The art of observation

Art writer Justin Paton's new book sets out to take us on a journey of exploration through the centuries and across the painted world. So how do you really look at a painting?

Well how? Sitting on a chair? Lolling on a bench? Standing? Across velvet ropes? In your own home? At a glance? Critically? Enviously? Dispassionately?

Everyone moans about the throngs in the big international galleries, but one of the under-rated pleasures of visiting those places is seeing the variety of ways in which people look. I'm not talking about the way they dress or do their hair, although I suppose that's part of it. I'm talking about the way they look while looking, the whole theatre of the "art encounter".

The German photographer Thomas Struth made a series of photographs that focus on the circles of tourists surrounding Michelangelo's statue David in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia. The results are fantastically strange. People confront the artwork like challengers, cock their heads as if listening, unconsciously mimic both the statue and each other, drift into states of slack-jawed boredom, and reel back like witnesses to something supernatural.

Cartoonists have offered a thousand chuckling variations on the theme of the art encounter: the woman accidentally scrutinising the air-conditioning vent; the cubist visitor pointing and laughing at a realist painting; the mother advising her unimpressed son, "Instead of 'It sucks' you could say, 'It doesn't speak to me'."

But there are encounters just as rich and absurd to be found daily on the floor of any big gallery. There's the Confrontation, when someone who doesn't-know-much-about-art-but-knows-what-he-likes goes head to head with something he doesn't.

There's the Ministerial Fly-By, chin up, hands behind back, gliding through the galleries on a slight forward lean, but never so close to any one painting that a troublesome conversation about its virtues could ensue.

There's the Professorial Scrutinise, frowning over bifocals at some symbol or detail. There's the Impressionist Backstep, designed to pull all those flurried brush strokes into focus as a big picture. And there's the Educational Sidestep, in which long digestions of wall-label texts alternate with brief, wary pecks at the paintings.

Publicity photos of people in galleries manage to ignore eccentric encounters like these. They depict a world of such fanatical stylishness it's impossible to imagine anyone actually wanting to live there - assuming it even exists. Herded well off-stage are dumpy dads, mopey adolescents, and tourists wearing T-shirts that say "Kissed as a Piwi".

Instead there's a svelte young woman, sheathed in black and posed in catwalk contrapposto in front of a colour co-ordinated painting. In the mid 1990s, Michael Parekowhai contrived a terrific joke at the expense of such images. I remember approaching a painting by his contemporary Shane Cotton, but hanging back so as not to interrupt the elegant fellow in the black suit who was paying it such close attention.

Eventually, admitting there was no way I was going to outlast him - this guy was beyond focused: a rock - I moved past and looked back and blinked at the sight of a life-size Maori manikin, one of a trio Parekowhai called Poorman, Beggarman and Thief. Those stand-ins have been springing culturally loaded surprises on New Zealand art-watchers ever since.

The comedy of such encounters lies in a basic paradox. Looking at a painting, although it usually happens in public, is a private and inward experience. Do you stand or sprawl, peer or gesticulate, stay as still as a Zen adept, or swoon and sigh like a 19th-century aesthete? The truth is there are no rules or etiquette books.

What matters finally is not how you do it physically, but where you go or find yourself taken imaginatively. Here are some wholly flexible suggestions for keeping the inward experience going long after you leave the gallery.

1. Respect the thing.

2. Take your sweet time. One painting seen well beats dozens seen in a state of perspiration and frustration.

3. That said, see as many paintings as you can, and then hunt for more. The fuller your image bank is with remembered paintings, the richer your responses will be to new ones.

4. When looking at a painting, before answering the question "What do I think?" try "What did I notice?" No opinions without observations.

5. If you're troubled by an apparent lack - not enough colour, not enough imagery - try turning the doubt into a question. What would an artist have to gain by losing those things? What is he or she inviting you to notice in their absence? You may feel previously unnoticed aspects of a painting emerging with new sharpness.

6. Seek out writers as guides through that foreign country, the past. Trying to imagine your way into a painting's life without picturing the time and place that produced it is like trying to understand fish without considering water. And pay no attention to those who say they don't read about paintings because the words get in the way. They had to use words to tell you that, after all.

7. If a work doesn't feel as though it's for you, try imagining the person it is for. At the very least, you will have stepped outside the circle of your accustomed tastes. You might even find yourself enjoying it out there.

8. At any one time, the amount of average or downright wretched art exceeds the other kind by an alarming ratio. If an artwork is giving you nothing, there's no shame in turning your back. Remember, though, that if you don't occasionally wade through art's lows, you're hardly qualified to register the highs.

9. Trust your own impressions. Children often have piercingly accurate things to say about paintings because they haven't yet been taught to distrust their first impressions and spontaneous associations. Tease out the significance of what you are already seeing, rather than fretting about unseen meanings.

10. Trust the painting. The best advice about how to look at a particular painting is usually right there in the painting. May Buick's portrait invites us to meet it up close, squinting, hunting for clues. Rohan Wealleans' big garden of paint insists we confront its sprouting forms before going in, if we dare, for a closer look. And Colin McCahon's Victory Over Death 2 requires us to walk its length, reading, looking and thinking as we go.

* An extract from How to Look at a Painting by Justin Paton, Awa Press, $24.99