How do you 'view' paintings?

Gut reaction for me. Immediate yes or no.

Same here, though if I linger and begin to see something, I might look a bit more, but I don’t have much imagnation or creativity.

I like to be able to recognise what the artist has drawn or painted.
I enjoy watching Landscape/Portrait Artist of the Year. It is interesting to see how a number of painters can produce such different work when they have the same view in front of them.
I struggle to see what message some can find in say, a completely black square. I have no idea what the artist is trying to convey with that.

Gut reaction for me too. I find that I tend to gravitate towards portraits.

For me too, it's usually an instinctive reaction - but there have been times when someone has made a comment about a particular piece and it's made me go back and look at it from a different perspective.

Basgetti

Gut reaction for me. Immediate yes or no.

Same.

But I have a relative who can see colours in grass.
She asked the group if others could, but we couldnt.
Guess who is the "arty" one?

Depends on the circumsyances.

If I am in an art gallery, I am there to look at the art works and I will sspend more time looking at them and anlysing them.

In other cases it is a uestion of the picture speaking to me. What speaks to me is any picture that feeds into my love of the British countryside and flowers and plants. My mother was a highly skilled flower arranger and could take three pieces of grass and a dandelion and just shove them in a jar - and it was a thing of beauty.

Walk round our house, the walls are covered in pictures. The landscapes and still lives are mine, the boats and ships are DH's, almost all are originals or numbered prints.

Oh, dear, with pure ignorance! I come from a very arty family but can't draw or paint myself. I love atmospheric stuff (Turner), the Pre-Raphaelites, E.H. Shepherd, Arthur Rackham, Alfred Bestall - anything that captures fairy tales, Romance, or late Victorian/early Edwardian children's stories, Lady Bird book art. My tastes are simple yet defined.

Art is such a vast subject, sometimes I almost feel slightly intimidated to give my opinion.

All art is subjective, when I mentioned my favourite painting on the other thread, Dali's "Christ of St John of the Cross" I didn't say then that I had such an immediate, almost opened mouth reaction on first seeing it. Gratifying to know therefore I wasn't alone in that reaction though as others felt the same. That was probably my first feeling of being totally moved by a piece of art, there have been other works since but never quite the same in having such an instantaneous emotion.

On the other hand, as a child we visited Malta to see extended family as that's where my paternal grandfather came from. Caravaggio lived in Malta for a while and we went to the cathedral to see his painting "The Beheading of St John" my gut reaction to that aged 11, it made me feel sick Now I can appreciate Caravaggio's work as an adult, not necessarily that one though

I have a friend who loves Rothko's reds, and tells me she can stand in front of them and after a while becomes completely mesmerized..I'm afraid the philistine in me doesn't get that, just red canvasses Still we're all different I guess.

'The Laughing Cavalier' was everywhere when I was growing up. A print on my grandmother's wall, in books and magazines, even on chocolate boxes. A bit of a cliche in other words.

When I was a teenager I finally saw the original. I was bowled over, the delicacy of the skin tones and the way Frans Hals had conveyed the transient nature of the laugh. You half expected the expression to have changed if you turned away even for a moment. None of the above was evident from the numerous prints I had seen and it was a complete revelation.

When I worked in central London I was close enough to be able to visit The Wallace Collection nearly every day and I had the luxury of only viewing one or two pictures at a time instead of having to skim my way round several rooms full of paintings.

Magenta8 I too grew up with the laughing Cavalier, I still have the print my grandmother had on our wall.

About 5 years ago, towards the end of COVID there was a wonderful Hals Exhbition at the Wallace Collection. They had 40 or so of his pictures and I could have spent a week there, just looking at the faces, how they reflected character and humanity.

The Open University teaches (as a free resource) an approach called the Study Diamond. It invites you to consider, and reconsider, four aspects of what you’re looking at :
effects
techniques
context
meaning.
There’s a worked example using a poem but it helps with visual art too.
www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=18906§ion=4
I have found it really helpful eg when I got through Tate Modern in half an hour, I started again and used this way of looking and got much more out of the experience

Theres no great mystique or indeed skill/education/ understanding involved.
By all means read about the artist- there’s usually a helpful text on the wall or better still use the large print booklets which give you all the information you might need.
But so many people are ‘intimidated’ by art as they feel they have to understand it and there’s no shortage of pundits to drone on and on.
But look at a painting or sculpture at your leisure if possible and if you like it, look some more and if you don’t, move on!

I construct entire narratives around paintings, I like to imagine what the people in them were thinking about and what they were doing, or where they were going.

I have been fortunate to see some beautiful portraits. It amazes me how the artists were able to capture such details as the fold of a skirt and give a three-dimensional look to it, in a two-dimensional medium.

RosiesMawagain

Theres no great mystique or indeed skill/education/ understanding involved.
By all means read about the artist- there’s usually a helpful text on the wall or better still use the large print booklets which give you all the information you might need.
But so many people are ‘intimidated’ by art as they feel they have to understand it and there’s no shortage of pundits to drone on and on.
But look at a painting or sculpture at your leisure if possible and if you like it, look some more and if you don’t, move on!

Good sensible advice.
There’s a lot of emperors new clothes around the art world.

I'm glad some other people feel the same as me.

One of our artist friends was horrified that I was quite taken by a picture that was partly AI generated but it was really colourful and vibrant.

I generally like abstract pictures , I was given a couple of drawings (prints) of apart of France by Charles Rennie MacIntosh and I like them they live in the dining space in my kitchen ,
I have several games that hold album covers and I just change the albums when I get bored with them.
Currently there’s an album by Haevn with a large orange moon against the hill underneath is a Manchester Orchestra album with a A turquoise moon the bleeds into orange and blow that there’s the Dark Side of the Moon cover,no moon it it seemed to fit my theme this week .
I put what I like o the walls what others think doesn,t interest me.
The three prints on the longest wall in my living room have been moved around the room but have been here for over 20 years.

Frames not games…

I tend to be drawn to a piece, but don’t spend ages deliberating on any deeper meaning it might or might not have. If I like it, I like it. If I don’t, I don’t.
Some pieces just grab my attention, others leave me cold. I’m certainly no expert and just buy pieces I like, which I imagine is true of most of us.

As a musician, I can analyse a piece of music in this way and it helps me to understand and appreciate it more (or not appreciate it as the case may be!). Most people will tell me that they “know what they like,” or variations on a theme. This is how I am with art. I can look at a beautiful painting and appreciate the talent and work involved but this is as far as I am able to go. For example, I love the stained glass window at Buckfast Abbey - my favourite venue when on holiday in Devon - especially when the sun is shining through it; it makes me feel both peaceful and ecstatic at the same time but I do not know why. All l know is that it is beautiful.

I like works of art that evoke feelings or thoughts. Sometimes it's instant, sometimes it takes a bit of work to engage with them.

Some installations are such you have to wander amongst them and ponder, "what does this evoke? And quiet all other concerns.

Or a video (say the wonderful work of Bill Viola) these re samples of his work)

www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bill+viola+video+on+mother+dying+excerpt

I am Fine Art trained and one of the things I learnt early is that it takes two people to 'make' a work of art: the artist, and the viewer, because no two people "see" with the same eyes nor say with music hear with the same ears - we all bring conscious or subconscious experience and knowledge.
I love - or appreciate - or dislike - lots of different stuff, whether it be a high level of craft type skill or not.

If you think, "why, I could do that! How can that be art...my 5 year old can do better than that" Then it does preclude some work that might really "speak" to someone else.

Look at Alfred Wallis's work (the Cornish fisherman) - whose work was very "naive and childlike" - he not only became famous and work ££££ but other artists now work "in the style".

Sometimes of course I think rubbish you have to joking when encountering not naivety but pretension!

I like a painting that tells a story, like the Vermeer ones. (What is in that letter?)
The Pre-Raphaelite Arthurian images, some children's book illustrations, old town maps, historical portraits...love the costume detail.

I am also fine art trained and have a degree in Art History. I know how to view a painting, but it must ‘call’ to me.