Comment on Stolen lives by katiousa15

It's sometimes difficult for an artist to see their own work objectively; you had a specific thought-process in your mind while you were painting this, so you will tend to approach/view it in a certain way, whereas an outsider will come to your art without preconceived ideas and will have to work to understand it. That attempt to understand is where one sees things that may be unintended. The outsider also brings preconceived ideas with them as a part of their background experience, which skews their analysis.

I liken it to a "Lateral Thinking" process en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_…. It's like a mix of logical thinking, and free-association. If we use a painting as an example, one would examine the work "as a whole" and "in part", looking a each element at a purely objective, "physical" level. This is the "what do you see" portion of your analysis. Then you move into the free-association phase where you try to understand what it means, or what it makes you feel. Here, you take the physical observations and think of all the different things that they suggest to you, no matter how absurd they may seem at first. By keeping an open mind about meaning, we allow our brains to make connections between two completely different things.

It can also be associated to Surrealist techniques of thought en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Surrea… The key point here is that one should "Question everything, taking Nothing for granted. Challenging the Status Quo in ALL areas." By avoiding automatic assumptions about what is meant we can build a larger pool of meaning to select from.

I hope that helps explain my "miraculous" ability a bit. It's really something that anyone can do and improve at.