Artist Anna Conti has been posting a great series this week on “Seeing” on her Working Artist’s Journal. Do go read it, it will help you understand art in a new way! I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

I love the quote Anna recalls in the first part: You do not see with the lens of the eye. You look through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye. (John Ruskin)

It makes me recall an intense experience I had once after a long and very satisfying life drawing class. As I was driving home, it seemed as if my vision was extra sharp and vivid, noting the finest details of the trees, sky, ocean, buildings and so on with unusual clarity and colour and emotion, like having super-vision!

This intensity of vision is to me a bit like the feeling I have looking at certain realist paintings of artists like Anna, and Canadians Christopher Pratt and Alex Colville.