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consciously. On the beautiful details in the painting for
example. I think looking at art can help you become
aware of the fact that you can direct your attention.
And that you see more that way than when you allow
yourself to be led by the outside world.”
You see more if you look at one painting for a long
time than at ten different works shortly. And that is
because paying attention needs time, Van der Stigchel
says. “If you look at something briefly, you overlook all
kinds of things, I guarantee it. For example, someone
else can easily point out something that you hadn’t seen
even though your eyes were focused on it. It really takes
a while before you know what you’re looking at; your
brain needs that time to process all the information. And
if you pay attention to a detail for a long time, like Van
Zeil did looking at the swallow, then you will become
automatically more susceptible to seeing swallows once
you’re outside. Because something you’ve experienced
before affects the way you look around you afterward. In
science, we call that ‘priming’. This way you carry your
museum visit along with you into the outside world.”
BIG BLOBS
British art historian and author Susie Hodge has written
dozens of books about art, including Art in Detail. Her
goal is to inspire people to spend more time looking at
art without being concerned with the idea that you
need to know everything about a painting to enjoy it.
And just like Van Zeil, she encourages people to keep
an eye out for the small things that may jump out at
you. “Anything small will do as a starting point.
Anything at all,” she says. “In old paintings, you can
look at the color yellow, for example. Look for all the
different shades of yellow that you can find. Or when
you stand very close to the painting, you can look at
the brushstrokes. They are different for every artist,
but also in different time periods. In some periods,
paintings had a very smooth finish; in other periods,
artists liked to deposit big blobs of paint on their
canvases. While looking, you’ll probably see things that
make you curious and it may be fun to look up what the
artist was trying to say. It really helps to look at details,
because then you notice very special things.”
Hodge noticed, for example, that the British
landscape painter John Constable used small blobs
of red paint to make his landscapes look brighter from
a distance. And that in his world-famous painting
The Kiss, Austrian painter Gustav Klimt used different
symbols in the clothes of the man and woman
embracing each other: rectangular shapes to >‘Looking at art can help you
become aware of the fact that
you can direct your attention’