u/Significant_Food5805

This is the Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (1887), at the Met in New York.

I have no formal art training. I love self potrait's in general and Van Gogh's ones in particular. Things I noticed after looking at this last time:

• The brushstrokes in the face seem to follow the shape of the face, but in the background they radiate outward around his head, almost like a halo.
• The beard is orange, red, even green. All separate strokes sitting next to each other and from a distance it reads as a beard.
• The blue jacket against the yellow hat. It feels like a deliberate choice. But I don't have a proper vocabulary for that.

So my questions for people who actually know how to look:

1. When you look at this painting, what do you notice first? What order do your eyes move in?
2. What am I not seeing that a trained eye would catch immediately?
3. And secondarily — if a layman wanted to train this skill, where would you start? A book, a course, a channel?

I'm not looking for the Wikipedia biography stuff (ear, Theo, illness). I want to get better at seeing/Looking deeper. Thank you.