How to Use Your Eyes [Paperback]

James Elkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2000

"... visually stunning and mentally stimulating."—Scientific American

"…the author of What Painting Is (1998) has written a fascinating new book filled with gorgeous illustrations that would inspire us ‘to learn to see anything.’ It's a tall order, to be sure, but one that the author pulls off admirably….How to Use Your Eyes is a wondrous visual tour that Elkins hopes will help us ‘learn to use our eyes more concertedly until the details of the world slowly reveal themselves.’ Readers will be inspired to stop and smell--nay, see--the roses."

—Booklist

"Elkins invites his readers to extend perception beyond narrow specialties to see meaning in the mundane. He is ever curious, his mind seemingly in overdrive."

—Chicago Tribune Magazine

"In that fascinating zone where creative imagination and scientific observation meet, Elkins shines a conceptual flashlight, aiming to illuminate in 32 short chapters a fraction of what we are missing daily. He asks us to use our eyes and our minds differently, to see the world as few of us bother to see it because we rarely make the effort."—Library Journal

Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life.

But when we look at them—really look at them—what do we see?

In the tradition of John Berger’s bestselling Ways of Seeing, James Elkins’s How to Use your Eyes invites us to look at- and maybe see for the first time- the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. A butterfly's wing pattern encodes its identity. A cloudless sky yields a precise sequence of colors at sunset. A bridge reveals the relationship of a population with its landscape. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins also explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations—eccentric, ordinary, marvelous. How to Use Your Eyes will transform your view of nature and the mind.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

How does one read an X-ray? What do the markings on a butterfly's wings mean? Why do the colors in a sunset always come in a certain order? Elkins (What Painting Is) answers these and other questions in this engaging guide to little-noticed and little-understood elements of the natural and technological worlds. "It's about stopping and taking the time to simply look," explains Elkins. If you learn to look at things in the right way, Elkins believes, the world around you "will gather before your eyes and become thick with meaning." Much of his book focuses on such "universally unnoticed" objects as twigs and stamps; in one chapter he demonstrates how to identify trees in winter by the leaf scars on their twigs, while in another he shows how stamp artistry reveals crucial details about the time and place of its use. Elkins also probes more esoteric subjects such as mandalas and Chinese characters (which are vastly more complicated than popularly thought in the West). This variety of topic seems intended to catch a wide array of reader interests, but it eventually feels like a thin pretext for discussing wildly dissimilar material. Still, most of the topics are interestingDespecially the chapter on "ice halos" (magical rainbow-like rings that form around the sun during the winter)Dand Elkins proves himself an enthusiastic, fun guide. With dozens of full-color photographs, this is a great book for the coffee table. (Nov)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Scientific American

Elkins, associate professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says that our eyes are too good for us, taking in so many things that we tend to focus only on what is important at the moment. "What happens if we stop and take the time to look more carefully? Then the world unfolds like a flower, full of colors and shapes that we had never suspected." Whereupon he takes close looks at 31 things and at "nothing." (Looking at nothing, he observes, turns out to be quite hard to do: "Our eyes will not stop seeing, even when they have to invent the world from nothing.") Among the 31 things are an old painting (not for its picture but for its craquelure, which reveals much about the history of the painting), an x-ray, the periodic table and a sunset. The result is a book that is visually stunning and mentally stimulating.

Editors of Scientific American --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415993636
• ISBN-13: 978-0415993630
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #483,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Note: information on reaching me, on unpublished texts, etc., follows this bio.

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James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer.

He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Chicago; he got a graduate degree in painting, and then switched to Art History, got another graduate degree, and went on to do the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes).

Current projects include a series called the Stone Summer Theory Institutes, a book called The Project of Painting: 1900-2000, a series called Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Art, and a book written against Camera Lucida.

He married Margaret MacNamidhe in 1994 on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, off the West coast of Ireland. Margaret is also an art historian, with a specialty in Delacroix. Jim's interests include microscopy (with a Zeiss Nomarski differential interference microscope and Anoptral phase contrast), optics (he owns an ophthalmologist's slit-lamp microscope), stereo photography (with a Realist camera), playing piano, and (whenever possible) winter ocean diving.

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Contact information:


Hi, most everything about me, including unpublished texts, is here:

www.jameselkins.com

That site also has a contact form:

http://www.jameselkins.com/#page6

And that website also has my travel calendar, in case you live outside the US:

http://www.jameselkins.com/#page4

(Amazon won't let people link their Google calendars to their profile page: don't know why.)

I'm also very active on Facebook. (Amazon doesn't have Facebook links: I don't know why.)

There are also pages for the visual studies reader I am working on:

http://visualreader.ning.com/

And I am active on Library Thing:

http://www.librarything.com/home/JimElkins

PS, I also have an Amazon "aStore," a special site for buying books:

http://astore.amazon.com/jameselkins

(Why doesn't Amazon let me link to that from here? Don't know.)

And last, I also have an Amazon Listmania! list:

http://www.amazon.com/lm/2ULLGW8L1NVW7

(Amazon doesn't have a way to link this page to that list either. What's up with Amazon?)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting book, but not what the title implies..., June 9, 2001

By 

TheSongsofDistantEarth "O" (Oceana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Use Your Eyes (Hardcover)

I eagerly looked forward to this book after reading a review in the local paper. However, the title is very misleading. Although it is well done for what it is, it is not a book (right brain) about how to see, but rather is a (left brain) book about the rather interesting details of the object that you are seeing ...like what automobile forces have created the irregularities in pavement, or what the anatomy is behind a chest x-ray, or the geologic history of grains of sand... interesting, but not really a book about the process of seeing, and how to actually see objects. You may actually enjoy this book if you are interested in unusual facts and details about the world, but its not a book about the process of awakening your awareness...

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An etertaining user's guide to seeing, January 23, 2001

By 

Jeff Abell (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Use Your Eyes (Hardcover)

James Elkins has written a number of engaging books, and is an excellent example of a scholar who can be appreciated by the layman. His last book, "The Object Stares Back," was dark and provocative, an unsettling exploration of how we look at images. His new book is as uplifting as the previous was distressful. The book is divided into 2 sections, the first focused on man-made objects, the second to 'natural" phenomena. In part one, Elkins dissects such diverse things as cracks in old master paintings, or culverts, or special effects, and how to discover how they're made by simple observation. The section on nature includes some terrific information on sunsets, twigs, and the night sky. Never bossy or high-fallutin' in tone, Elkins conveys a sense of the wonder of vision, and the remarkable balance of simplicity and complexity in the world. There's an old quote about seeing the universe in a grain of sand; James Elkins can tell you how you, too, can look at sand and learn something about the universe in the process.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I OFTEN REREAD THIS, December 22, 2004

By 

William Meisel (Jacksonville, FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Use Your Eyes (Hardcover)

...particularly the chapter "How to Look at Oil Painings". The chapter is about looking at the crack pattern on the back of an oil painting and how you can tell a lot of information about the type of painting, and when it was painted, just from that crack pattern. Lots of the other chapters are excellent as well, but this one tickles me each time I reread it. I would recommend a prospective buyer pick up a copy at a bookstore, and read a chapter at random. If you like that chapter, chances are you will be delighted with the entire book.

P.S. Another book worth looking for that approaches this topic from a different viewpoint is THE AWAKENED EYE by Ross Parmenter.