“There is so much to learn from artists about noticing the everyday moments of beauty and wonder that . . . routinely pass us by” says Will Gompertz, coming over all Fotherington-Tomas. So much in fact that he has decided to pass on some of those lessons. Ways of seeing, from Leonardo to John Berger and beyond, is a theme as old as art writing itself. In See What You’re Missing, Gompertz, a former BBC arts editor and artistic director at the Barbican Centre in London, varies the formula by instructing his reader through 31 individual works. Each of his examples, whether pre-Columbian sculptures or David Hockney’s huge composite landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds, contains a nugget of aesthetic or perceptual truth.
So,
