Richard Estes and Looking

I also like looking at the blue sky outside the airplane window, and I hope to keep learning to see the world more deeply.

Excerpt:

“I went to the Art Institute of Chicago,” Estes, 94, tells me over the phone from his Maine home when I ask how he became an artist. “It was pretty traditional: figure drawing in the morning, figure painting in the afternoon . . . One of my teachers told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t ever expect to make any money.’”

…

“I spent 15 years as an illustrator in advertising,” he tells me. “I always wanted to be an artist but I had no idea how it would happen.” 

…

Estes is unwilling to ascribe almost any intentions to his work beyond the representation. “I wasn’t thinking about anything profound, just looking at the world.”

…

But maybe that is the thing. The intense precision with which he works demands a certain kind of gaze: a close examination of surface and city, of light, colour and the intricacies of details we would not normally notice. Those phone booths and candy store windows, cafeterias and subway cars were the backgrounds of everyday life, mostly unseen and unexamined. And now mostly disappeared. What felt then like a finding of the extraordinary in the ordinary, now feels like documentation; nostalgia for a layer of urban life that has been flattened by banal corporate overlay.

…

“There is something about looking,” he says. “When I get on planes, I’m always amazed that the first thing people do is close the blinds. The cloud formations moving beneath you are fantastic.”

P.S. Here’s Ron Lemen on learning to see: Slow down, be curious, and pay attention.