Cathy's Art Diary

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

All day event at the National Gallery looking back at the 1972 television series by John Berger “Ways of Seeing” which revolutionised how we view images. The day consisted of sessions where one of the programmes was screened followed but a response to it by a speaker. The first programme was followed by a fascinating discussion with the director Mike Dibb and the editor of the book which accompanied the series Richard Hollis. It was interesting to hear about the mechanics of the work. Responses to the other programmes came from art historians Griselda Pollock and Michael Rosenthal, Director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, and director of exhibitions at the Haunch of Venison gallery, Ben Tufnell. It was a fascinating and stimulating day but I did come away not that impressed by the programmes. I don’t remember them from the time so was not influenced by them then. With hindsight I am sure they changed a lot of things but I think they were so long ago that we ma...