"Slow Looking"

In the New York Times, an article by art critic Michael Kimmelman is headlined At the Louvre, Many Stop to Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. However, he notes, "Artists fortunately remind us that there’s in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience" and he goes on to say:

Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found.... Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic."

Cast drawing class

Last Monday I began a class at Gage Academy to work on cast drawing. This method relies on starting the drawing with a pains-taking block-in of dots and lines, with repeated measurements and comparisons, always looking from the same position.

Although on Day 1 my results were feeble, I felt that something good could come of this. Evidence: the almost audible shrieking sounds as the two halves of my brain duelled for control.

"The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance."

My hope is that the harder it is, the more useful the hand-eye training. We'll see! Four more Monday afternoons to go.

(Quotation is from this book review.)

The Impact of the Unequivocal ("Silence is so accurate")

Oh and then there's Rothko: "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."

"Scatole contemplative": fugitive, exquisite, and secret

“Screwing things up is a virtue,” said Robert Rauschenburg. “Being correct is never the point."

From Josef Albers, Rauschenberg "gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool."

Hmmmm.....

"Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly ... Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title 'scatole contemplative,' or thought boxes."

Around 1959, Rauschenberg developed a "transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process ... created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret."

Fugitive, exquisite, and secret.....