Vein with a View: When the Image Looks Back

You know that feeling when you stare at an abstract work and it suddenly stares back at you?

That’s exactly what happened with Vein with a View.

When this image first appeared on my screen, I didn’t immediately think “artwork.” I thought: What on earth is this? I could see a funny cartoon character – a slightly ridiculous “Snoz” – but at the same time I felt I’d slipped inside the body, travelling through blood vessels.

The red field became plasma.
The soft vertical shadows became the interior walls of a vein.
The silver curve turned into a needle.

And then there were the dark hollows. They refused to stay as simple shapes. The more I looked, the more they became eyes – small, watchful presences looking out from somewhere deep inside.

I realised I was having one of those classic moments of pareidolia: the mind searching for meaning in abstraction, finding faces and figures where none were intended. It’s something that happens to many viewers with my water reflection work, but this time I was the one caught in it.

Rather than force a title onto the piece, I decided to treat this as an experiment. I wrote a description of everything I was seeing and feeling and sent it to ChatGPT:

“When I look at this I see a funny comic character, the Snoz, perhaps blood vessels, perhaps the interior of a vein, maybe a needle passing into the vein. There appear to be eyes looking at me from deep inside those black hollows through red plasma… I am not sure what I am seeing or what I should call this artwork.”

ChatGPT came back almost instantly with a title:

Vein with a View.

As soon as I read it, I felt my shoulders drop. That was it. The artwork had named itself.

I typed back, “Vein with a View breathes life into the artwork.” The AI replied that the title suddenly made those dark hollows feel like witnesses rather than shapes, and the silver line like a passageway through the image.

What I love about this exchange is that it reflects something I’ve always believed: sometimes the work knows more than the artist. The photographer in me captured a reflection on water. My subconscious turned it into a comic character in a vein. Then the AI helped me language that intuition and give it a form that others could enter.

In that sense, Vein with a View isn’t just an image of a possible interior. It’s also a record of a conversation – between perception and imagination, between artist and machine. The artwork shows how Klee’s idea still rings true today:

“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

In this case, what becomes visible is the strange feeling that the body – or perhaps the image itself – might be quietly observing us in return.

When you stand in front of Vein with a View, I invite you to notice the moment your mind starts to make sense of it. Do you see a cartoon? A vein? A needle? Eyes? Something else entirely?

Whatever appears, that’s your own “view” emerging inside the vein – a reminder that seeing is not just a physical act but a deeply creative one.