We've Learned to Look Faster. But Have We Learned to See More?

Sometimes I wonder whether we are living through one of the greatest shifts in human perception without fully realising it.

Never before have we been surrounded by so many images. We wake up and almost instantly step into an endless stream of photographs, videos, advertisements, news, interfaces, works of art, and now images generated by algorithms. They accompany us from morning until night, replacing one another so quickly that we rarely have time to truly look at any of them.

It is easy to assume that seeing more images naturally makes us more visually aware. As a painter, however, I have found myself questioning that assumption more and more over the years.

What if the opposite is true?

What if we have learned to look at far more, while actually seeing far less?

There is an important difference between those two things. Looking can happen almost automatically. Seeing never does. Seeing asks for time. It asks us to stay with something long enough to notice that a cool grey is quietly filled with warm undertones, that a white wall changes throughout the day as the light shifts, or that the same landscape becomes an entirely different place within the space of a few minutes. None of this is new. The world has always behaved this way. What has changed is our willingness to remain still long enough to notice it.

Perhaps this is why I have come to believe that the value of painting today has very little to do with the fact that it is made with oil, painted by hand, or exists as a single original. Those things matter, but they are not what makes painting irreplaceable.

What makes it different is that it resists speed.

A painting refuses to be fully experienced in a passing glance. It quietly asks something that has become increasingly rare: time. It invites us back to a way of looking that much of contemporary life no longer encourages.

Every meaningful painting asks not only for our eyes, but for our presence. It does not reveal itself all at once because it was never created all at once. It carries within it hours of observation, months of searching, and countless decisions that shaped the work long before the final brushstroke was made. Perhaps that is why certain paintings remain with us for decades. We return to them not because we have already seen everything they contain, but because each encounter allows us to discover something we had missed before.

The more I paint, the more convinced I become that the true scarcity of the twenty-first century is not information, and it is certainly not images. We have more of both than any generation before us. What has become truly rare is sustained attention - the willingness to stay with something long enough for it to reveal its depth.

Perhaps this is why painting still matters.

Not because it creates beautiful images. The world has never lacked beautiful images.

It matters because it reminds us that some things cannot be seen in haste.

They can only be seen once we stop rushing long enough to truly look.