Seven masterpieces of painting and seven practices of seeing to take into your daily life and enhance the beauty of your world.
Learn to see the beauty of the world through the eyes of its greatest painters
“Beauty will save the world.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Seeing as an Artist is written for students of art, art lovers, and, ultimately, anyone who wants to see a more beautiful and kinder world around them. It is about how to learn to see as a painter without actually painting. Beauty, as we all know, is in the eye of the beholder — in your eye, if you care to see it…
Just think about it for a moment: there is literally no beauty in the world but in the eye of the beholder; the very concept of beauty makes no sense whatsoever without a spectator. This means that one can learn to see more beauty, and this very act increases the beauty of the world.
The book condenses seven major lessons I have learned from my art studies, my own painting practice, and my whole life experience, into seven simple exercises, which will gradually shift and expand your sense of vision. These assignments — simple daily seeing practices — won’t take much of your time and can be easily integrated into the busiest of lives: just a minute or two here and there during the day. Every chapter starts with a link to the reproduction of a great painting on Google Art Project, with brief notes on what to zoom in to and what to pay attention to. We will be looking at these paintings not from the art-historical perspective, which tends to draw an impenetrable line between the realm of art and the realm of reality, but with an entirely different question in mind:
What do these artists show us that we can learn to see for ourselves in our daily life?
The exercise I suggest in each lesson will help you do exactly that — see and experience in the real world what the artist has shown us in their art. If you practice the new ways of seeing on a daily basis, you will witness for yourself how the world around you gradually becomes a much more beautiful and miraculous place to be.
If you are interested, please click the thumbnail to download the book. It is in E-pub format, compatible with most reading devices (alternatively, you can easily install an e-pub reader that would work with your browser).
P.S. Downloading the book doesn’t subscribe you to updates from “Art of Seeing”. Don’t get me wrong, I would love you to subscribe; I just acutely dislike this modern fashion of compulsory sign-ups in exchange for “free gifts”. In these updates, you’ll find more painting masterpieces, more insights into artists’ way of seeing, more suggested seeing practices to take into your daily life (and perhaps into your own studio practice) and help you see a more beautiful world. Please leave me your e-mail if you would like to receive these updates: