Just Looking
AND OTHER ESSAYS
Author: Helen McLean
In these essays Toronto writer
Helen McLean meditates on her world with a painter's eye.
What at first appear to be simple observations often mask
unusual and startling perceptions that prompt the surprised
reader to say "why, of course!"
She examines the puzzle of why an artist feels compelled
to paint. What is it that captures his attention, and how
does he go about reproducing that first perception in his
studio, days or weeks later? Does an artist record what
he sees or what experience has taught him? She inveighs
against phoniness in art and the contemporary lack of rigour
that Umberto Eco calls an "orgy of tolerance."
Just Looking might have been
called "just living." One tragedy of life, she
suggests, may be the way we slide into convention and habit
in our latter years and urges us to stay alert, lest on
our deathbeds we rear up, belatedly aware that we have spent
this precious time sleepwalking.
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