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April 16, 2004

Oil painting

“The special qualities of oil painting lent themselves to a special system of conventions for representing the visible. The sum total of these conventions is the way of seeing invented by oil painting. It is usually said that the oil painting in its frame is like an imaginary window open on to the world... [but] it is not so much a framed window open on the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited.”

John Berger, “Ways of Seeing”, BBC/Penguin Books 1972

Posted by john at April 16, 2004 02:45 PM

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