How to look at a painting

Studies of museum visitors have found that people often spend less than half a minute in front of a painting, including time spent reading the label. One of the simplest ways to enjoy art more is to look for longer.

A useful approach is to move from what you see, to how it was made, to what it might mean. Start with a first impression: what catches your eye, what mood the picture creates, and what you would say about it to a friend.

Composition is how the elements of a picture are arranged. Notice where the main subject sits. Artists often avoid placing it dead centre, and many use lines, such as a road, an arm or a gaze, to lead your eye around the canvas.

Look for shapes and balance. Triangular groupings, common in Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and Child, create stability. Diagonals suggest movement and drama, which is why Baroque painters used them so often. Empty space can be as expressive as crowded detail.

Colours carry mood. Warm reds, oranges and yellows tend to feel energetic and come forward, while cool blues and greens feel calmer and recede. Complementary colours, opposite each other on the colour wheel such as orange and blue, make each other look more intense when placed side by side, an effect Vincent van Gogh used constantly.

Light shapes how solid and dramatic a scene feels. Caravaggio and Rembrandt used chiaroscuro, strong contrasts of light and dark, to spotlight figures against deep shadow. The Impressionists, by contrast, painted outdoors to capture changing daylight and coloured shadows.

Painting on a flat surface means creating an illusion of depth. In linear perspective, developed in Renaissance Florence and associated with Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, parallel lines converge at a vanishing point on the horizon. Atmospheric perspective makes distant objects paler and bluer, as they appear in real air.

Not every tradition wants deep space. Medieval icons, Japanese woodblock prints and much modern art deliberately flatten space, and the choice itself tells you something about the artist's aims.

• Look closely at the surface: smooth, invisible brushstrokes, as in many Dutch still lifes, create an illusion of reality.
• Thick, visible paint, called impasto, draws attention to the act of painting, as in van Gogh's skies.
• Oil paint dries slowly and allows rich blending and glazes; tempera, made with egg, dries quickly and was common before about 1500.
• Fresco is painted on wet plaster, as in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.
• Watercolour and ink rely on the paper showing through, creating luminous effects.

Once you have looked carefully, ask when, where and for whom the work was made. A painting might be a religious object for a church, a portrait to show a family's status, or a political statement. Symbols often carried meanings viewers of the time recognised: a skull for mortality, a lily for purity, a dog for loyalty.

Your own response still matters. Art historians offer valuable context, but a painting can mean something different to each viewer. The best questions to finish with are simple: what do I notice now that I missed at first, and why might the artist have made it this way?