Touching The Art: A Guide To Enjoying Art at a Museum

by Luc Travers (Illustrator), Marianne Epstein (Illustrator)

"A visit to an art museum does not have to be a history lesson. Appreciating a painting is not reserved for a cultured few. Get ready to experience an innovative yet familiar-feeling approach to enjoying art!"
For many people a visit to an art museum means a tedious history lesson. If you aren't an art historian or an artist, a trip to an art museum feels like a draining cultural duty.
The visual arts, however, have the potential to be as thrilling to experience and as personally moving as your favorite movies. In this book, Luc Travers will introduce you to five powerful works of art, and teach you how to experience them like you would a great movie or novel. You will learn how to "read" an artwork; how to bring static images to life; how to connect your life to the lives of the characters in the art; and how to create for yourself a museum experience that will thrill and inspire you.
You will never look at the visual arts the same way.

Featuring Colored illustrations

Genres: Art, Teaching, Nonfiction

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travers brings interesting analogies, exercises and realism to the table in his suggested approach to art appreciation. I won't give away the tips he teaches, but I'd never thought of the novel perspectives he proposes taking and liked the focus on aesthetic immersion over intellectual posturing. Having gone to the Louvre today just after reading the book, there were a bunch of times I found myself benefitting from explicitly using the exercises Travers outlines in the book and overall came away with a much richer artistic experience than I can remember having at a museum.

However, the book is painfully short. I really wish there had been more examples to practice with and some more of Travers' own "readings" of art to compare with. It also wasn't clear prior to my opening the book that the approaches lend themself more towards realistic artwork of people. I particularly struggle to engage with abstract and modern forms of art (which can tend to look like random lines on a page to me), so I would have liked at least an appendix on how to best engage with that kind of art due to its prevalence in the art world today.

All in all though, I would still highly recommend this book to skeptics of art and art appreciation, or just anyone who wants to feel more of the emotional/aesthetic side of the visual arts!

[Torunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little guide is everything you'll ever need to read prior to any museum visit. It'll open up the world of art and make it more approachable. An absolute game changer!

[Tauno]

https://www.touchingtheart.com/the-bo...