WELLBEING
What is slow looking ?
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston , Massachusetts , a group of medical residents gathers in front of a large painting . Their purpose is to develop their observation skills through looking at art . A museum guide tells them to look closely at the painting and talk about what they see . As the conversation unfolds , the residents are surprised to discover how differently they each interpret the painting , even though they are all drawing on the same visual clues . The experience causes them to think anew about their own clinical practices .
Tishman ( 2018 ) uses this example of an exercise in looking slowly . Other examples , in a school context could be :
• Isolating small areas of an image to encourage students to notice and recall visual information .
• Making students carefully draw and label an anatomical diagram rather than simply supplying them with one .
• Providing a scaffolded approach to responding to an image or text . Students are required to make notes in response to an image / text under a variety of categories .
Slow looking
Charley Openshaw , Head of Art
Introduction
My interest in the practice of looking slowly was fired by a Project Zero conference in Washington some years ago . Shari Tishman spoke about the profound benefits of “ taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance ”. Keen to implement what I had learnt on my return to Sevenoaks , I soon realised that in the busy hurly burly of life in the Art Department , we are always trying to race to meet a deadline , finish a painting before an exhibition or sign off a piece of coursework ; the last thing on our minds was doing anything slowly . I came to realise that the benefits may be more keenly felt in two areas : wellbeing and academic recall . Whilst of course my approach has been largely informed by my experience as an art teacher , I am more interested in how slow looking can be embraced to enhance these other areas .
• An alternative to the above , Tishman suggests ( p . 13 ) open inventories as a way of encouraging an “ encyclopaedic-like ” approach , where students document everything they notice in an image or document .
• Looking at objects through a microscope “ forces ” slow looking .
• Tishman ( p . 24 ) suggests juxtaposition as a strategy where the objects are contrasted and slow comparison reveals meaningful information . For example , plant specimens can be juxtaposed to reveal differences and similarities between species .
Slow looking drawing classes
Scheduled for the summer term , The Royal Drawing School ( RDS ) have been collaborating in the conception of a series of life classes , with an emphasis on slow observation of the human form . Now scheduled for the Michaelmas term , the idea is to offer these classes to both staff and students , specifically to those with little or no experience of drawing . During the period of remote learning in the summer term , as a preamble to this , I offered a series of short lunchtime sessions to a group of staff . Diverse in terms of subject , the group of teaching and support staff undertook a range of looking activities . Drawing was the primary medium of recording the response to observation but the process and emphasis was on looking slowly and carefully .
28