How art ought to be written.

Writing about the man in the back of the picture:

Even so, there is a difference [between him and the figures reflected in the mirror]: he is there in flesh and blood; he has appeared from the outside, on the threshold of the area represented; he is indubitable–not a probable reflection but an irruption. The mirror, by making visible, beyond even the walls of the studio itself, what is happening in front of the picture, creates, in its sagittal dimension, an oscillation between the interior and the exterior. One foot only on the lower step, his body entirely in profile, the ambiguous visitor is coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing. He repeats on the spot, but in the dark reality of his body, the instantaneous movement of those images flashing across the room, plunging into the mirror, being reflected there, and springing out from it again like visible, new, and identical species. Pale, miniscule, those silhouetted figures in the mirror are challenged by the tall, solid stature of the man appearing in the doorway.

Writing about art.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Museo del Prado

Paintings such as this makes one wonder, “How did he think of doing that?”

From The Order of Things:

A teaser about the odd relation between painter and beholder:

“The painter is looking, his face turned slightly and his head leaning towards one shoulder. He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are that point: our bodies, our faces, our eyes. The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking.

…And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established. Because we can only see the reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing? As soon as [the painter’s eyes] place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable… He sees his invisbility made visible to the painter and transposed into an image forever invisible to himself.”