What is Slow Art / Slow Painting?

Looking back, I think I always knew, deep down in my bones, that I was slow. But for a very long time I refused to admit it. As slowness is traditionally linked with dullness, laziness and lack of power. I tried to speed up my whole being as much as I could to fit into other people's expectations. (By now I know, because of conversations I had with young mothers, that it looks like every child born has its own personal sense of time and pace and you will be in real trouble if you try to push your time concept upon your baby.)

Maybe because I seldom felt that I did fit in properly I always looked out for different approaches on time and life in general. That was when I discovered the Slow Movement. Which I came across by pure accident while my studies at art school in the movements earlier days in 1998.

The movement in its early phase generally advocated a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. And it began with Carlo Petrini’s protest against the opening of a Mc Donald’s restaurant in Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986, that sparked the creation of the Slow Food Movement. The movement started out as a lifestyle expression and protest, concentrating on food, crops, rituals, consumption and regional products as well as food preparation. And it slowly formed into a worldwide movement which now includes almost every aspect of cultural and social life.

To explain things a bit more clearly, let me paint you an image. So meeting in a small Italian village, where grandma did prep homemade pasta all day and an uncle brings fresh truffles, (which he did collect in the woods with his dogs in the early morning), and aunty Paola would bring freshly picked juicy tomatoes from her garden, you would witness them sitting at a huge wooden table and enjoying a long family gathering. If you envision something like this, you'd be right at the core of the origin of Slow Movement. In its very beginning, environmental issues weren’t as important as the focus on food, regional high end products, crops and rituals. 

By now, slow movement has spread widely and has infiltrated areas of life like fashion, travel, science, technology, media, marketing, parenting, gardening and education. Just to mention a few. And it infiltrated the field of arts in two very different ways. Slow art and slow painting.

Slow art is mainly dominated by the art consuming and curating world. Not by artists. 

Slow Art Day is a global art event, which was founded by Phil Terry and officially launched in 2009. During one day in April each year, museums and art galleries across the world host events focusing on experiencing art intentionally slowly. The movement aims to help people discover the joy of looking at art, typically through observing a piece for 10–15 minutes, often followed by discussion. Slow art aims to slow down art reception in museums, to enhance the visitors' experience and change ways of observation. Slow art is meant to train people to really see, enjoy and stay in the present moment. 

Slow painting is a completely different concept and in the first place practiced by artists.

It explores ideas around the concept of ‘slowness’ in producing art and what it might mean in relation to contemporary painting, drawing, sculpting and concept art. How slowness might be present in the making of the work, how the work might reveal itself slowly, or how time as a concept or movement might be involved in imagery or topic. It’s interesting that time is a man made construction which behaves quite differently in terms of physiological perception. We all have experienced racing time and time standing still.

Acting as a counterbalance to an increasingly accelerating world, slow painting offers a space of pause, contemplation and gradual unfurling, for both the painter and the viewer and plays a major role as a rewarding repository of time. So slow painters offer spaces of pause, contemplation and stillness.

Recently I did some research on Instagram and I found proof that slow painters start to focus on environmentally friendly materials and regional products. Just like the original slow movement did. But each and every single artist focuses on different aspects, as the slow movement is not organized by one single institution. A fundamental characteristic of the slow movement is that there is no set of uniform rules, and its momentum is maintained by individuals who form an expanding global community. Its popularity has grown considerably since the rise of first protests in Europe, with slowness initiatives spreading worldwide.