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

A Times Book of the Year

‘This is as clear a piece of writing about the experience of looking at a great painting as I have ever read … Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it’ Andrew Marr, New Statesman

'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

'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

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

‘A remarkable painting can move the soul. So how does it come about? Martin Gayford brilliantly marks out the path from inspiration to execution’ The Irish Times

Drawing on decades of conversations with practising artists, Martin Gayford offers intimate insight into the practice, meaning and potential of painting.

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.