Notes on Looking Slowly

People sometimes ask what I mean by looking slowly. The honest answer is: not very much.

It is an instruction I give myself when I do not want to begin a piece of work yet — a way of saying to my own hands, wait. Wait until the cup looks like itself; until the room has finished arriving.

In practice it usually means staying in one chair for an unreasonable amount of time. Forty minutes, sometimes. The difference between minute thirty and minute forty is, I think, the only real subject of these projects.

Slowness is not a virtue. It is just the time required for a particular kind of attention to take its shape.

Lately I have been wondering whether the same instruction can be given to a viewer. Probably not, and probably it should not be. Better, perhaps, to make works that are quiet enough to invite slowness without ever asking for it.