Attending to - by Tom Palin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Across thirty-six paintings - from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century - Tom Palin offers a series of closely observed encounters in which meaning emerges through the interrelation of pictorial structure and the material conditions of painting.

Attending To bears witness to sustained acts of looking. Across thirty-six paintings - from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century - Tom Palin offers a series of closely observed encounters in which meaning emerges through the interrelation of pictorial structure and the material conditions of painting. Each chapter holds a single work in extended attention, combining formal and iconographic analysis with insights drawn from the author's own studio practice. Rather than a survey or a linear history of art, the book proposes a different tempo of engagement: slow, deliberate and cumulative. From Giotto to Seurat, these essays explore what it means to dwell with a painting, considering how works of art organise perception, thought and memory. The result is part critical study, part painter's meditation on the experience of seeing and of having seen.

About the Author

Tom Palin is a painter, writer and teacher, born in Birkenhead. He studied Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, before completing a PhD in Painting at the Royal College of Art (the last PhD in Painting to be awarded by the institution). His writing focuses on the material and pictorial conditions of painting, addressing questions of surface, temporality, staging, configuration and spectatorship, drawing on Romantic, formalist and phenomenological traditions. He has exhibited widely and received awards including the Royal Academy British Institution Award, the Gilchrist-Fisher Award and the Hunting Art Prize Young Artist of the Year Award. For nearly three decades, he has worked across a range of arts education contexts, teaching painting at the Royal College of Art since 2022.