The Art of Seeing:
Beyond the Surface
with Mary Attwood
Thursday 30th October 2025
7.00 – 8.00pm UK time via Zoom
£10
“Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient values, so that something new is discovered . . .”
Alfred North Whitehead
This session will be recorded.
This month’s The Art of Seeing will explore how a work of art can reach into the depths of soul and touch us in ways we often neglect to see and hear. The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead wrote extensively on the effects of art upon the human senses and soul, observing that;
“Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivd, but transient vlaues, so that something new is discovered . . . the permanent realisation of values extending beyond its former self.”
He emphasised the importance of not just resting on the surface of what we see, but of moving through and beyond it. This movement through a work of art has a reciprocal effect: as we engage more deeply with what we behold, we too journey into hidden regions of the psyche and imagination that might otherwise remain unseen, and as we do so, the work of art revealed to us alters.
In this session, we will focus on a single 17th-century painting. Through its seemingly ordinary, secular subject matter, we will consider how the everyday can invite us to look beyond the surface—and what such deeper seeing might awaken or recover within us.
This session offers a tripartite approach of theory, practice and reflection and you are encouraged to participate as much or as little as you wish.
To purchase a this session, please go to Mary’s website here.
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About Mary Attwood
Mary is an art historian, author, business creative and producer. She is co-founder and director of The Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, and co-founder and director of Channel McGilchrist. She holds a BA hons degree in the History of Art from UCL and Birkbeck, where she focused on late medieval and renaissance Art and Architeture. She holds an MA with distinction in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred from CCCU where she researched renaissance art and art’s effects in general on the viewer/ beholder. Taking as broad an epistemological approach as possible, she studied the meaning/s of art, specifically quattrocento Florentine Renaissance art, in the contexts of ancient Greek philosophy, the neuroscientific approach of McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, archetypal psychology and Renaissance artistic approaches.
Mary’s teaching and research seek to offer a renaissance of humane values through a broader understanding of art, not as an object to be analysed, but as a bridge between seemingly disparate ways of understanding the world and our place in it.
