A grandmother visited FAA/Sweden a few years ago. She walked through the studios, peering at the work.

“So you teach them to paint so you can see what it is.”

That’s the best description of what we do that I have ever heard.

Now, I’m happy to talk at length about the history of the realist tradition: the Riace bronzes, the Fayum portraits, the Renaissance, the atelier methods of the late nineteenth century, and what they mean for those of us practising today. But she put it better. Paintings where you see what it is.

Her summary holds a paradox: creating work that needs no prior knowledge to be felt, yet continues to evolve inside the viewer, demands enormous training. Thousands of hours. Repetition close to the musician’s or the dancer’s. Discipline that eventually becomes instinct. But I think her observation describes something more than a paradox. It points to a distinct knowledge system.

Visual art does not communicate the way text does. Text is sequential: word follows word, meaning built in one direction. An image gives everything at once. It has no before and after. The eye moves freely, lingers where it wants. Light, form, colour, space and feeling exist in the same moment. That makes an image a different kind of thinking, fundamentally unlike the discursive, the conceptual, the verbal. Of course a painting can carry meaning, but its real superpower is what it does to the person standing in front of it.

Realist painting sharpens that point. A work whose strength lies in the linguistic domain invites interpretation, the reading of references. A work that renders what the eye actually sees offers something else. It takes the viewer directly into the act of seeing: light falling across a cheek, a hand resting against fabric. The painting does something to you. Or it doesn’t. No code to decipher.

Making such a painting requires a peculiar kind of work. Part of the process is strictly linear: simplify form, establish values, modelling. That part can be taught as method. But what elevates a painting beyond the visually convincing — what gives it presence, interior movement — arises in a different mode. A non-linear one, though I prefer to think of it as concentric: oscillating between the whole and the detail, between intuition and intention, in an order that cannot be planned in advance.

You can see it at the coffee machine at the end of the day. Someone who has spent more than two hours in that mode needs a moment before they can speak in a cohesive manner, as though the language center has been paused. I am convinced that this is the main reason people paint this way: the state is addictive. There is a need to think, to be, non-linear.

The pattern is not unique to painting. The dancer rehearses positions for years — monotonously, repetitively, in a way that looks almost mechanical. The cellist plays scales until the fingers know what the mind cannot formulate quickly enough. Every form of knowledge that operates beyond language seems to require this kind of long, bodily, apparently tedious training. This is not coincidental. It says something about the nature of knowledge itself: wordless skill cannot be lectured into existence. It cannot be summarised or shortened. It has to pass through the body, through repetition, through time.

In 1962, the psychologist Sarnoff Mednick published a study that sheds some light on why. Grossly simplified, Mednick described creativity as the capacity to connect remote associations, and investigated how that capacity varies. He found that people can be placed along a scale based on how they use what he calls associative hierarchies, from steep to flat. A steep hierarchy produces fast, predictable responses: table calls up chair, and the chain stops. A flat hierarchy moves more slowly but further, out toward connections that are not obvious, and it is among these remote links that creative solutions tend to emerge.

What makes Mednick especially relevant here is that he also identified a dimension between visualisers and verbalisers. The visualiser calls up sensory images: forms, light, spatial relationships rather than words, and navigates through them toward associations the verbal chain can never reach. That, I would argue, is a description of precisely what long atelier training cultivates: an ever richer field of visual connections, a capacity to perceive relationships that language cannot render.

Which is what is so striking about the grandmother’s observation. An artform essentially born in non-linear thinking, requiring nothing of the viewer in advance, in constant motion inside whoever stands before it. But also an artform that carries time. To train this way is to join those who came before — to receive an accumulated body of knowledge and add your own seeing to it. Centuries of wordless skill, passed from body to body, from eye to eye, alongside and often beyond what could be put into words.

And yet, all it takes to appreciate such a painting is to stand in front of it.
You can see what it is.

Reference: Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232.