Learn to Look at Art, Part 2: How Paintings Shape Our Perception

Devices that direct our focus to heighten the effect of compositions

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Part 2 of Learn to Look at Art.

Building on the idea of “training our visual awareness” introduced in Part 1, this second instalment shifts the focus to look at how paintings attract our attention and shape the manner of our seeing — guiding our gaze, directing our focus and structuring the rhythms of our experience. In other words, we move from considering the skills we bring to the act of viewing to examining the subtle strategies paintings employ to orchestrate that act.

As a reminder, the full archive of the series as it builds is available here.

Part 2: How Paintings Shape Our Perception

When we look at a figurative painting, a remarkable thing happens. A flat surface transfigures into a three-dimensional space and we are drawn into a picture of the world shaped by the artist’s aesthetic choices.

Naturally, this doesn’t happen by chance. Artists have developed a range of techniques for suggesting or establishing space and depth in their pictures. The technical term for a sense of depth in a picture is recession, which is most obviously achieved by employing methods of perspective like diminishing the size and detail of objects as they recede into the distance.

Among the methods of recession we find aerial perspective: the recognition that distant objects lose clarity and drift towards a bluish haze under the effects of atmosphere.

Pastoral Landscape: The Roman Campagna (c.1639) by Claude Lorrain. Oil on canvas. 101.6 × 135.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, U.S.

The effect can be seen in the works of the influential French painter Claude Lorrain (1604-82), whose misty dawns and fading sunsets are often bathed in an ethereal blue glow. It is a glow that does something more than convey distance: it proposes a sort of timelessness, the steady radiance of long-ago days — an effect that helped to elevate the genre of landscape to a classical ideal it had never known before.