I am serializing an unpublished book in this column. It's about an amazing, mysterious manuscript I discovered in Scotland. It's a little book with nothing in it but 50 watercolor paintings. No one knows who painted it, or when, or where, or what it means. I was so entranced by...

I am serializing an unpublished book in this column. It's about an amazing, mysterious manuscript I discovered in Scotland. It's a little book with nothing in it but 50 watercolor paintings. No one knows who painted it, or when, or where, or what it means. I was so entranced by...

I am serializing an unpublished book in this column. It's about an amazing, mysterious manuscript I discovered in Scotland. It's a little book with nothing in it but 50 watercolor paintings. No one knows who painted it, or when, or where, or what it means. I was so entranced by...

I'm going to be serializing an unpublished book, starting this week. It's about an amazing, mysterious manuscript I discovered in Scotland. It's a little book with nothing in it but 50 watercolor paintings. No one knows who painted it, or when, or where, or what it means. I was so...

This month I am going to write about the painting that means the most to me, Giovanni Bellini's Ecstasy of St. Francis in the Frick Collection in Manhattan. By a stroke of luck it is included in the Google Art Project, so I can reproduce it in detail....

I have been writing about looking slowly, taking the time to see the visual world. My first column was about a Mondrian painting, and it included some closeups made with a special macro lens. After that, I turned to the question of boredom (are artists ever...

I have been writing about looking, and how to take the time to see the world around you. The first few columns have been about paintings, especially Mondrian and Titian. But I promised from the beginning that I would be looking at many other things,...

I have been writing about looking slowly, taking time to let the visual world seep into your thoughts. It took me three years, on and off, to learn to see a certain painting by Mondrian. In my last column, the subject was a beautiful painting in...

My subject in these posts is how we look at the world. In future columns, I will be writing about all sorts of things, from hieroglyphs to ice halos, from postage stamps to insect wings. I want to gently undermine the idea that there's nothing to be said about seeing...

Our eyes are far too good for us. They show us so much that we can't take it all in, so we shut out most of the world, and try to look at things as briskly and efficiently as possible.

What happens if we stop, and take the...