Looking at Paintings: Richard Arthur Wollheim

...paintings do not instantly disclose their meanings; and Wollheim has left us an amusing description of his own method of looking at paintings: "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at."

Guardian 5 Nov 2003

Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May 1923 – 4 November 2003) was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.

Plates: Jan De Vliegher

www.mikeweissgallery.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T4ZW8NZOeA&feature=youtu.be

Tal R

"Painting is a zombie medium. As a painter you are a little bit like a guy showing up in a tiger suit at a techno party. So your dress code is outdated, but you might still have the best moves on the dance floor."

Interview with Mika Hannula on Stop for a Moment
http://www.nifca.org/stopforamoment/presence/artist_tal_r.html

Marshall McLuhan

"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

In Wanderlust, I wrote, “This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.”

http://believermag.com/issues/200909/?read=interview_solnit

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you'll park or capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

I’m Just Walkin’... Matt Green

... those who walk for the sake of walking are called on to distinguish themselves from ordinary pedestrians. In Teju Cole’s recent novel “Open City,” the narrator, a psychiatric fellow at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, takes aimless walks “as a release from the tightly regimented mental environment of work.” The British novelist Will Self — who has published two books on psychogeography, or the effect of topography on the human psyche — once trekked 20 miles from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. “I walk,” he said, “in order to somatically medicate myself against the psychosis of contemporary urban living.”

Mr. Green’s reasons are less succinct, though similar in spirit. “People tend to narrativize neighborhoods in New York, saying such and such a place is hip, or poor, or ugly or barren,” he said. “This walk is a way of understanding a place on its own terms, instead of taking someone else’s word for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/nyregion/matt-greens-goal-is-to-walk-every-street-in-new-york-city.html?_r=1

Painting the Westerns in Georgian Bay

scale

If you get the scale right, size doesn't matter. 

—John Chamberlain (rough quote)

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact/watch?view=item&catid=713%3Acurrent-exhibition-videos&id=36%3Ajohn-chamberlain-choices

William Nicholson

Diebenkorn ink drawings

Here
Mara Korkola
Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton
March 17 – March 31 , 2012

No place 245

Why Not? 15 Reasons to Live

Author Ray Robertson explains his rationale for why most self-help books are basically bullsh*t. His suggestion? Try some Montaigne instead. Or maybe Ray's own new book, 'Why Not? 15 Reasons to Live'.

www.cbc.ca/strombo/books/the-list-five-reasons-why-most-self-help-books-are-bullsht.html

The urgency of slowing down

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

...

A series of tests in recent years has shown, [Nicholas] Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

Pico Iyer

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2