Using the metaphoric story device of two tribes, one that builds their culture around words and the other which depends primarily on visual perception, this paper suggests a distinctive mental paradigm at work within the society of artists, who pursue visual literacy through graphic ideation. The author discusses his education in art and his discovery of "memes," the smallest recognizable pieces of information, and notes that holistic memes have given him a perception of the ethical values and biases of the tribe of the vision. Discussion then moves to the differences between the thinking of visual artists and those without artistic inclinations, as identified by neuropsychologists and psychologists. Artists, who are more aware of the abstract structures underlying visual perception, are better able to control and manipulate the viso-spatial abstract structure of their visions for communicative and creative purposes. Visual artists of acknowledged creativity have also been found to demonstrate much greater use of allusive--or loose categorical--thinking than non-artists. Research has suggested that the superimposition of separate entities and phenomena in the same space within the human brain is the triggering mechanism for creative thought, or homospatial thinking. Psychomorphology holds that the mind (psycho) and the world of visual forms (morphology) are intimately and integrally entwined. As illustrated in the author's abstract layered-form and shaped canvas paintings, flexibility and fluency are necessary to effectively develop effective visual stimuli; this design fluency has been identified with the right hemisphere of the brain. Visual literacy requires a deepening of visual understanding achieved through visual experience in addition to the word based study of human perception. (Contains 19 references.) (AEF)