--- title: "Art Is a Way of Knowing" description: "Pat B. Allen makes image-making a practice of direct self-knowledge organized by intention, attention, and witness, while resisting both art-market judgment and professional interpretation." author: "Pat B. Allen" year: 1995 shelf: the-body purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Pat+B+Allen+Art+Is+a+Way+of+Knowing" content_type: book-commentary related: - moon-art-and-soul - cobb-ecology-imagination-childhood - mccarthy-speaking-unspeakable collections: ["art-voice-and-imagination"] key_takeaways: - "Allen treats image-making as direct participation in self-knowledge, not as a product to be judged by the art market or data to be interpreted by a professional." - "Her practical method rests on three linked acts: form an intention, give sustained attention to what appears, and provide a witness without demanding one final meaning." - "Insight is not identical with change: living with an image can reorganize experience before the maker can explain it, and later images can revise what an earlier one seemed to mean." references: - "Allen, Pat B. Art Is a Way of Knowing. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995. ISBN 978-1-57062-078-2 (paperback); eISBN 978-0-8348-2326-6." glossary_terms: - imagination - active-imagination - soul - projection - archetype scholar_prompts: - "How does Allen's claim that attention transforms differ from the claim that interpretation produces insight?" - "What safeguards are needed when a solitary spiritual practice of image-making encounters traumatic memory, intense fear, or destabilizing imagery?" - "Can image-making remain direct knowledge once it is situated in a class, clinic, online community, or art market?" seo_title: "Art Is a Way of Knowing by Pat B. Allen — Image Practice" seo_description: "Commentary on Pat B. Allen's practical philosophy of image-making: intention, attention, witness, active imagination, and knowledge beyond interpretation." last_updated: 2026-08-28 --- **Knowledge made with the hands** Pat B. Allen’s title is an epistemological claim disguised as an invitation. Image-making does not merely illustrate something already known in words. The struggle with paper, pigment, clay, memory, bodily sensation, and resistance produces knowledge that did not exist in that form before the work began. Allen writes from more than twenty years of keeping a record of her inner life in images and words, and this autobiographical location is essential. Although trained and employed as an art therapist, she is not primarily reporting treatment conducted on other people. She offers the methods and consequences of submitting her own life to sustained image practice. That choice separates the book from both a clinical manual and a creativity guide. Allen is not teaching readers how to make successful artworks. She often prefers *image* and *image-making* to *art* because “art” arrives burdened with distinctions between good and bad, high and low, amateur and professional. An image needs no exhibition, sale, frame, or public identity as an artist. Its standard is more intimate: whether the marks feel true to what is asking for form. **A refusal of professional ownership** Allen’s history of art therapy is affectionate and adversarial. She honors pioneers who made space for institutionalized children, psychiatric patients, and people consigned to hospital back wards. Yet she argues that the field’s increasing alliance with mental-health professionalism risks turning art into one more treatment modality with prescribed outcomes and predetermined meanings. In that arrangement, a trained interpreter becomes the owner of significance while the maker supplies clinical data. The art world provides no refuge. Allen describes modernist alienation, the market’s division of labor among critics, curators, dealers, and collectors, and a culture in which ordinary people increasingly consume rather than make the forms that mark birth, death, work, celebration, and grief. Her alternative is participatory rather than anti-professional: restore the maker’s authority and recover art’s capacity to join personal uniqueness with connection to other people. This is why the book moves constantly between private studio practice and collaborative forms. Direct knowledge does not require an intermediary, but it does need conditions in which it can be made and received. **Intention, attention, witness** The book’s twenty-five “Knowing” chapters range from drawing, painting, and sculpture through obstacles, work, soul, grief, projection, collaboration, transformation, and fear. Beneath that range is a remarkably stable method. First, state an intention. It may be as broad as wanting to encounter paint or as focused as examining a relationship. Intention is not a demand that the image confirm a hypothesis; it gives the practice direction while leaving form open. Second, attend to what appears. Allen recommends looking, noticing bodily and emotional responses, and allowing the agitation of making to settle. An image may initially feel foreign, frightening, silly, or empty. Resistance is not an enemy to conquer. It is part of the information, and Allen repeatedly counsels patience rather than heroic penetration. The maker can journal, make a responding image, turn a scribble until a form appears, or simply remain with what cannot yet be explained. Third, witness. The maker is the first witness, but images also need trustworthy others who can receive a changing story without whitewashing or turning away. Witnessing is not the same as decoding. Allen insists that no image has one final meaning; later work changes the context in which an earlier image is known. This leads to one of her most useful distinctions: insight is not change. A correct explanation may precede transformation, but it neither guarantees nor exhausts it. Giving an image form and living with it can alter experience before conscious interpretation catches up. **The river beneath the professional life** Allen’s recurrent image for soul is a river running under everyday existence. The metaphor earns its place because the book shows her repeatedly losing and recovering access to it. As professional competence grows, her own art recedes. Work becomes talk, administration, training, and the management of other people’s processes. The result is burnout described not simply as overwork but as depletion: without a practice that replenishes her, the professional self becomes an empty success. Images then function as maps back to participation. Allen follows dreams, active imagination, figures from religious traditions, bodily poses, sculpture, and revision across years. A painting can refuse a frame; a figure’s static legs can be altered after she tries the posture in her own body; a frightening old woman can develop into a more complex image of destructive and regenerative power. The point is not the universal correctness of Allen’s symbolic readings. It is the serial method by which an image is tested across materials, dreams, movement, association, and time. Meaning remains mobile because the maker remains alive. **An accessible practice with real depth** The book’s democratic confidence—anyone willing to make a mark can begin—is one of its strengths. It also requires the caution Allen supplies from within her own practice. Images may restore feeling, but restored feeling includes grief, anger, fear, and the dismantling of cherished self-conceptions. She does not promise that art fixes or cures. She asks readers to honor resistance, proceed slowly, preserve ordinary supports, and trust embodied judgment about what is right at a given moment. Allen’s closest companion in this collection is Bruce Moon’s [*Art and Soul*](/library/the-body/moon-art-and-soul/), which shares her resistance to diagnostic interpretation but writes more directly from the therapist’s side of the studio. Dennis McCarthy’s [*Speaking about the Unspeakable*](/library/trauma-and-healing/mccarthy-speaking-unspeakable/) shows how witness and material encounter operate with children; Edith Cobb’s [*The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood*](/library/the-psyche/cobb-ecology-imagination-childhood/) places the capacity to make worlds inside a longer developmental relation between body and environment. Allen’s distinctive achievement is to leave the reader with a workable discipline: intention empowers, attention transforms, images revise one another, and no profession can substitute for making.