Author: Stephanie Chatfield

  • Art Appreciation for Beginners

    Art Appreciation for Beginners

    Art appreciation can feel intimidating from the outside, full of dates and movements and names you’re worried you’ll pronounce wrong.

    But it’s not an exclusive club. It’s a conversation. And it is absolutely open to anyone who is curious.

    This is a gentle guide for people who want to begin with a sense of welcome. A soft invitation into a world that has shaped cultures, sparked revolutions, and whispered truths across centuries.

    Flaming June, Frederic Leighton

    Begin With What Moves You

    Start with the pieces that make you stop for a moment, noticing a feeling or a thought you didn’t expect.

    Maybe it’s:

    • a single painting you can’t stop looking at (or thinking about.)
    • a color that feels like home
    • a story behind a portrait
    • a sculpture that makes you wonder
    • or even a meme that made you laugh and realize, “Wait, this is art?”

    Open with your own spark.
    Let curiosity lead you.
    The best journeys always begin that way.

    Visiting one of my favorite works, Dame Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, painted by John Singer Sargent (Tate Britain)

    There Are Many Ways to Look at Art

    Some people approach art analytically, studying technique and composition. Others are drawn to symbolism and story. Many simply stand before a painting and feel a spark of recognition or stillness. Seeing art in person can be transformative, but not everyone can travel to museums, and that’s okay. Art meets us wherever we are: in books, on screens, in community spaces, or in the sudden moment an image lingers with us long after.

    All of these experiences are valid. You might decode a picture like a puzzle, or let it wash over you. Some works ask for analysis; others simply sit beside you, quiet and companionable.

    Art is not a test.

    It’s an experience.

    Stories Are the Easiest Way In

    Every piece of art was made by a person living through something, whether it was joy, grief, desire, fear, or simply boredom, their experience informed their work.

    Learning their stories opens a door for you, inviting you to take part of the dance between artist and viewer.

    Ask:

    • Who made this?
    • What was happening in their life?
    • What did they hope people would see?
    • What were they afraid people would see?
    • Who were they painting for?

    You don’t need to memorize biographies.
    Just follow the thread of humanity.
    It’s there. It’s always there.

    Img 8739 Scaled
    Madonna and Child, Westminster Abbey

    Details Speak Volumes

    When you look at a painting, try noticing just one small thing:

    • the way light hits a shoulder
    • the choice of a flower
    • a gesture of the hand
    • shadows that don’t quite match
    • clothing that tells a story

    These details are like whispers from the artist across time. Once you start noticing them, art becomes infinitely richer.

    Illustration from The Bells and Other Poems, Edmund Dulac

    Let Your Emotions Be Part of the Process

    Appreciating art is not only about intellect, it’s about feeling.

    Ask yourself:

    • What emotion rises first?
    • Do the colors comfort or unsettle me?
    • What story do I see here?

    You’re allowed to bring your whole, complicated human self into the experience. In fact, you must.

    Explore Slowly; No Need For a Syllabus

    One painting will lead you to another. One artist will introduce you to their circle. One movement will spark curiosity about what came before or after.

    Follow:

    • threads
    • fascinations
    • moods
    • themes
    • moments of “Wait, who is that?”

    Experience work not through rigid order, but through curiosity.

    Soir Bleu, Edward Hopper

    Start With Artists Who Make You Feel Something

    If you need ideas, these are beautiful entry points for beginners:

    They are welcoming artists, generous artists, who reward even the briefest attention.

    Art History Belongs to You Too

    One of the greatest myths is that art history is reserved for experts. The truth is that art has always been meant for all people. It was created to be seen, felt, interpreted, misinterpreted, loved, questioned, treasured.

    You don’t need credentials to experience beauty.
    You don’t need training to feel wonder.
    You don’t need permission to fall in love with a painting.

    All you need is openness. And a little time.

    A visit to Tate Britain

    The point is not to master a timeline but to join a lineage of looking, a lineage of people who believed beauty was worth paying attention to.

    Art meets you exactly where you are, there’s no pretense and no prerequisites. And if you allow it to linger with you, it will shape you in subtle ways, that may only whisper their presence years later.

    “The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that’s there. We shouldn’t think “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or “This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z.” Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn’t think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.” Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

    If you’re interested in digging deeper into art here at Guggums, you may enjoy The Legacy of Millais’ Ophelia or William Holman Hunt: Visionary of Pre-Raphaelite Symbolism.

  • Seeing Clearly: Pre-Raphaelite Thanksgiving Thoughts

    Seeing Clearly: Pre-Raphaelite Thanksgiving Thoughts

    Thanksgiving can be a complicated holiday here in America. For many, it’s a day of gratitude, connection, and familiar rituals; for others, it carries the weight of history, mythmaking, and stories that have been smoothed over until they no longer resemble the truth.

    The holidays arrive as a season of gathering for some, a warm anticipation of family and tradition, while for others it sharpens the quiet ache of the loved ones who are no longer here to share the table.

    The Convalescent, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Ford Madox Brown

    I’ve been thinking about this duality lately. It’s a tension between celebration and clarity, and I found myself turning, as usual, to the Pre-Raphaelites.

    The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were many things. Rebels, idealists, dreamers. But above all, they were committed to seeing clearly.

    They painted nature not as polite background decoration but as something fierce, vivid, and honest. Every leaf in Ophelia, every seed in Proserpine‘s pomegranate, every folded petal in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s luminous portraits was rendered with an almost devotional attention.

    For Pre-Raphaelite artists, beauty was not an escape from truth but a companion to it.

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti Proserpine Google Art Project
    Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

    It strikes me that this approach might serve us well during Thanksgiving.

    Rather than mythologizing the holiday, perhaps we can approach it the way the Pre-Raphaelites tried to approach the world around them:
    with honesty, reflection, and a desire to see clearly.

    Seeing clearly doesn’t mean rejecting the comfort of the day. It simply means holding the whole picture, with its history, its contradictions, its beauty, as an invitation to pause.

    It means acknowledging that gratitude and grief often share the same table.

    Giving ourselves permission to feel the complexity of the season without flattening it to a single, tidy story.

    And once we do that, we can practice a deeper gratitude. One that isn’t performative or perfunctory, but real:

    Appreciation for the people who gather with us, whether in the flesh or in memory.

    Gratitude for the small, ordinary beauties that sustain us.

    Thankfulness for the true, complicated, and human stories that broaden our empathy and connect us to others across time and distance.

    Millais, Autumn Leaves
    Autumn Leaves, Sir John Everett Millais

    In this way, Thanksgiving can become less of a myth and more of a moment: a quiet place to stand, much like the figures in Millais’ Autumn Leaves, watching the old year burn down into embers and letting ourselves feel both the melancholy and the hope of what comes next.

    This year, I’m choosing a Pre-Raphaelite Thanksgiving, not in decoration, but in spirit.

    I want to move through the holiday with openness, clarity, and a willingness to sit with complexity, to notice the beauty in the smallest details, and to approach the day with artfulness, intention, and a kind of gentle, honest reverence.

    Creation
    Creation, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones

    May your Thanksgiving be whatever you need it to be this year:
    a gathering, a pause, a healing, a remembering.

    I pray it will be full of truth, tenderness, and the courage to see clearly.

    And may you find, as the Pre-Raphaelites so often did, that honesty and beauty are never at odds. They illuminate each other, even in the deepest season of the year.

  • What if Princess Leia had stepped out of a Victorian dreamscape? 

    What if Princess Leia had stepped out of a Victorian dreamscape? 

    The moment where two worlds meet: the fierce, determined Leia Organa reimagined as a 19th-century muse, poised between galaxies and golden age romanticism. A little bit sci-fi, a little bit Rossetti… and entirely magical.

    I’ve been imagining Star Wars through a Pre-Raphaelite lens, where heroines are painted in luminous tones, surrounded by wildflowers, stars, and mythic landscapes. This has inspired some experimentation with short Star Wars inspired Pre-Raphaelite poetry lately, and it’s been such a fun creative crossover.

    Leia of the Shattered Stars
    Stephanie Chatfield

    She walks in grace where planets die,
    A princess forged of loss and lore;
    Though tears may glimmer in her eye,
    Her will burns brighter than the war.

    Her braided crown in starlight gleams,
    A vow unbroken at her core;
    She rises from her shattered dreams,
    To guard the hope she’s fighting for.

    And when the darkest nights unfold,
    Her steadfast spirit lights the shore;
    For Leia’s heart, both fierce and bold,
    Shall guide the stars forevermore.




    Read more in Pre-Raphaelite Princess of Star Wars

  • Taylor Swift’s Fate of Ophelia

    Taylor Swift’s Fate of Ophelia

    An allegory of survival instead of sorrow.: where Hamlet’s Ophelia sank beneath the river, Swift’s Ophelia is pulled to safety.

    In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is undone by grief, betrayal, and a world that denies her voice. The Pre-Raphaelites later transformed her tragedy into an unforgettable image: Millais’s Ophelia floating among wildflowers, a vision of fragile beauty and sorrow.

    Ophelia In Frame
    Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais

    Now, in her latest song ‘The Fate of Ophelia,‘ Taylor Swift reframes that story. Instead of surrendering to the current, she imagines a rescue from someone who arrives before the river claims her. It’s a powerful reversal: Ophelia as allegory, not of inevitable loss, but of survival.

    Swift’s song reminds us how enduring Ophelia’s symbolism remains, whether in Victorian canvases or modern lyrics.