“Accident suggests randomness. Contingency suggests relationship.”

 In 1980, a young man from Bogotá arrived in New York City the day before Thanksgiving. Within a year he was homeless — working factory shifts, sleeping in movie theaters, and visiting museums because he loved them, and because they were warm. One morning he joined a line of job applicants at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and came out a guard. For years he stood watch over the world's great paintings, a notebook in his pocket, teaching himself to see.

Learning to See is the story of that education — from the galleries of the Met to a philosophy degree, from a first canvas in 1998 to the Dallas studio where Omar Asprilla paints today. It is also a meditation four decades in the making: on attention as a discipline, failure as a teacher, judgment as a form of character, and painting as a way of knowing — a practice Asprilla calls Provisional Art, in which every resolution remains open to further discovery.

Part memoir, part philosophy, Learning to See makes a quiet, radical claim:
that seeing is not a gift but a practice — one any life can take up, and no life ever finishes.

"Every generation inherits the visible world. No generation inherits the ability to see it."

Available in Hardcover, Paperback and Kindle. Review copies are available to critics, curators, and editors. Write to omarasprillaart@gmail.com.