Slow Art - Further Thoughts

Here are some more thoughts to ponder from the blogosphere:

There are colored inks, stamp pads that do everything except print themselves (that’s next year) and pieces of paper printed, embossed, and covered in particles to look like glass, river stones (and rivers), drifting snow and hundreds of other things. Die-cutting and binding machines in pastels for fun studio use; machines that make stickers or add glue to one or both sides of anything.

Many of the classes require using these objects. It makes me feel old and out of date. I use colored pencils, paper, India inks and other things that have been around for years. I’m not against progress, I have a Mac and blog, for heaven’s sake. But what I noticed was that a lot of classes were about assembling more than creating.

[separate post] Yesterday’s post got me thinking about the huge variety of slow art, and the difference between assembling pre-packaged items and working with simple tools and creating on your own.

Quinn McDonald on her blog QuinnCreative

the notion of painting as something that benefits not from a “lifetime of experience” but from the more demanding “lifetime of practice”.

Broadbent Gallery, from the
introduction to their exhibit "Slow Art" in 2004

...very little of education seems to have as much time for play and experimentation. If you like, schools have become more product orientated, namely, in the meeting of targets, good grades and ultimately league table positions. If this indeed is the case, then perhaps there is a need for today’s artist to bring in the slower (and not so sexy) process skills into schools. Perhaps teachers now don’t need artists coming into schools to show how to quickly create quality product – after all, they can go on a course for that. Perhaps what is needed is for artists to bring their actual creative process into schools to show how they journey from one idea to the next, reflecting on what they have done and considering what they might do subsequently, as their art-piece gradually evolves. Perhaps teachers now are in more need to be shown how to slow down and to simply trust the moment and have faith in the natural evolution and progress of ideas. In short, perhaps every project should embed the concept of 'Where Do Ideas Take Us?' into their very process....

Robert Jarvis in his "Campaign for Slow Art"

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

Robert Hughes, quoted from Helen South's Drawing/Sketching Blog

What slow art is not. To be clear, slow art is not a distant cousin of slow food whatever that catch phrase of lifestyle magazines means. Nor is it simply a reactionary art of the network society. In an age of increasing connectivity and speed, it is tempting to interpret most everything as a reaction to this speed, as a reaction to the cycles of fashion if you like. The anti-fashion of slowness. But this is lazy thinking. The resistance to the speed of urban informational life explains only part of the appeal of slow art.

Marko Ahtisaari

Hmmm. Maybe I have to come up with a different "title" to my theme, then!