How Painting Happens (and why it matters) – A Times Book of the Year 2024

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A Times Book of the Year: Drawing on decades of conversations with practising artists, Martin Gayford offers intimate insight into the practice, meaning and potential of painting

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Painting is an almost inconceivably ancient activity that remains vigorously alive in the twenty-first century. Every successful painting creates a new world, which we inhabit for as long as we care to look at it. Paintings can incorporate profound ideas and paradoxes that can be grasped without words. For those who dedicate themselves to it, the art of painting can become an all-consuming, lifelong obsession.

It is a subject on which painters themselves are often the most incisive commentators. Martin Gayford’s riveting and richly illustrated book deftly brings together numerous artists’ voices, past and present. It draws on a trove of conversations conducted over more than three decades with artists including Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Lucian Freud, Katharina Fritsch, David Hockney, Claudette Johnson, Lee Ufan, Paula Rego, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Frank Stella, Luc Tuymans, Zeng Fanzhi and many more. Here too is Vincent van Gogh on Rembrandt, John Constable on Titian, Francis Bacon on Velazquez, R. B. Kitaj on Cézanne and Jean-Michel Basquiat on Picasso.

We hear the personal reflections of these artists on their chosen medium; how and why they paint; how they came to the practice; the influence of fellow painters; and how they find creative sustenance and inspiration in their art.

How Painting Happens crosses the centuries to give us a wealth of insights into the endlessly compelling phenomenon of painters and painting.
Extent: 384 pp
Format: Hardback
Illustrations: 176
Publication date: 2024-09-26
Size: 24.6 x 18.6 cm
ISBN: 9780500027424

Press Reviews

From El Greco to Picasso, Martin Gayford’s How Painting Happens offers us an encyclopedic journey through art history
Daily Telegraph

This book’s strength is that it darts from the greats of art history’s past – Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it – to contemporary painters such as Oscar Murillo, Jadé Fadojutimi, Cecily Brown, Eric Fischl and Frank Bowling, to whom he speaks, and about whom he bubbles with enthusiasm … In covering, chapter by chapter, the themes of colour relationships, brushwork, composition, subject, space, relationship with photography, and so on, Gayford sets up a lively conversation between painting today and the work of precursors such as Giotto, Titian and Cézanne. That requires, obviously, a lavishly illustrated book and I’d say that the £35 being asked for such a gorgeous volume is well worth the price … This is as clear a piece of writing about the experience of looking at a great painting as I have ever read
Andrew Marr, New Statesman

Martin Gayford, long-serving critic and art historian, is a trusted insider and a favoured guest of the most celebrated talents in the UK and beyond. If anyone knows what makes them tick, it ought to be this latter-day Vasari ... Stimulating and sumptuously illustrated
Financial Times

If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat them ‘as if they were ice cream or something’, in Damien Hirst’s phrase, then Martin Gayford’s latest book will be a banquet
The Spectator

About the Author

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf (in which he recounts the experience of being painted by Freud); Modernists and Mavericks; Spring Cannot be Cancelled, with David Hockney; A History of Pictures, with David Hockney; Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, with Antony Gormley; Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954, with David Dawson; and Venice: City of Pictures, all published by Thames & Hudson.

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