What kinds of visual distortions would you see near a black hole?

There are lots of them, but you would have to get right up close to the event horizon to really see them in your vicinity. On the largest scales, they cause various degrees of gravitational lensing so that the images of distant objects seen near a black holes outer edge would get distorted into rings. If you were looking at things emitting light near a black hole, they would be distorted like a view in a funhouse mirror as the light rays from various parts of the objects take different routes to your eye.

There are so many possibilities for the kinds of distortions that it is rather hard to describe them all. You might look at the pages at CASA.Colorado.edu to get a better idea. The above view is of gravitational lensing in a cluster of galaxies, but the arc-like distortions of background galaxy images are probably similar to what you would see near a black hole for background star images.

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