An essay on perception, between creatures, machines, and the bodies that carry us into a room.
There was a time when I believed clarity in art meant universality. That if the intention behind a painting was clear, everyone in the room would fall into roughly the same emotional terrain. Life has since taught me otherwise.
I think back to my old living room, which doubled as my first atelier. A canvas propped on a folding chair. My partner pausing with a cup of coffee. One of my kids drifting past on the way to the fridge. Louie the dog sniffing a paint drip with mild suspicion. And me, squinting left, then right, nudging a shadow into existence.
Four beings. One rectangle. Four different worlds.
It is tempting to believe one of those versions is the correct one. But that assumes such a picture exists. In truth, each of us stands inside a private landscape built from mood, memory, biology, and the peculiarities of our senses. What you see is never just what is there. It is what is there, filtered through your history, your sense of safety, your nervous system, your cultural baggage, your algorithms, your expectations. We rarely pause to consider any of that. We react, as if the canvas or the feed explains itself.
Other Eyes began there, as a slow realisation that what we see is rarely the same thing, even when we are looking at the same thing. Art, for me, has become a place to unravel that illusion, gently, without theatrics. This essay is the doorway into it. What follows is a tour through the eyes I have lived alongside: my own, then a dog’s, a cat’s, the nervous system that travels with all of us, and finally the machines that now stand between every picture and the person who sees it.
What I do not see
My own vision is the easiest entry point, because it forced the question on me early. I am deutan colourblind: my reds run hot, my greens go muted, and the mid-tones collapse into the same muddy pool, so I learned to lean on what my eyes can trust, high value contrast, clear light direction, architecture over chroma. That is the foundation the whole practice is built on, and it has its own full account in how a colourblind artist sees colour. What matters here is where it led: once I accepted that my world could differ this much from yours, something larger opened up. No two people, even those with normal vision, are ever seeing the same thing. There is no default human vision. Only defaults we mistake for truth. That insight became the seed for everything that follows.
What Louie sees
When Louie wanders into the atelier, he does not arrive as a critic or a spectator. He arrives as himself: a creature built to smell first, hear second, and see last. His eyes are not tuned for colour or subtle transitions. They are tuned for survival, movement, proximity, and the plain arithmetic of value and shadow.
Dogs see a narrow spectrum, a washed-out world of blues and yellows. Reds collapse. Oranges pale out. Greens drift into a muted zone that barely separates from brown. The boldest colour I could possibly push often becomes, to him, a mid-value smudge. And yet he still responds. Not to the colour, but to the weight of the composition, the contrast between shapes, the emotional temperature implied by structure, the direction of light, the rhythm of the piece. Dogs remind me that perception is not only a matter of hue. It is also a matter of hierarchy.
If Louie ever did sit and study a new work, he would stare at the centre, then turn toward an area of high contrast, then to me, asking what I want him to see. High contrast reads as information. Low contrast reads as background. So Louie and I share something. We both navigate the world primarily through value, not colour. My deutan vision flattens greens and collapses the mid-tones. His dichromatic vision flattens reds and collapses much of the spectrum beyond them. In an odd, slightly comical way, we meet in the middle. Two sets of imperfect eyes hypothetically squinting at the same rectangle for different reasons.
That overlap is useful to me. Show a dog a painting with violent chroma and nothing happens. You can saturate a field until it hums, and the dog sees a light thing or a dark thing. It is humbling in a way I appreciate, because it forces a question: what remains of my work when colour evaporates? If contrast is the backbone of the practice, Louie is a mirror to that backbone. He shows me what happens when all the sunshine is turned down and only the structure is left. If the piece still reads, still carries emotional weight, then the work has a spine. If it collapses, the colour was carrying more than it should. I wish Louie would talk to me about my art more often.
What a cat reads
If Louie teaches me about value and hierarchy, cats teach me about restraint. A cat does not rush toward anything. It moves through a room like a soft question mark, pausing, listening, absorbing. Cats are built for dusk and for thresholds, that half-world where outlines float and colours slip into shadow. Showing a painting to a cat is like showing it to the night itself.
A cat’s eyes are designed for dim light. Not metaphorically. Their pupils expand into black moons, their retinas hold more rods than cones, and their world is tuned for motion over hue, faint edges over saturated fields, the softest flicker over the brightest colour. What many of us would call mood lighting, a cat would simply call daylight. Place one of my works under that blue-grey horizon where the sun has stepped out of the room, and the painting becomes something else. Colours soften. Boundaries sharpen. The piece is stripped to its bones.
Cats ignore bold colour almost entirely. They track edges, symmetry, implied movement, contrasting silhouettes, the direction of light hiding under the surface. A cat is not evaluating harmony. It is reading the scaffolding of light and shadow that holds the scene together, which makes cats, unintentionally, excellent readers of composition. Where most people read the emotional temperature of my work in the chroma, a cat reads it in the weight of a shadow, the sharpness of a line, the stillness inside the frame.
They read stillness differently too. Even in a static image, a cat reacts to directional composition, diagonal tension, the sense of something about to occur. A cat looking at one of my Lonescapes, a staircase disappearing upward, is not responding to the colours. It is responding to the pause, the suspended moment before the next step. Cats live at the threshold of action. So do many of my pieces.
There is something disarming about watching a creature ignore the parts of your work you thought were essential. A saturated field, a warm orange glow, none of it registers. But place the piece under low light, and the emotional structure stands naked. If it still holds, still creates a feeling, the composition carries more than its colour. If it collapses, I built on chromatic scaffolding rather than emotional architecture. Cats expose this instantly. In their eyes my paintings become sharper, more architectural, more about the ghost of an idea than its surface. Before there is meaning, there is attention. And before attention, there is stillness. A cat reads a painting’s silence, not its noise.
The nervous system as an eye
Long before your eyes register colour, shape, or contrast, something else has already taken hold: your nervous system. It sits beneath perception like an invisible lens, deciding what enters with clarity and what arrives distorted. It is not an observer. It is a participant. It colours the picture before the picture even appears.
We like to imagine seeing as a clean optical event: light hits the eye, the brain interprets it, a picture forms. Inside the body it does not go that way. The sequence is closer to a series of questions. Is this safe? Is this familiar? Does this confirm what I expect? Only then, what am I looking at? The nervous system is a guard standing between you and the world, and like all guards it decides what gets through. A calm body sees one picture. A threatened body sees another. A grieving body, a burnt-out body, an overstimulated body, each generates its own reality.
Stand in front of a painting after an argument, and you notice tension. Stand there after a long walk, and you notice space. Stand there during grief, and the whole scene seems heavier, almost paused. The image has not changed. Your nervous system has. Fear sharpens shadows. Anxiety narrows contrast. Hope expands the scene. Exhaustion flattens detail. Safety widens the field of view. These shifts are not symbolic. They are physiological. A nervous system in defence mode literally reduces the bandwidth of what you can perceive. You miss softness. You miss humour. You miss nuance. The world collapses into what you are capable of surviving. This is not a flaw. It is an ancient inheritance.
When I look at art now, mine or someone else’s, I am aware that I am not only seeing with my eyes. I am seeing with the memory of being colourblind, the residue of old deadlines, the rhythms of a body that once lived in burnout, the calm of a morning without urgency, the small storms carried over from yesterday. The nervous system looks through me. It highlights one corner of the picture and erases another. Two people with identical vision hardware can still see radically different worlds, simply because their internal weather differs.
So when someone stands in front of one of my pieces, I no longer assume they are seeing what I intended. I assume their nervous system is co-authoring the moment. A piece is never just a picture. It is a negotiation between the work, the eyes, the biology, the memory, and the state of the body that arrived to see it. Once you recognise this, disagreements in art and in life begin to make a surprising kind of sense. People are not arguing about the same picture. They are arguing from different internal states. The artwork does not change. The viewer does. And so the picture shifts.
Machine eyes
Then there are eyes with no heartbeat at all. A surprising amount of what we see in the modern world has already passed through eyes that are not alive: eyes without pulse, memory, instinct, or fear. They have no intention and no history, and yet they shape our pictures long before we encounter them.
My practice is full of these mechanical observers. A high-end printer that lays pigment as microscopic constellations. Generative AI that recombines shapes and fragments from my older work. Cameras and phones that compress, shift, or flatten colour depending on their sensors. Screens that decide brightness, contrast, and temperature on your behalf. None of them know what they are seeing. The irony is that eyes without emotion end up affecting us emotionally. A machine does not know what loneliness looks like, but it can rearrange my strokes in a way that changes how you feel when you see them.
The printer was the first machine eye I learned to trust. It places pigment in tiny, deliberate dots, a kind of industrial pointillism. Where a brush blends, the printer separates. Where my colourblindness collapses hues, the printer creates chromatic vibration. It treats colour as physics, not intuition. A soft gradient becomes a field of particles. A shadow becomes a constellation of cool dots. An orange becomes a chorus instead of a block. It produces effects my brushes could never achieve, and reveals harmony in places I assumed were chaotic. The machine becomes a collaborator. Not creative, but clarifying.
AI is often described as having an eye. This is a misunderstanding. AI has no eyes. It does not see, it does not feel, it does not know. What it can do is detect patterns, almost disturbingly fast and entirely indifferent. When I feed it my own paintings, sketches, and fragments, it rearranges them with no emotional agenda. It finds relationships I buried. It surfaces shapes I abandoned. It brings forward echoes I would not have noticed for another decade, and sometimes it shows me what I kept trying to paint without realising it. This is not creativity. It is recognition without consciousness, a mirror with no memory. But even a blind mirror can reveal something unexpected when you look into it.
And before a painting ever reaches you, a whole chain of machines has already had its turn. A camera interprets it. A file compresses it. A platform resizes it. A phone screen alters the colour temperature. An algorithm decides whether it is shown at all. By the time you stand in front of the work, or scroll past it, you are not seeing what I made. You are seeing my work through the camera’s eye, through the file’s compression, through the feed’s priorities, and through your own nervous system and the state you are in. The original image is a ghost by then, an approximation that existed for a moment and then dispersed into the pipeline. This is not a loss. It is just what seeing has become.
Dogs and cats show us biological variation. The nervous system shows us emotional variation. Machine eyes show us systemic variation, the invisible infrastructure shaping perception in the digital world. Humans argue about the real image. Machines prove no such thing exists.
Look again
The instability of all this could be discouraging. If no one sees the same thing, why paint at all? For me, that is the answer rather than the problem. The atelier becomes a laboratory for perception, a place to ask how a piece reads to someone overwhelmed by colour, what happens under different suns and filters, how far I can strip a thing back before the feeling disappears. I move between acrylic, pigment transfers, collage, generative AI, and printing, looping through mediums until the work reveals its own logic. Underneath all of it, one question stays: what are you seeing, and what are you bringing to it? Most of the time it starts with, what would happen if.
This is why Other Eyes exists. Not as a series of different eyes looking at art, though that is the entry point, but as an extended conversation about perception, between creatures, machines, nervous systems, and histories. It is not meant to conclude anything. It is an invitation to look again.
We do not see the same. We never did. For me, that is not a flaw to correct, but a space in which art, dialogue, and perhaps even a bit of solace can happen.
Thanks for being here,
Kalle