Slow Looking: The Art of Nature, by Olivia Meehan review: 'a visual feast'
This book brings together a stunning selection of images inspired by the natural world, but the text would have benefitted from more careful editing, writes Roger Cox
A perhaps inevitable reaction to the fast pace of modern life, the slow movement has become such a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon that you can now find a book advocating the slowing-down of almost anything. Slow food came first (as a protest against the idea of fast food), and you could probably stock a decent-sized branch of Waterstone's with books about that, but there are also publications on everything from slow travel to slow making, while the idea of slow journalism has gifted us the wonderful Delayed Gratification magazine - published quarterly and proud to be "last to breaking news" since 2011.
Another head of the hydra-like slow movement is slow art, or what might more accurately be described as slow art appreciation. Since 2010, there has been an international Slow Art Day, in which participating galleries select a handful of artworks to display and then encourage visitors to spend five to ten minutes looking at each one. If that sounds overly prescriptive, then consider this somewhat alarming statistic from the introduction to Olivia Meehan's lavishly illustrated new book Slow Looking: The Art of Nature: "Research in art galleries and museums has shown that most people will spend around 8-15 seconds looking at a work of art." If that's really the case - and if, as Meehan suggests, the rise of social media platforms is continuing to have an adverse effect on our attention spans, with an average "swipe away mark" of 2-3 seconds - then perhaps some remedial action is called for.
Meehan's "Guide to Slow Looking", incorporated into her introduction, is brief and to-the-point. When considering a work of art in a gallery, she suggests, put your phone away, try not to read the explanatory text panel on the wall and give the work itself your full attention. "Examine the entire canvas, page, or object, the total surface of the thing. We can never fully exhaust the work with our eyes and our first look will reveal only part of what it has to offer." She also offers a couple of useful prompts, for example "find descriptive ways to name the colour as you perceive it", and there are notes on gallery etiquette too, the best and perhaps most universally needed of which is: "There is no immediate need to share your reaction or response with others. Allow it to settle."
It's a promising set-up, and the selection of images that follows - divided into "Land", "Water" and "Sky" sections - is not only a stunning visual feast but also a carefully curated one. As Meehan explains at the outset, she has attempted to break down the traditional Western-dominated narrative of art history by including art from all around the world. As a result, in the space of a couple of pages, it is possible to compare and contrast the ways in which ocean waves have been interpreted by 20th century British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, 19th century Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai and 17th century Dutch painter Pieter Jansz van der Croos. There are some thought-provoking guest essays scattered through the book, too - the one by Miya Tokumitsu, in which she takes a deep-dive into the representations of clouds by two different printmakers, is particularly excellent.
It's a crying shame, then, that the capitalised captions which appear throughout the book - presumably intended to inform and enhance the slow looking experience - are frequently banal and sometimes just plain wrong. Do we really need to be told that "just like other vital elements of nature, the sun nourishes all living beings"? Or that "when we think about the weather, we look to the sky for clues"? Or, indeed, that "bodies of water indicate a life force necessary for all beings"? Frankly, this kind of wishy-washy word salad has no place in a book by an author with a PhD in art history from the University of Cambridge.
Things get even worse when we get to the section on the moon and stars. Does the reader need to be informed that the moon "has the capacity to illuminate our night sky"? And then there's this: "The solar system hosts comets and constellations that spend hundreds of thousands of years in orbit." I’m pretty sure that constellations ("a group of stars which form a pattern" according to the Collins Dictionary) exist outwith our solar system, unless our own star, the sun, can be said to constitute a lonely constellation all by itself. However, if there are indeed plans for us to "host" - say - Ursa Major at some point in the near future, then I suppose somebody should get the kettle on. Never mind slow looking - some slow writing, slow editing and perhaps a couple of slow Google searches would have improved this book no end.
Slow Looking: The Art of Nature, by Olivia Meehan, Thames & Hudson, £40
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