Art Appreciation & Books
Looking at art is first and foremost about making personal connections, no matter where you are
I love to visit galleries, but I believe that the rich experience of art appreciation can happen anywhere.
Some of the best ‘looking at art’ I’ve done has been in books. Making a personal connection is often easier, I find, flicking through the pages of a book than it is walking among the hallowed objects of a museum. A book’s pages are personal; their space is private and their contents somehow tamed, mitigated — in a way that art gallery exhibits can at times feel grand, even anointed.
The pages of a book — an art book especially, where the images are the main event — is a place to nestle and browse and occasionally settle, like a butterfly skimming over flowers.
The first art book I ever owned belonged to my father, who won it as a prize at school, making the item over 50 years old. The book has a mangled spine and bundles of loose pages to prove it.
My father passed it onto me when, at around the same age, I started to show an interest in art. The book is called Painting…
