The Art of Slow Looking

Unusual online talk from the National Gallery introducing the idea of slow looking.

Caroline Dawson and Holly Morrison explained the idea of taking time to look at a picture. They said that on average we look at a picture in a gallery for 8 seconds, I suspect I take a bit longer than that! They discussed the role that audio description can play in this and, taking Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” as an example, Caroline took us through various descriptions of sections of the work, encouraging us to close our eyes while we listened then to look at the area the picture she had described with a fresh eye.

I did find that there were things you looked at again, for me the cloud formations, however I found the words distracting. It felt odd to use a different medium to make you slow down and look at the work. Just stop and look. The idea seemed to be to make you look more closely and make up your own mind about the image and yet you had just been told what to look at.

I also realised that for me a lot of my enjoyment of an art work is about its story and the layers of meaning that are added by understanding its context. This is a beautiful work, and I’d not object to it on my wall, but it means so much more when you understand the story it depicts and who it was painted for and where.

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