Sunday Journaling Prompt

On looking closely

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I used to work in an art gallery, and one of the hardest things was getting people to just stand still for a few seconds to actually look at the art. We assume that children have short attention spans, but adults were just as bad. They came with an added layer of self-consciousness, and an embarrassment that they might reveal their ignorance. Better to rush through the experience and get to the gift shop, than take the huge personal risk of responding to the blurs on the gallery walls. 

But if they could be persuaded to do this for a minute, something shifted. After a few seconds,  their connection to the work deepened past the surface. Five minutes, and they would start to see all kinds of details they’d missed; 10, and they would experience changing emotions, starting to debate with each other with startling passion. Lifelong bonds to great works of art were formed. All they had to do was stand still, and notice.

A big part of my job was to give people permission. No wrong answers, I would say. What do you see here? I would often have to share my own silly perceptions (‘I always think that this bit looks like an angry seagull’) first, and then everyone would start telling me what they saw. I would ask what emotions a painting triggered, or how it might smell or taste. If I was feeling particularly impish, I would ask them if they liked it. Ignore the fact that it’s hanging in a gallery, I would say. If you saw it in Habitat, would you notice it? Would you hang it on your wall?

These were uncomfortable questions, and deliberately so. Great art isn’t always nice or pretty. I was asking those questions to get past that barrier of aesthetics or taste. Nearly everyone understood that art didn’t need to be something that would work as part of their decor, but they also didn’t have a toolkit to respond to it on any other level. As long as they could spend some time looking at the artwork, we could open up a dialogue and understand it more deeply. Permission had to come first. 

I thought about this when I was writing about awe for my post on Friday. The barrier  is so often that sense of permission to really look closely, to stand still and to experience. That pause makes us self-conscious. It’s wide-open space, and we don’t know what to do with it. We feel self-conscious. We feel silly. We suspect we won’t do it right. 

But those doubts too often stop us from forming the deep connections that we crave, and which would sustain us. So, for today’s prompt, I thought we’d try a close observation exercise that I’ve sometimes used in workshops. You’ll need a notebook and pen, a timer, and an object you find complex and fascinating - for example, a shell, a stone, a feather, or an Old Master. Let’s get into it!