About a decade ago I read an article about building community through making ‘bad art thingies’ together. The idea: A neighborhood host volunteers his home and kitchen table, and participants bring potluck food and recyclable materials — empty cereal boxes, fabric scraps, sequins, wrapping paper, old birthday cards, toilet paper tubes, etc.

The host provides basics like scissors, crayons and markers, construction paper, glue and staples, and decides whether to open up the creative possibilities by including hot glue guns and paint.

The process: Sit down at the table and make something out of the stuff. It could be an oatmeal container with glitter, two straws and sections of the comics taped to the side. No rules, except talk, eat, share supplies and techniques. Then take home your thingie. Or swap thingies. Toss thingie.

This made me unexplainably, wildly happy. I ran to the garage and pulled out an empty laundry soap holder.  I brought it into the studio and started covering the sides, using old wallpaper, stamped cardboard, scraps of old paintings I never liked, postcards, spiraled pipe cleaners, etc.

Breathless with the complete absence of the ‘inner snick’—I was in kindergarten again, smiling and singing away.  The humble nature of the materials freed me up. The only part missing was that thick paste with a paddle attached to the lid that smelled like wintergreen lifesavers.

My husband who didn’t read the article, saw my thingie and said, “Uh, honey, where are you going to sell that?”

I still have it. I invite you to make one. Feed the Beauty.

 If anyone knows where I can find the article mentioned above, please let me know.

Allow me to introduce myself.    Trained as a textile artist and fashion designer, professionally I am known as an executive in the world of retail.   Retail is not particularly known for its dedication to Slow, but rather is a world which thrives on and requires speed to market.  In my field it is all about knowing your customers and responding – quickly – to their needs.  To counterbalance  this addiction to speed, I have retained my connection to my training as an artist and have become a knitter – a serial knitter, in fact – throughout the past decade.

Thought by some to be the domain of grannies, knitting allows me to start something from the ground up, focus on the practice and the journey .   It is amazing to start with balls of yarn and Slowly, Slowly, Slowly create something entirely different.  You can carry that creation with you to multiple experiences, keeping the slow rhythm of knitting a constant during meetings, long plane rides, boring waits.  Dr. Perri Klass, in her book Two Sweaters For My Father: Writing About Knitting knitted her way through medical school, much to the chagrin of her mostly male classmates.  She claimed it kept her alert throughout lectures, a not-to-be-scoffed at accomplishment for sleep deprived residents.  It also kept her balanced and focused on the lectures.

With knitting, if you make a mistake, unlike in the rest of life, you get to rip it out and have a makeover.  The steady movement of your hands and need for counting stitches and rows provides a soothing counterbalance to chaos around and seems to allow true clarity of thinking.  Instead of the mind wandering, the mind seems to focus while knitting.  Some think we are not listening when we knit;  I have been reprimanded for knitting while attending strategic planning conferences.  Silly non-knitters.  If they only knew.
This is my introductory post on the concept and practice of Slow Design.  The posts will focus on artists who, whether they have named it as such, engage in Slow Design.  Those who work in the media formerly known as craft exemplify Slow Design, with their dedication to the connection between the mind and the hand.  Stitchers, ceramicists, glassblowers, furniture makers all practice the Art of Slow.  As I learn from them, I shall pass it along.

It is a strange task to produce a work that will endure beyond its maker - enduring physically and in infamy. On some level, this is the absurdity in which a painter engages each time he or she approaches the canvas. One dilemma in the face of this metaphysical crisis is pacing the construction of a painting. Since the lifespan of a painting after completion will inevitably outweigh the time of its creation, how long should one spend getting it ready for a life in the big bad world? As an artist, my paintings are little Pinnochios whom I secretly expect to come alive and pay homage to their creator. In truth the paintings are indifferent to me and I am only a small portion of their inanimate lives.
Painting is slow in nature. Fast painting is only relative. There is a critical delay between a thought or sight and its translation into paint. It is in that delay, while the artist’s intention is channeled through the archaic technology of brush, pigment and oil, that interesting inaccuracies occur. There are the deviations from reality that express a personal subjective view. Then there are the deviations from intention that belong solely to the mysteries of paint, creating an aura of otherworldlyness that is so attractive. It is the inefficiency of painting that makes it special and alluring. The inefficiency of the process is thereby sympathetic to slowness and often rewards it. Yet again, where along the spectrum of inefficiency should a painter exist? How slow is too slow?
This summer I saw a retrospective of an extraordinary realist painter, Antonio Lopez Garcia at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Garcia, still actively painting in his 70’s, is renowned for working on his paintings for many years at a time. One painting, “Lucio’s Balcony” took 28 years to complete and during that time the apartment where the balcony was located changed ownership several times. The duration of a painting may be lengthy but in the moment, Garcia is not slow at all. A documentary film by Victor Erice called “Dream of Light”, shows Garcia working tirelessly and swiftly to capture the appearance of a Quince Tree. Sustaining that heroic pace over long periods is what makes his paintings more a meditation on the appearance of time than anything else.
A friend of mine, Alvaro Altamar has been working on a master copy of a painting in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts collection since we attended a class there together in 2005. The original painting from which Alvaro is copying is John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne— a mythical nude sprawled out in the woods on a crimson drape. He has studied every aspect of the painting, accounting for Vanderlyn’s palette and working methods, visiting other versions of the painting and meticulously scanning the surface of the paint for its secrets. He has analyzed it like a scientist, making obsessive calculations of the inner geometry and painting studies devoted to particular color dynamics. He knows the Ariadne so well that at times it’s hard to separate the painting from an actual embodiment of the sensual maiden when he refers to it— the painting of the goddess has slowly become her.
I am reminded of Borges the more I think of Alvaro and his Ariadne. Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short stories that teased the idea of the infinite. In one story a group of scholars create an Encyclopedic entry for a fictional state with such precision that the place begins to exist in reality. The reader’s comprehension is pushed to exhaustion in a story where a writer attempts an exact recreation of Don Quixote, not by copying the text but by arriving at the same decisions that Cervantes did. Another story describes a book intended by its author to be infinite by including every possible outcome of a narrative as simultaneous interweaving realities. Borges’ metaphysical experiments underscore the wonder and beauty of mankind’s most futile endeavors. He celebrates inefficiency as a sort of liberation from time.
My opinion of Alvaro’s Ariadne repeatedly sways back and forth. At one end I am in awe of his dedication and continued fascination. At the other end I am impatient with his exercise and urge him to move on to new territory, to move on to original works. Alvaro does make other paintings, but the Ariadne has been a consistent draw on his time and energy. A year ago someone wanted to purchase the painting and Alvaro gave him a timeframe for its completion that continued to elongate until our economic recession intervened and the buyer backed away. Now Alvaro has no incentive to wrap up the Ariadne and can continue unhurried. It is a painting that hasn’t lost its initial purpose to copy a masterwork, but other ambitions have certainly been adopted as the piece becomes something far more than a simple copy. We joke at the sincere question of one the Academy’s museum guards who asked, “are you ever going to be done her?” Alvaro pontificates with a revolutionary zeal that his painting reflects his wish for people to slow down and really look at one thing with full attention.
In time all paintings will decay. They will crack and discolor and further deviate from their original intentions. This is not necessarily a bad thing—in fact, there is some satisfaction in seeing the age of a painting. The enduring slowness is revealed underneath the signs of age. The slowness of painting seems to open up an exception to time while still being tied to it. Paintings reflect the desire for a soul that will endure past our physical bodies. A painter’s separation anxiety is understandable because it is as if the soul departs the body when a painting is finished. I look forward to one day seeing Alvaro’s Ariadne long after the hard work is done—cracked and aged, resembling Vanderlyn’s. But then again, it might never be finished.

I made a drawing of a flower today. We all did, sitting down, scattered between bushes and rocks on Europe’s most western point, sea stretching out below us. We were on a Sketchbook Walk.

It was given as a very simple task…

Just look at the flower and don’t make up any ideas about it. Don’t know anything about it. Don’t think about it. Just look at it and know that as your pencil finds its way along the lines you see, the drawing will start making sense. You might get lost, finding your drawing doesn’t match with the way the leaves grow. Just continue, keep insisting on the searching and following of the eye along the flower. The pencil roams slowly, figuring out as it goes. An honest drawing, with no presupposing of knowing it beforehand and with no need to impress anyone.

The brain, addicted to adrenaline, and dull from daily overstimulation, is having a hard time. The eyes skip around the flower, looking for patterns, a system to simplify it by, get it over with.

‘yeah, I get this part, it goes straight, I’ll just skip to the yellow petals, now that’s a challenge”.

“I bet I can use my fancy markmaking and do this texture”…

Do it slower, draw painstakingly slow for a few minutes. Let your eyes move as a small ant would, walking across it. Let your pencil do the same line as your eyes, feel the exact coordination. There is nothing else right now, just this line happening, millimeter by millimeter. Just you and the flower.

Something happens, a shift inside. Like the flower is actually there, before me. No words are going through my mind anymore. It is just an intense following, physically feeling the point of the pencil making my eyes’ path real, pushing against the paper, stronger and weaker as the flower grows from thick stem to delicate petals. There is an intense joy, that I can only describe as related to childhood. It has no purpose and no knowledge attatched to it. It is an appreciation of something filling your sensory horizon, putting you right in the middle of time, where time dissappears.

I look at the drawing and I can’t believe how odd and beautiful it is. I didn’t do this..The flower did.

‘Craft, art, and design are words heavily laden with cultural baggage. For me, they all connote the profound engagement with materials and process that is central to creativity. Through this engagement form, function, and meaning are made tangible. It is time to move beyond the limitations of terminologies that fragment and separate our appreciation of creative actions, and consider the “behaviours of making” that practitioners share.’
David Revere McFadden
Chief Curator and Vice President, Museum of Arts & Design, New York
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/crafts/what_is_craft/

‘Slow is not a new concept in the crafts, it would seem that notions of ‘slow’ are epitomised by Craft and processes within craft production and life. The values that powered the development of twentieth century studio craft in Britain and informed its nineteenth century forebear, the Art and Crafts movement echo the ideas and values debated within the current Slow Movement. Truthfulness – to oneself, to materials, to humanistic principles of design, creative satisfaction, ethical production, process and sourcing of materials, were debated and practised by craft practitioners well before the advent of the internet and the current shifts we are experiencing in reassessing the impact of global production and consumption and the stresses it places on our lifestyles.

Many of the themes and debates within the slow movement persist within craft, both within our perception of the interests of many makers and the history and culture of studio craft. There are still generations of craftspeople for whom making and lifestyle are intimately connected and for whom the desire for autonomy is a significant motivation. The process and experience of making, of tacit knowledge that brings together the hand, eye, mind, the lived experience and bodily knowledge that understands material and goes beyond learned skill is one which is deeply connected and driven by personal value.

In 2007 we initiated a project for Craftspace www.craftspace.co.uk to explore the identity of contemporary craft within the philosophies of the Slow Movement. This project brought together some of our shared interests. A major ambition was to develop an exhibition, which could, through exhibiting the work of craft practitioners, who are responding to the ideas and values we are debating, and to present this for public discussion. This exhibition which we have called ‘taking time: Craft and the Slow Movement’ launches in October this year (2009) and will be touring around the UK.

A key process of the project has been to communicate our ideas – and to bring in the responses of others – through the blog: http://makingaslowrevolution.wordpress.com

We are hoping to regularly update you on how the project is developing and we welcome your questions and comments.