The art of “Slow Looking”: A conversation with author & art critic Peter Clothier
By MARRIE STONE
Photos by Jeff Rovner
Do you remember the last time you visited a museum or art gallery? How long did you spend looking at any given work of art? Close your eyes. Try to conjure a particular piece. Maybe start with something iconic and seemingly simple, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Can you recall any specific details? Forget about those famous eyes that follow you. What’s in the background? How is she holding her hands? Are there other artworks in your mental repertoire you’ve internalized enough to make your own?
According to research published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts in 2017, the average museumgoer spends only 27 seconds looking at a great work of art. Much of that time is consumed reading the placard beside the painting, rather than observing the painting itself. In our digitally distracted, media saturated, and information overloaded society, slowing down and taking time to appreciate art is…well…a lost art.
Click on photo for a larger image
Author and art critic Peter Clothier leads “One Hour/One Painting” sessions at the Laguna Art Museum. Last week he used Peter Krasnow’s 1977 painting, “Waterways.”
Art critic and author Peter Clothier understands the instinct to rush. When he began his career as an art critic back in the 1980s, he too hurried through exhibitions and gallery openings, sweeping his eyes across paintings and photographs to catch their gist before running home to write about them. “I understood I was not looking at paintings very well,” said Clothier. “I spent maybe one or two minutes, looking at the tag and going home to write about them.”
Around the mid 90s, Clothier was introduced to meditation, a practice he initially resisted as being too spiritual and not for him. He heard about a “sitting group” in Laguna Beach, who would sit for an hour in quiet meditation. An hour? Clothier congratulated himself for five-minute meditations. But the hour-long sit became the impetus for “One Hour/One Painting,” an experience that combines meditation with contemplation. After an hour with one specific painting, you’re guaranteed to understand it in ways you could never otherwise achieve.
Clothier, author of Slow Looking: The Art of Looking at Art, has been conducting his One Hour/One Painting meditations for more than 25 years, never using the same work of art twice. Last week, he returned to the Laguna Art Museum to deliver the popular experience using Peter Krasnow’s Waterways. By applying the practice to abstract (versus representational) art, the mind experiences more freedom to play. The eye can look for long stretches of time, still discovering new things to see. Clear the mental palette and look again. It’s possible that everything has changed.
Stu News talked with Clothier about his path from academia to art criticism to meditating on art, the epiphanies he’s experienced along the way, how he chooses the paintings and how this practice has changed the way he sees the world. As you might predict, Clothier is a thoughtful fellow with an insightful mind. The perfect guide for teaching mindfulness and the art of appreciating art.
Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Click on photo for a larger image
Clothier is the author of the 2011 book, “Slow Looking: The Art of Looking at Art”
Stu News: You began your career as a poet. Both poetry and art can sometimes feel intimidating. Some poems are hard to understand, and many paintings are abstract to the point of confusing. I suspect people go straight to the exhibit’s label because they’re searching for meaning. Do you see a connection between poetry and art?
Peter Clothier: Your question reminds me of what got me into writing about art in the first place. As I started to get interested in the work of contemporary artists in Los Angeles, I went to a gallery in the San Fernando Valley – a very small, unknown gallery – and I was utterly appalled. There were axes stuck in the wall, and jars of stuff growing and letters sprawled all over the place. It was a total mess. I thought, “Oh my God, is this art?”
Being a poet, the things I worried about tended to come out in poetry. I couldn’t let this go. I had it in my head, and it kept coming back to me. It ended up as a 30-page poem. That was my first piece of art criticism.
I got to know the artist, who saw the poem. When you’re an artist and you have a poem written about your art, you think it’s pretty nice. He loved it. He said, “Why don’t we do a book together?” So, we spent a long time putting together this huge book. It had an axe handle for the spine and a galvanized steel cover dented with the back of an axe. One page was a piece of tar paper and the next was something else. We printed every page with a poem. It was a huge project, but we only sold a few copies. One ended up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in their collection.
I tell you this story because that was my attitude. I didn’t understand contemporary art. It was way out of my comprehension. I just didn’t get it. I’d had reasonable exposure to Picasso, Matisse and a few other modern artists, Paul Klee and the surrealists. But the abstract expressionists were totally new to me until I went to my wife’s parents’ house. I saw Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Philip Guston. That was amazing to me. I get choked up thinking about how that moved me and really changed my life.
[Clothier’s in-laws were Michael and Dorothy Blankfort, who were among the founding members of the Los Angeles Contemporary Arts Council, a prominent group of local art collectors connected to LACMA. The couple donated more than 400 works of art to LACMA’s permanent collection.]
SN: From an art history perspective, then, you were entirely self-taught?
PC: I never went to art school. I never took an art history class in my life. I learned by looking at it. Looking and talking to artists. I love going to artists’ studios and talking to artists, hearing about what they’re doing, coming to understand more of what they’re about, and getting to know them as people. I love that part of it.
SN: But you had an extensive background in other academic disciplines.
PC: I was born and raised in England. I received my doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Iowa [in their famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop]. I came to Southern California originally as a professor of comparative literature at USC.
Then I met my wife, Ellie, whose family had this major art collection. Through Ellie, I got interested in contemporary artists and soon ended up more interested in art than literature. But I wasn’t qualified to teach it. I moved over to administration and became Dean and Student Director of the Otis Art Institute and, after they merged with Parsons, I took a Rockefeller Fellowship for two years to study the work of Charles White, an African American artist. Eventually I became the Dean of the College of Fine & Communication Arts at Loyola Marymount University. I left academia entirely in 1985 and, technically, haven’t had a job since. [Clothier has since worked full-time as a freelance writer, consultant and lecturer in the arts.]
SN: You had an epiphany at some point after leaving academia that led to your interest in meditation. Can you talk about that?
PC: I experienced some personal challenges that made me realize how I handled things in the past was no longer working.
At the height of this – New Year’s Day, 1992 – I woke up, went to my desk, and looked at my “to do” list. I had a list of telephone calls I needed to return. There were five names on the list and every single one was “Peter.” I thought, “Well, that’s strange. This has to be the year of Peter.”
A few months later, I was commissioned to go to Rome – to a place called St. Peter's City – to write about an art installation by the L.A.-based artist, Peter Erskine. It happened that another L.A. artist, Peter Shelton, was also having a show in Rome at the same time. There we were, three Peters in St. Peter's City.
I’d always wanted to see Michelangelo’s Moses. That great sculpture is at the opposite end of life from David. David is this big, young, spunky guy. Moses is this old, bearded guy. We’d been in Rome a few years before, but we’d never been able to find the church. This time, I was intent on finding it and we ultimately found it. It’s the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli (“St. Peter in Chains”). I was born on the Feast of St. Peter in Chains – August 1 – that’s how I got my name.
When we went to see the Moses, Ellie went off in one direction and I wandered in another. I found myself with a group of tourists looking down into a crypt chapel. There in that chapel is a reliquary. In the reliquary were Peter’s chains. There were Peter’s chains and my birthday. I stood there absolutely transfixed. It was a moment of incredible epiphany. I was looking at my own chains – that’s how it struck me. I realized I was living in chains. I understood what I needed to do. So, I came back to L.A. knowing I needed to work on myself and get rid of those chains.
Long story short, I was directed to a men’s training weekend, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I was distrustful of men, wounded in my own way and shameful of showing my wounds. It put me in touch with a part of my life I’d neglected – my emotions and my heart – which I’d never taken seriously at all.
SN: How has meditation changed your way of being in the world?
PC: It has improved my focus. It’s certainly improved my writing over time. I feel much more confident where I’m going. I allow myself to follow where I’m led, rather than trying to manipulate my work and telling my writing where to go.
It’s also calmed me down and taught me a little patience. I’m not a very patient person. Most of all, it’s helped me to stop and look at myself when something is going amiss, going off track in some way. Let’s say I’m losing my temper. The experience I’ve built up makes it easier for me to step back and look at what I’m doing. I can look at my life in a more equanimous kind of way.
I’m not a monk. I’ve never pretended to be. That’s not my lifestyle. But I’ve certainly improved my ability to stand away from world events and maintain my own equanimity.
Click on photo for a larger image
Clothier acted as a quiet guide behind the meditation and contemplation of Krasnow’s “Waterways”
SN: It’s interesting to have built such a sense of community and togetherness around a solitary practice.
PC: That sense of community is important to me. I have little lifeboats – like my One Hour/One Painting sessions, like my meditation group, like my Sitting Group here in Laguna Beach. I have a group of older men and we meet once a month for just an hour. We call it “Conscious Aging.” I’ve known these men, who I trust and love, for years. Getting to spend that hour with them is like boarding a sacred lifeboat. It’s important to maintain that sense of community.
SN: How do you choose the paintings for One Hour/One Painting?
PC: I’ve done everything from monochrome and abstractions to figurative paintings. It frankly has to do with size. It must be big enough to have 15 or 20 people sit and look at it. It has to appeal to me in some way, although I’ve dealt with paintings I don’t like at all and ended up liking them. And I’ve done paintings I really thought I liked and ended up hating them. Some paintings stand up and others don’t. This painting, for me, stood up well. There was a lot I didn’t begin to look at, even after an hour. There was a lot more for me to see than I actually saw. So, I look for something with some complexity. The one thing I don’t do is think about the name of the artist. I don’t usually mention the title of the painting, but it seemed appropriate with this one.
Click on photo for a larger image
“Waterways” by Peter Krasnow provided a lot of complexity for sustained contemplation
SN: Are there particular paintings you’ve used over and over?
PC: I’ve never repeated a painting. The first one I did was a Willem de Kooning painting from my in-laws’ collection called Montauk Highway. I can do it with anything. I sometimes joke that I’d be able to do it with the side of a car.
SN: Do the meditations differ depending on the painting, or are you fairly consistent in your approach?
PC: I always use the edges of a painting in some way. I also always find a focal point in the painting and take that long walk through the work in a slow and methodical way.
SN: The first comment I heard after the meditation ended was, “It went so fast. I’m surprised it was an hour!”
PC: When I first started offering the experience, I agonized for a long time thinking these participants – lawyers and doctors – would be sitting there, looking at their watches, wondering when it would end. I worried about it even as I was doing it. I was delighted when they reported that the time went so fast.
Click on photo for a larger image
Clothier commanded a nice crowd at the Laguna Art Museum last week
That’s the strange thing about time, particularly when meditating on a piece of art. It plays tricks on us. Even as the hour neared its end, there were still things in Krasnow’s painting left to discover. The group discussed the experience afterward. Folks noticed things I hadn’t seen and made observations I hadn’t contemplated. Most liked the painting more after the meditation. One woman didn’t care for it at all, but nonetheless found value in the experience. Regardless of the audience’s reactions to Krasnow or Waterways, it’s hard to imagine that painting won’t occupy some space in our minds forever.
“Slow looking” offers more than an appreciation for a given work of art, or a way to train the brain. The practice alters our relationship to the world. Art – or anything else for that matter – is no longer simply an object. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s observation in The Little Prince, when we devote our time to something, we make that thing our own.
To learn more about Peter Clothier and his work, visit his website at https://peterclothier.com/. Clothier hosts the One Hour/One Painting experience at the Laguna Art Museum. Follow the Museum’s calendar at www.lagunaartmuseum.org for upcoming events.