SLOW ART: PAINTING AND DRAWING AS A MEDITATIVE PROCESS

by Amanda Robins

Slow Art is the perfect antidote for our image-saturated age. Exploring the work of a range of contemporary artists who use a "meditative" process, Slow Art argues for a counterpoint to the disposability of contemporary culture. The author asks why we, as artists, make art and what it might do for all of us - artists and viewers. Can contemporary art reach beyond the need for entertainment and the shallow currency of fashionable social and political issues - or are we faced with the seemingly endless variety of what has become standardised as International Biennale art: consumed, digested and discarded as readily as last year's wardrobe? Slow Art argues for a new art based on the hand and the body, unafraid of history and willing to talk about what it means to be human. Drawing on object relations theory and examining the evidence of the work produced by a range of Australian and International artists, the author looks at the words of artists in notebooks, diaries and interviews. Slow art also examines the work of Vermeer, Sanchez Cotan and Francisco Zurbaran as exemplars of a meditative mode of painting.

140 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2009