Dialogues with Paintings: Notes on How to Look and See

Paintings invite us to engage in dialogues with them. By questioning them, by reflecting on the ways they structure and express the world, we can come to understand the layers of meaning that are embedded in the ways we construct our perceptions. Learning to look at paintings is a way of learning to see the world through someone else’s eyes. The questions in “Dialogues with Paintings” are intended to help us see a painting, to understand how and why the painter made it look the way it does. It takes a long time and many questions--many dialogues--to come to see a painting as a whole composed of many approaches, perspectives, aspects. By reflecting on the ways paintings structure and express the world, we can come to understand the layers of meaning that are embedded in the ways we construct our perceptions. Learning how to look at paintings can also help us see things more clearly and vividly, to notice the compositions of things--scenes, faces, landscapes, city streets, rooms--to see how light and shadow affect color, how shapes echo one another, how distance is conveyed, how ways of understanding the world are visually expressed and conveyed, how seeing a painting can change our way of seeing our world.