"Beguiling and informative"-Wall Street Journal Learn to see art as an artist does. Discover how a painting's composition or a sculpture's spatial structure influence the experience of what you're seeing. With an artist as your guide, viewing art becomes a powerfully enriching experience that will stay in your mind long after you've left a museum. A visit to view art can be overwhelming, exhausting, and unrewarding. Lincoln Perry wants to change that. In fifteen essays-each framed around a specific theme-he provides new ways of seeing and appreciating art. Drawing heavily on examples from the European traditions of art, Perry aims to overturn assumptions and asks readers to re-think artistic prejudices while rebuilding new preferences. Included are essays on how artists "read" paintings, how scale and format influence viewers, how to engage with sculptures and murals, as well as guides to some of the great museums and churches of Europe. Seeing Like an Artist is for any artist, art-lover, or museumgoer who wants to grow their appreciation for the art of others.

Lincoln Perry is justly celebrated for his murals and edgy narrative figure paintings, with their saturated palette and multifaceted architectural compositions--Poussin refracted through de Chirico. This beautiful new book showcases his images of Charlottesville, Virginia--many of them multipanel compositions featuring the University of Virginia and its environs--accompanied by an essay and interview by his wife, the writer Ann Beattie.

Perry's mural The Student's Progress, which depicts a woman's education and social experience from matriculation through graduation, is familiar to U.Va. students, faculty, and visitors, but Perry has been painting Charlottesville subjects on and off since 1985, when he first moved to town. From his early explorations of the complex relationships between professors and students, played out against the backdrop of Jefferson's Lawn, through his intriguing depictions of the city's domestic interiors, buildings, and streets, Perry illuminates a different side of a place widely appreciated for its history and natural beauty.

Charlottesville, writes Beattie, "both disturbs and calls to Perry] it's a paradoxically comfortable and uncomfortable not-quite-home he has been drawn to many times for reasons he can't easily articulate.... I think that Lincoln likes the town's quirkiness and its lack of uniformity. It's also a place that allows him to practice the x-ray vision so many visual people have for underpinnings: the contradictions that can be drawn upon and aesthetically dramatized.... The place sparks his imagination, and with his paintbrush, he sparks it, charging the air with a bit of unexpected--but very recognizable--light."

Together, Perry and Beattie give us a view of Charlottesville, of place and artistic production, that carries with it the warmth of recognition and the thrill of discovery.

Publication made possible by generous support from the W. L. Lyons Brown Jr. Charitable Foundation