Simply Looking is a selection of drawings from the career-spanning sketchbooks of Jane Freilicher, (b. 1924, d. 2014), the influential American painter of vivid landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes and interiors. The title is adapted from a passage in the James Schuyler poem "Hymn to Life": [...] The sap rises. The trees leaf out and bloom. You / Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives / Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of / Simply looking.

A friend and muse to several figures of the so-called New York School of Poets, including Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, Freilicher developed her work amid the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, and eventually embraced what the artist described as the voyeuristic pleasure in seeing and painting her immediate world. Included among the artist’s well-known motifs are early figure studies, created during her formative instruction with Hans Hofmann, and drawings relating to the artist’s lesser known paintings of nudes from the 1960s. Like a poem itself, this special zine, developed with the Estate of Jane Freilicher, compresses the artist’s vast drawing practice into a savorable and surprising format, a small window into a lifetime of looking, drawing and painting.