Essay Collection

Eye wide open

Strange power of images

by Saskia Beudel •

August 2025, no. 478

What Artists See: Essays by Quentin Sprague

Monash University Publishing, $29.99 pb, 288 pp

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Essay Collection

Eye wide open

Strange power of images

by Saskia Beudel •

August 2025, no. 478

I came to this book with a question: how will the author select the dozen or so artists upon whom he focuses? Of all the artists in Australia and beyond, why these few? One answer is pragmatic: What Artists See is based, in part, on previously published essays, several from The Monthly, others in exhibition catalogues. Sprague’s book might be understood, then, as an assemblage of previously dispersed parts, a drawing together of discrete pieces under one title. But it is also far more than this.

Saskia Beudel

Saskia Beudel is the author of A Country in Mind (2013) and Curating Sydney (with Jill Bennett [2014]), and the novel Borrowed Eyes (2002). In 2022 she was awarded the Copyright Agency’s Fellowship for Non-Fiction Writing. Her books have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Dobbie Literary Award, and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Her essays and articles have been widely published in Australia and internationally. She has a PhD from UTS and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Sydney and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU in Germany.