Slow Painting: Contemplation and Critique in the Digital Age

Review

“Slow Painting roundly rebuts the notion that painting has been made obsolete by lens-based media or digital developments. On the contrary, Helen Westgeest argues for painting's relevance as a contemporary medium that is flexible, vibrantly political and endlessly renewing. This masterful, accessible book provides a rallying point for discussions of painting in the twenty-first century.” ―Lucy Soutter, author of Why Art Photography? (2013)

Product Description

The abundance of images in our everyday lives-and the speed at which they are consumed-seems to have left us unable to critique them. To rectify this situation, artists such as Daniel Richter, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Artur Zmijewski have demonstrated that painting is brilliantly equipped to produce 'slow images' that enable, encourage and reward reflection. In this book, Helen Westgeest attempts to understand how various forms of slow painting can be used as tools to interrogate the visual mediations we encounter daily.

Painting was expected to disappear in the digital age but, through interactive painting performances and painting-like manipulated photographs and videos, Westgeest shows how photography, video and new media art have themselves developed the visual strategies that painting had already mastered. Moreover, the fleeting nature of digital mass media appears to have unlocked a desire for more physically stable and enduring pictures, like paintings. Slow Painting charts how, in a world where the constant quest for speed can leave us exhausted, the appeal of this 'slower medium' has only grown.

About the Author

Helen Westgeest is Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art History and Photography Theory at Leiden University, The Netherlands., and worked as field editor for photography at caa.reviews. She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as two monographs and two edited collections. Her research interests are how the medium produces meaning in the visual arts, contemporary art, the theory of photography, and video art and artistic interactions between the East and West.