Instructions

• Choose a picture of a masterpiece painting (you can see it in detail on official museum websites or even Wikipedia) and watch it from a closeup, familiarising yourself with its content. Spend around 30 seconds on that.
• Shift the focus to the view from your window. Look as far as possible. Try to recognize the furthest buildings, trees, and hills. Spend around 30 seconds on that.
• Go back to the painting, now contemplate its shapes, colours and composition. Is it aesthetically pleasant? Why yes or not? Take around 1 minute.
• Change your focus on the landscape behind the window, remember to look far away. Recognize different shapes, colours and composition. Is it aesthetically pleasant? Why yes or not? Around 1 minute.
• Now painting again. Think about the content, what it could mean for the artist, the audience of its times, and what could mean nowadays. Around 3 minutes.
• Get back to the view behind the window, think about what you see, what kind of buildings and infrastructure, what function they have, is it useful. Around 3 minutes.
• Last shifts of focus, 15 seconds on the painting and 15 on the window (remember to finish up by looking far away).

Advice

You can customise the timing of your focus, just remember to switch from far landscape to close painting several times. Wikipedia has access to high-quality images of famous paintings and when downloaded, they can be zoomed in to see them in detail.

You may choose one of your favourite paintings and change it every day. You can also create a structure and schedule it so that once a week you do a "Refined me" exercise with different art periods from prehistoric cave paintings, antic, medieval, renaissance, mannerism, baroque, neo-classicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, symbolism, expressionism, cubism, abstractionism, pop-art, minimalism to postmodernism. For example, we recommend Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (on Wikipedia you can find very high-resolution images).