SeeSlow

Submitted by Rob Swainston and Alison Dell, Artists

Taking its lead from the Slow Movement (Slow Food, Cittaslow, etc.), artist team Alison Dell and Rob Swainston propose ‘SeeSlow’.  SeeSlow is a plein air drawing practice that slows down the speed with which we process images.   In the age of faster and faster consumption of images sitting down and spending concentrated time to look at and notice one’s environs is a civic act, an act that connects us more firmly to the neighborhoods and to the people with which we live.

A SeeSlow civic action workshop challenges the speed in which we consume the visual landscape.  This is accomplished through a drawing.  Within the SeeSlow action, each participant will find a vantage point and begin to consider their place in the world through a detailed observation of their environment.  The location of the workshop can be infinitely flexible: a neighborhood corner or community garden; Socrates Sculpture Park, The Noguchi Museum, or the surrounding neighborhood of Long Island City.   The size of the group could range from just one person, to upwards of 20 people.  No background in drawing is required for the SeeSlow action.  Anyone who can use a pencil can SeeSlow.

A SeeSlow workshop begins with a short lesson on some of the basics of drawing.  This step is fairly fast and is intended only to make people feel more comfortable drawing from life.  This could include such basics as setting the parameters of your drawings or defining how objects relate to each other in space.  The next step is to find a place to sit and draw from what we see.  The drawing itself is not the primary object of the practice.  The aim of the practice is both inter- and intra-personal.  On the intra-personal (or introspective) level, drawing slows down the rate at which one consumes the visual world.  Slowing down one’s rate of visual consumption helps one connect to the physical world.  On an inter-personal level, this connection to one’s environment makes social interactions more likely.  When you draw in public people will stop and come look at what you are doing and at what you are drawing.  At this point the simple act of drawing becomes a social act.  The person drawing is approachable in a way that people ‘just hanging around’ are not.  This simple act of public drawing has just opened up a space for ‘real’ social interaction and ‘real’ connectedness to the environments in which we live.

A detailed lesson plan for using SeeSlow with a class of students can be found here.

Rob and Alison have been leading SeeSlow meetups in New York City and Philadelphia; for more information visit www.seeslow.net.