#194 - Why You Should Consider Slowing Down
Practice Drawing This Draw-along.
A new book came out recently, Get The Picture by Bianca Bosker. It’s a fantastic book about art and the art world. Bianca is a journalist who submerged herself in the New York art scene because she wanted to understand modern art. She worked for galleries, museums, and an artist.
The book offers a fascinating insight into the art world. I’ll give a very high overview, leaving out a lot. For the whole experience, you need to read the book. It’s really good!
In the first part, she works for a gallery, and from that place, she learns that the value of a work of art is supposedly its “context”: which academy did the artist graduate from, which gallery sells their work, for how much are the works sold at auction, and which collectors are collecting their work. All that is not about the work itself, and she finds that unsatisfying and keeps looking.
The second gallerist she works for teaches her that it is about the work. You become better at selling a work if you stay with the work itself. She forces herself to notice five things in each piece and discovers that helps her sell the works.
She works for an artist, Julie Curtiss, and there, she really learns the value of seeing.
If you’ve been drawing from observation for a while, forcing yourself to look at things really closely, you may have experienced what she experienced: the explosion of things she suddenly saw that she had never noticed before; that white wall actually contains a rich variety of colors, little patches of green and purple.
That part wasn’t that much of a revelation for me, but it was great to see how a writer was able to explain this to a bigger audience. She writes really well.
Practice drawing this here.
When working as a guard at a museum, she had to stand at specific spots for forty minutes. There, she forced herself to look at one work of art for a long time, and when she did that, she started noticing new things about it.
She also advises doing that at the museum and then doing the same thing with something outside the museum, a hotdog stand, for example. You start to notice so much when you slow down to really look.
Slow looking. There is even a book about it, Slow Looking by Shari Tishman, which I have yet to read, so I won’t comment on it now. The Art Of Noticing by Robert Walker also talks about slowing down and looking at something for a longer time, noticing the things around you.
It’s the opposite of how we consume media on our phones: we doom-scroll image after image, and our brains become used to the instant dopamine hits, one after the other, every few seconds, and we cannot slow down.
I try to spend at least a few hours with just one reference image now, studying it, drawing it from observation and memory, looking, seeing where I deviated, and looking at what does or doesn’t work because deviating from the reference isn’t necessarily bad.
Like the hotdog stand mentioned above, there are many seemingly mundane things around you worth studying for a few hours!
This Week
I spent this week revamping my YouTube plans. My Art Flashcards are cool, and I want to raise awareness.
This video gives nineteen tips on how to draw more accurately.
As you can see in this video, I am rusty when it comes to talking on camera. I hem and haw a lot, and occasionally, I speed up and talk too fast. I will work on that in the coming videos.
All in all, it is not that bad, though. It’s designed to be listened to while drawing, and it works for that, even with the hemming and hawing.
Slow down. Look slowly. Draw. And then draw it again. A dozen times. For a few hours.