“To stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience.”
Have you ever wondered how many beautiful and enriching moments remain unseen and unlived due to the relentless busyness, multitasking and speed that permeates our modern lives?
And have you considered what the personal and creative downside of fast surface-level living might be?
Twilight Landscape with Birches, Anna Billing, 1849-1927.
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People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed. ”
Art of Lingering with Butterflies
Pots de Faience, Henri Le Sidaner, 1928.
I visit a small garden daily to eat lunch. There are many kinds of flowers and a flurry of fluttering white butterflies in the spring and summer.
Today I sit among the butterflies, watching them flitter and flutter, floating on the warm breeze as I eat my lunch.
I enjoy and delight in their company.
I don’t occupy myself with my phone or thoughts.
Instead, I linger and savour this small moment of calm, connection and beauty on a typical working day.
“Savouring is the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.”
The Art of Seeing Deeply
“Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon.
We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are.
The artist is a professional see-er.”
Look at the Moon, Leonard Weisgard, 1969.
The creative person's job, whether a painter, poet, performer or photographer, is to see the world with deep sensitivity.
Our job is to seek and discover the small moments throughout our day that might reveal a sliver of beauty or pastures of wonder that nourish our inner world and future creativity.
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
Prolonged Deep Attention
Sunrise, Maxfield Parrish, 1933.
Of course, seeing deeply and lingering on the details of what we encounter requires prolonged attention, which many believe is rare in our hyper-kinetic social media-distracted world.
And yet, we can choose how long and what to focus on at any moment.
Importantly, what we focus on hourly and daily shapes our inner world and creativity.
“An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”
When we go slow and tune into the outer world, we notice the many wonderful sensory elements that refresh and nourish our inner world and creativity:
Villeneuve, Henri Biva, 1848-1928.
Catching a waft of jasmine on the warm evening breeze.
A breathtaking pink and orange winter sunset.
Water droplets sparkling like jewels on green spears of grass in the morning light.
The joyful sound of a kookaburra call in the distance.
A cool breeze brushing the skin on a hot, sweaty day.
The fresh scent of eucalypt after a summer thunderstorm.
At twilight, watching a troop of fruit bats slowly and softly fly overhead toward their evening meal of figs.
Evening Atmosphere, Waldemar Fink, 1912.
Simply slowing down and not rushing onward enriches us, for we may experience a moment of delight, wonder, stillness, beauty, enchantment, consolation, calm, or connection.
Of course, we can also have slow sensory experiences visiting an unfamiliar section of a museum, art gallery, neighbourhood or market in our city or on holiday.
Whether spending an afternoon in a quiet dusty antiquities museum or slowly looking at 17th-century Dutch paintings, we never know what might delight us, spark interest, insights or creativity.
“Attention is the key to what we find; a particular kind of attention, looking that is informed by love. ”
What Monet Saw
Creativity and inspiration are potentially sparked by the many humble scenes we encounter daily.
Haystacks, Claude Monet, 1885.
Consider Claude Monet's Haystack series.
From his back door, Monet could see a field of haystacks.
Over time Monet noted the changing effects of light and seasonal weather upon the haystacks.
However, Monet didn't dismiss the common haystack as an unworthy subject to paint.
Haystacks, Summer, Claude Monet, 1885.
Instead, he saw the beauty of late afternoon sunlight falling on the golden haystacks—a moment of enchantment found in a familiar scene in the french countryside, and he wanted to capture that moment.
In loving the light & weather effects on the humble haystack, Monet captured slices of time that comfort, ground, and steady us in silence and stillness and remind us to appreciate and savour the small, unexpectedly beautiful things of our world.
“I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located.
”
To create in the moment as Monet did, or to later draw upon the memory of that moment, requires prolonged attention.
We must pause and tune into the scene or subject and soak in the sensory details (light, sounds, scents) that form the overall atmosphere.
Haystacks, Snow Effect, Claude Monet, 1885.
When we go slow, linger and savour the moment, we create a memory we can recall and draw upon for future creativity.
Like squirrels, creative people store away tiny moments of beauty and enchantment to nourish their inner world and future creativity.
“It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way.
So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”
The Tyranny of Multitasking
“Under the tyranny of multitasking, the uni-tasking necessary for the art of noticing has been exiled from our daily lives.”
When we are whizzing and multitasking through our day, what do we recall at night but a blur of activity?
What small pleasant, or tranquil, beautiful moments do we remember?
What beautiful and enchanting slivers of time have we stored away to inspire our creativity?
September, Erik Werenskiold, 1883.
“The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
With constant rushing and multitasking, we risk entering the studio or sitting at our desks and finding our attention scattered and jumping around like a jackrabbit.
As a result, finding the stillness needed to start our work is difficult.
We may even find our creative well empty or full of junk that inspires little but low-quality thoughts and images.
Winter Landscape, Svend Rasmussen Svendsen, 1900.
“This benefit of seeing can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully. ”
What we creatively express is influenced daily by what we see and experience.
“Art is fundamentally communication. We feel something and we want to give expression to it.
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Ultimately creative expression in all forms is a profound responsibility as we communicate and converse with our audience through our artwork.
“Painting should call out to the viewer….and the surprised viewer should go to it, as if entering a conversation.”
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Johannes Vermeer, 1657–1659.
When we invite our audience into our world, what kind of host are we?
What kind of conversation are we offering?
One that is calm, still, warm and delightful?
Is the world we offer rich with beauty and enchantment, providing consolation and wonder, generally making a positive contribution to the world?
Our paramount responsibility as creators is to consider what experience we give our audience.
“When we create beauty we somehow add to the light of society. Beauty is uplifting. It penetrates the density of what surrounds us and enlivens our world. ”
Consuming fast, noisy, shallow junk imagery is easy and effortless; like it or not, we swim in it daily.
View From the Artist’s Window, Martinus Rorbye, 1803-48.
But to discover a sliver of beauty or enchantment, often just outside our door, requires slowing down to see deeply, which is worthwhile for what we gain inwardly and creatively but also for what our audience is given and gains.
We will create heartfelt beautiful work with depth that lasts - that continues to communicate and not fade away.
Choosing the Slow Road
“Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context.”
St Tropez, Paul Signac, 1893.
As Carl Honore, the author of In Praise of Slow, notes, the “overall aim is balance of fast and slow - tempo gusto - the right speed for the moment.”
Honore describes fast as, “ busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality.”
While “slow is calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.”
Slow quality-over-quantity reveals moments we can linger and dwell in, savouring the minute details, enriching our inner world and potentially our future creativity.
“Art is a by-product of an act of total attention. ”
A Slow Afternoon
Honore recounts a wonderful story about an unexpected encounter with slowness in Rome many years ago.
“On a sun bleached afternoon in the summer of 1985, my teenage tour of Europe grinds to a halt in a quarter on the outskirts of Rome. The bus back into town is twenty minutes late and shows no sign of appearing. Yet the delay does not bother me.
Instead of pacing up and down the sidewalk, or calling the bus company to lodge a complaint, I slipped on my Walkman, lay down on a bench and listened to Simon and Garfunkel sing about the joys of slowing down and making the moment last.
Every detail of the scene is engraved on my memory: two small boys kick a soccer ball around a medieval fountain; branches scrape against the top of a stone wall; an old widow carries her vegetables home in a net bag.”
“When we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people.”
Pylon 1, Jeffery Smart, 2006.
Honore’s snapshot of an afternoon from decades ago illustrates the benefit of dwelling in and soaking up the sensory details and atmosphere of a moment.
Twenty years later, Honore vividly recalls the atmosphere and the sensory feeling of that afternoon in Rome.
The Steps, Palma, Jeffrey Smart, 1965.
That's what memories are, moments in which we have lingered and fully absorbed all the subtle sensory details: the atmosphere - the light, the sounds, the warmth of the sun.
The sensory elements transport us back to that languid, dusty Roman summer afternoon.
When we are busy rushing around and digitally distracted, we miss the many curious, delightful, and beautiful moments sprinkled throughout the day.
Alternatively, we go slow, pause and linger with the things that interest us.
Madeleine in the Bois d'Amour, Emile Henri Bernard, 1888.
And as we linger, a space opens for reflection, contemplation, insight and inspiration.
And those small moments are refreshing, wonderful, beautiful, possibly enriching and meaningful.
“It is not the total number of events, but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about.
Those things which only reveal themselves in contemplative lingering remain hidden. ”
The Flower Friend, Carl Spitzweg, 1855-1860.
And so Monet and Honore show that any humble subject or seemingly mundane moment may reveal an unexpected beauty or enchantment when we go slow, linger and savour the moment.
Finally, when we choose the slow road more often, we will see more, experience more, and deeply enrich our inner world and our creativity.
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