Many years ago I encountered for the first time the idea of “slow food”, as a riposte to “fast food”. (It was in the north Italian city of Forli, where I was taking part in a conference.) The idea, as you probably know, is that instead of choosing food because it is instantly available we would be better off going for meals that are prepared and cooked with care and attention to quality, even if that does take time. It’s an idea I’ve since taken to heart, and these days very rarely use any “fast food” outlet. I really have to be desperately in need to a meal in such places.
The BBC has taken up the idea in the form of “slow radio”. Every Saturday morning (I think) there is a brief interlude in which listeners are offered the chance just to listen to some sound that is soothing, relaxing, and undemanding. These can be found anywhere, and typically are sent in by listeners rather than produced by the BBC staff. I think that the sound of eggs boiling was a recent one, and the sound of the breathing of a sleeping dog. The purpose of these snippets of sound is to interrupt deliberately the atmosphere of frantic and stressful demands on our imagination made by their context in a major news broadcast. The very idea of “the news” involves necessarily a headlong rush from one piece of information to the next. No! Let’s just stop, and listen to something which holds our attention for the simple reason that it is a pleasant noise. I like “slow radio.”
Today I have begun to generalise the concept to include “slow art”. Although I came back from our Italian trip with a couple of interesting ideas for pictures I have done nothing with them. In part, up until now, I have interpreted this lack of creative activity to the regrettable pressure of other things. “Why am I not painting?” has niggled away at the back of my mind. “I call myself an artist, don’t I? Well: get on with it!” Then today I realised that, in fact, neither of these ideas is clearly focussed as yet. I am sure there is potential for something interesting there, but rushing into activity is not going to clarify the purpose of these projects, and certainly it will not uncover the emotional centre of either of them, without which they will not be worth doing. It is actually positively important that I slow down.
Thinking about this, I fell to reflecting on one of my pictures that I had the chance to see again, after a long separation, visiting our son in Plymouth over Christmas. It is a very early piece, that depicts a rock-face in the Lake District, known as White Gill. (That must have been done more than twenty years back.) I really like the picture, and indeed my wife remarked on how good she thought it is. On reflection, it is good not just because it is an accurate depiction of the place, but because I have managed to infuse into it an emotional charge, that has something to do with the light. Learning from that, I realise that one of the great things about “slow art” is that it does permit the emergence of that emotional element. That can require, often, a good deal of time.
Before Christmas I was working on a piece I had begun some time previously, and then set aside. It always felt incomplete, and the reason for this, I came to realise, was that it was complete as an idea, but the emotional core of it had yet to emerge. I’m still not sure that it has. I need to give it time, and to become reconciled to the importance of slow art.