Becoming familiar withĪ painting requires that one submerges himself/herself in it and ask it questions.
The paintings may first appear as silent pieces but one can change this. What we make of that painted moment when it is before our eyes depends upon what we expect of art, and that in turn depends today upon how we have already experienced the meaning of paintings through reproductions. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. The original work speaks to you in a way that a reproduction is not able to. The information that comes from the silence of a painting is only truly experienced when looking at the original work rather than a reproduction of it. According to John Berger in his essay “Ways of Seeing” the way that a painting is viewed by some may already be distorted prior to analyzing it because we are not viewing the original piece.
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