite bedroom and I loved it and I remember every inch of it. So that was entirely memory.
- [22:30]
C
There must be certain ages where your kind of tabula raza of a child is cleared away. No more monsters under the bed. You're about 12 and you think you're on the cusp of adulthood. But actually I'm no longer a child. This is my bedroom. Because I remember a really similar thing. Being in a bedroom, watching those holy. You know, when the. The clouds have sunlight coming through it.
- [22:53]
B
Jesus is coming down.
- [22:54]
C
Jesus is coming down. Religion might be what. You just have a religious feeling about the whole thing. And then I remember playing reggae on my stereo and I still play reggae all the time. I was like, this is it. Jesus is coming reggae and my own bedroom. I am here living the dream. And it's super vivid. I think that's the adolescence essence memory, which is a different kind of memory where things are embedded in you once again, even more strongly like a child. But the next version, I think my
- [23:26]
A
version of that is getting my first big girl bedroom, where I got to choose. I chose lime green walls, like bright lime green. And I had a dark blue stencil to do blue flowers around it. It was amazing. And I had my PlayStation and butterscotch flavor Polos, which I don't know, no exist anymore. And I was playing Tomb Raider and I had big boy friends that had twins and I used to get their clothes hand me down. So I was wearing one of their T shirts playing Lara Croft. Amazing.
- [23:53]
C
Can you picture it in your head now?
- [23:55]
A
Yeah, really clearly. And I was allowed a computer in my bedroom as well. It didn't have the Internet on it. But it had a program called Sound Blaster 16, where it was so high tech you could type into it and it would speak. So I wrote my own radio program, Hours of Fun Hours.
- [24:11]
B
Could you draw it?
- [24:13]
C
Probably.
- [24:13]
A
Yeah, definitely.
- [24:14]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [24:14]
A
It was a weird shaped room. It was cool.
- [24:17]
C
But this is like techy Katie Mark 1. Now I see where you came from. Even techie. At what age? 13.
- [24:24]
A
That would be 12, maybe. That'd be. I don't even. Yeah, 11 or 12.
- [24:29]
C
Wow.
- [24:30]
A
It's good times. But it's funny when you think of, like, the taste of the sweetie, the smell of the new paint, the glow of the lime green walls.
- [24:40]
B
It must work for touch as well, mustn't it? It's touch part of the fantasia.
- [24:45]
C
Yeah, I think they said. Yeah. Like stroking a really soft cat or a memory of a border terrier's bristly hair. Yeah, it's so interesting. And I think that connection between what is in our head because we talk a lot about how you take what's in your head or your mind or you want what you want to draw. We talk about the technical implementation. How do you paint it? You're a digital artist. How do you visualize it? Is your technical skill where you want it to be, to create the kind of images that you have in your mind? And that seems to be the larger part of teaching. Create creatively or visually. But the bit that's in your head is really interesting. We rarely talk about that. Like, where is it coming from? Is it coming from an intellectual decision or a mind picture?
- [25:28]
B
Yeah, it's funny because I think you just. You just assume everybody else sees the world like you, and that's.
- [25:33]
C
Yeah, that's so.
- [25:35]
B
It's not wrong.
- [25:36]
A
But I wonder that about even having an artistic eye and looking at things, because sometimes like. Like a website design or something, you'll see and you'll be like, why haven't they fixed that? Or like, that looks terrible. How can't they see that? But some people, part of it's, you just don't know. Or some people just don't have the eye to see that something looks terrible. Or maybe it looks good to them. Unless it's so confusing. Are we seeing colors the same as well?
- [25:59]
C
Totally. We could go on forever, couldn't we?
- [26:04]
B
Yeah.
- [26:05]
A
But do tell us how you see things.
- [26:07]
B
Yeah, I'd really like to hear. If you'd like, allow me access to your brain. That would be great.
- [26:11]
A
Just step in through the ear hole, have a little look.
- [26:16]
C
Maybe at night, try visualizing Some things I'm gonna start doing nightly visualization to do like a mind gym exercise.
- [26:26]
A
What were those books? Was it Tony Buzan, the memory exercises? Oh yeah, Mum used to get them. And it was like, how memorize 150 things and you would like link the things together.
- [26:36]
B
So if you needed to remember a shopping list, it would be like the. You'd imagine like a packet of onions, but they have to be on your head in a funny place. So you'd remember. So onions. And say the next thing on the list was milk. Then you might imagine somebody just pouring the milk over the onions. So it led to a story. So you'd have a story. You put the onions on your head, pour the milk over them, tips the sugar down your jumper. I don't know. And that helped. That helped you remember a big long list of things because you used the storytelling bit of your brain rather than a really emotionless list.
- [27:09]
A
I wonder if that is not good for Aphantasia because it was so visual in the mind. It was like. You just go into your brain and be like, okay, what's this thing I made?
- [27:18]
B
But maybe you can hold a story in him.
- [27:20]
A
God, I don't know.
- [27:23]
C
I'm like, why on earth didn't they write a flipping list story?
- [27:29]
A
Nowadays you just do a voice note and be like, turn that into a list, please.
- [27:31]
C
Yeah.
- [27:32]
B
It was for people wanted to win competitions where you had to remember everything. You know, like people would compete over who could remember a whole pack of cards. In what? In that order? Did they?
- [27:41]
A
Yeah, but that was a thing.
- [27:42]
B
Yeah, I think so.
- [27:43]
A
Oh, and the Generation Game. Quivering Bloke Bridge.
- [27:47]
C
Helen Kell, My famous art teacher, Binny Matthews. She used to. I say famous because I. She taught me lots over two years. There were so many weird things I look back on now that really had an impact. And when we were in sixth form painting, she used to do that tray thing where you have a tray full
- [28:02]
B
of things and put the velvet useful for that.
- [28:05]
C
And you have to feel it. And then even if you don't know what the object was, and you probably didn't know what the object was, you'd have to go and draw it purely from the physical sensation. Wow. This could be Art club.
- [28:15]
B
Oh, let's do that at art club.
- [28:17]
A
Let's do Elephantasia Art Club. But you're not allowed to look at
- [28:20]
B
it or you touch it. I don't know.
- [28:22]
A
It's not discrimination against the advantage. Touching things under.
- [28:28]
B
I like that idea.
- [28:29]
C
You'd have to get someone else to prepare the objects. Yeah.
- [28:33]
A
Otherwise it'd be cheating.
- [28:34]
C
You don't need to know.
- [28:35]
B
So what we usually do is blind art club is you put the drawing under a box but you can see the object. But this is going to be the other way around. You can't see the object. You can touch it but you can't. But you can see. See you drawing. I really want you to try that.
- [28:52]
C
Get your significant. What do they call them? Your significant other in your life to create a tray of strange things for you.
- [28:59]
B
That would be so good.
- [29:00]
C
And at the end you post the drawings and the reveal.
- [29:03]
A
The big reveal. Yeah. What have I been drawing?
- [29:05]
B
I think we should deliver a tray of things to each other with a towel over.
- [29:09]
C
Yeah.
- [29:11]
B
It would be so much fun.
- [29:12]
C
Thank you.
- [29:16]
A
Okay, I'll see you at art club.
- [29:17]
C
Yeah. Okay. Bye for now.
- [29:19]
B
Bye. Bye.