35 Methods to Take a look at Artwork

Visiting a museum to have a look at artwork will be an intimidating or overwhelming expertise.

Most of us aren’t specialists, and we’d assume that we’re not trying on the artwork within the “proper” manner. However there’s nobody proper manner to have a look at artwork!

After I was writing my new ebook Life in Five Senses, I made a decision to problem myself to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork day by day for a yr. (I’m extraordinarily lucky to stay inside strolling distance of the Met.)

That yr is over, and now I’m on my third yr of going to the Met day by day. I like these visits! One good factor: as a result of I’m going day by day, and I’ve joined as a member, my visits will be as lengthy or as quick as I need.

As I made my visits, I discovered some ways to assist me take a look at the artwork with contemporary eyes. Whether or not you’re visiting a small native gallery or a large museum, and whether or not you’re a frequent artwork appreciator or on the lookout for someplace to begin, attempt these solutions that can assist you decelerate, discover particulars, and expertise artwork in a brand new manner.

1. Seek for a particular colour. For example, you may select a specific Pantone colour, such because the Colour of the 12 months, and search for it.

2. Search for issues that shock you—within the Met, I used to be shocked to see how typically the Buddha is depicted with a mustache (however why not?)
3. Think about what you’d create to promote within the present store.
4. Stroll throughout the room to have a look at an object from a distance.
5. Stand close to to an object to look at it intently.
6. Take a look at a single object for thirty minutes.
7. Look within the object’s corners and edges.
8. Purchase a postcard of an object, then examine the postcard to the precise object.
9. Learn the label.
10. To look extra rigorously at a colour, make a small circle together with your fingers and isolate it from its context (a colour typically isn’t what we assume it’s).
11. Establish distinctions amongst comparable objects—Greek vases, Egyptian amulets.
12. Take a look at an paintings in a hand mirror, to see it lowered and reversed.
13. Squint at an paintings, so particulars vanish to disclose a less complicated composition of form and colour.
14. Maintain up a hand to dam one a part of the work, to see how its absence impacts all the things else.
15. Seek for a tiny element that’s straightforward to miss.
16. Hearken to music as you take a look at the artwork, to create a soundtrack to the expertise.
17. Learn a ebook, watch a film, or see a play that mentions an paintings, then go take a look at it for your self—such because the novels The Goldfinch, Girl with a Pearl Earring, or The Second Mrs. Gioconda.
18. Use the audio information.
19. Search for what house has been left empty.
20. Seek for a specific component all through the gathering—on the Met, I search for swans, objects with supernatural powers, errors, skulls, frogs.
21. Look at the body.
22. Search for any something that breaks the body.
23. Search for shifts in scale.
24. Take a look at the “unfavourable house,” the house round an paintings or a picture depicted by the work.
25. Take note of how the soundscape of an space—noisy, quiet, echoing, muffled—influences the best way you see.
26. Search for triangles, squares, rectangles, circles.
27. In portraits, search for the “catchlight” in a sitter’s eyes—the tiny white specks that present mild reflecting off the shiny eyes of the topic.
28. Ask different folks to inform you their favourite artworks, then go take a look at them (we’re at all times to know what others discover fascinating).
29. Search for notably spectacular colour combos.
30. Take into account the connection of the title to the paintings—I’ve at all times cherished the portray and title of Charles Demuth’s I Noticed the Determine 5 in Gold.
31. Puzzle out the that means of symbols and iconography.
32. Search for components of nature within the museum’s galleries: water, vegetation, daylight.
33. Discover 5 items featured on objects within the present store, then go take a look at the precise items.
34. In every room, select your favourite paintings.
35. Create one thing based mostly on a chunk of artwork that resonates with you—a sketch, a narrative, a reimagining—or just take notes in your ideas and observations.

Throughout my visits, I actually loved giving myself these sorts of visible assignments. I observed extra, and I had extra enjoyable, as I walked from Egyptian Artwork to Arms and Armor to the Damascus Room.

In the event you’d like extra concepts about how to have a look at artwork, try “Don’t ‘get’ art? You might be looking at it wrong.”

I like all train that provides me extra appreciation for the world round me.