See What You're Missing
New Ways of Looking at the World Through Art
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Taking us into the minds of artists—from contemporary stars to old masters—See What You’re Missing shows us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.
Artists are expert lookers: they have learned to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
In his inimitable engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists—from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world—to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.
In See What You’re Missing we learn, for example, how Hasegawa Tohaku can help us to see beauty, how David Hockney helps us to see colour, and how Frida Kahlo can help us see pain. In doing so we come to know the exhilarating feeling of being truly alive. See What You’re Missing is at once entertaining and enlightening art history while delivering empowering new insights to its reader.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stimulating entry, Gompertz (What Are You Looking At?), the artistic director of London's Barbican Centre, examines the ways artists use their powers of perception to "see the world afresh" and help others do the same. Nineteenth-century English landscape painter John Constable used an "empirical" attention to nature to paint meticulously detailed, six-foot-tall cloudscapes that let viewers "see what was in plain sight but routinely overlooked." And after Frida Kahlo was injured in a streetcar accident at 18 that left her with lifelong health problems, she harnessed her pain in dramatic self portraits that "bar her soul with brushstrokes rather than a pen." Meanwhile, after contemporary painter Jennifer Packer observed the conspicuous absence of Black people in paintings in contemporary museums, she took it as an "intellectual provocation" to weave a recurring theme of partial disappearance into her own work (she depicts figures that "fade in and out of view like a small boat on a high sea"). Gompertz combines accessible discussions of artistic technique with an appealing enthusiasm, rendering entries vivid and thought-provoking. Artists and art lovers alike will be delighted.
