Literature
Books That Changed How I See
A reading list for painters: seven books — novels, essays, and one poem — that altered how I understand light, composition, and the act of looking.
People often ask where my paintings come from. Part of the answer is other paintings; part of it is direct observation; and a surprisingly large part of it is books. Not books about painting — though those matter too — but novels and essays and poems that taught me to see differently.
Here are seven that have stayed with me.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead — I've read this novel four times and each time find new understanding of how to write (or paint) the quality of light. Robinson describes ordinary midwestern afternoons with a precision that makes them sacred. Her attention is an argument about what attention is for.
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn — Sebald walks through Suffolk and keeps stopping to look: at ruins, at herring catches, at a painting by Rembrandt. The essay-memoir hybrid form mirrors the way looking actually works — associatively, digressing toward meaning rather than marching to it.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing — The obvious choice, but obvious for good reason. Berger's chapter on the oil painting tradition — its relationship to ownership, surface, and possession — was the first time I understood that how an image means is inseparable from its material conditions.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — A year of paying intense attention to one place. Her chapter on vision — on what we would see if we had no learned framework for visual objects — is among the most useful things I've read about looking.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet — Written about poetry, but every sentence applies to painting. The instruction to stop asking whether your work is good and start asking whether it is necessary changed how I approach the studio.
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just — A philosopher's attempt to explain why beautiful things compel attention and generosity. Difficult but worth the effort; it gives you a language for something you've always felt without being able to say.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse — Mrs Ramsay's shawl. The painting. The lighthouse. All of it. Woolf understood that art is about duration — the attempt to hold something still in the current of time — better than almost anyone else who has ever written about it.