Who Are You Looking At?
Painters are drawn to paintings. It is this affinity that makes them painters. And there is no truer way to engage with, explore, or grasp the essence of a painting than by drawing directly from it. Through drawing, painters seek to experience, understand, and dissect a painting—or, as is often the case, to resolve a particular challenge they face in their own work.
In my earliest sketchbooks, I find scattered notes and small sketches on composition, mostly made from paintings at the National Gallery in London. Those early drawings reflected a youthful desire to discover something essential. Instead, I found that one observation led to another, with an ever-growing curiosity pulling me in different directions. First Cézanne, then Delacroix, Poussin, Rembrandt—the list is endless, with each one inviting a deeper, more intricate dialogue.
This pursuit gripped me. It became not merely an exercise in study, but a kind of pleasure, a seduction, and a form of documentation. What began as an art school impulse turned into a lifelong conversation—questioning not just a handful, but many artists, and not just a few paintings, but hundreds.
This is not a treatise. Rather, I offer an ongoing dialogue with painting. There are no concrete conclusions—only exchanges between a painter and the canvases he admires. Something about the work itself, a trace of its historical moment, and, perhaps, an insight born purely from the act of looking.
NOTES ON A RECTANGLE -Morandi at the XXX
