Attending To (Thirty-Six Portraits of Paintings Past)

Across thirty-six paintings – from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century – Tom Palin offers a series of closely observed encounters in which meaning emerges through the interrelation of pictorial structure and the material conditions of painting.

Attending To bears witness to sustained acts of looking. Across thirty-six paintings – from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century – Tom Palin offers a series of closely observed encounters in which meaning emerges through the interrelation of pictorial structure and the material conditions of painting. Each chapter holds a single work in extended attention, combining formal and iconographic analysis with insights drawn from the author’s own studio practice. Rather than a survey or a linear history of art, the book proposes a different tempo of engagement: slow, deliberate and cumulative. From Giotto to Seurat, these essays explore what it means to dwell with a painting, considering how works of art organise perception, thought and memory. The result is part critical study, part painter’s meditation on the experience of seeing and of having seen.