Prospero's Island

Paintings by Carleton Palmer from previous series O/C 4' X 5'

Prospero’s Island is an ongoing series of paintings studying the above issues and others. Among recent concerns has been non-optical visualization, both its voluntary control and involuntary emergence.

Internally created visual percepts such as illusions, afterimages, imagery, and hallucinations are treated phenomenologically. A difference between the phenomenological and other treatments of the same material, such as in pictorial surrealism, is that while other treatments depict what is thought to have been seen, this artist attempts to create the phenomenon.

Some pieces make demands on the viewer to construct or reconstruct an image in such a way that thought is so provoked in the process of perception as to make evident processes of visual cognition

One current thread of these studies concerns cognitive control exercises which in the absence of optical events permit the silencing of imagery. Since the visual system is not silent the events that do appear have some interest in that they are not merely “snow” or “static” as one might expect of the carrier wave of an electronic information or communication system. An attempt is made to capture these phenomena pictorially.