New England | Marsh 5 | Collect Art Print Here ▶︎
Last week, I spent fifteen minutes watching water move through a wash.
That is all. I laid pigment onto wet paper, and then I watched — the bloom spreading, the edge forming, the pooling at the lowest point of the sheet where the water carried the ultramarine to rest, in between the paper grain. Fifteen minutes. Nothing else got done. The emails waited, the business tasks waited, I haven't posted a damn thing on Instagram. I watched the water move.
This is not a story about productivity but about what attention actually costs and what it delivers.
We have a poverty of attention. The structural kind, that is, the logical result of living inside an information environment designed by engineers whose goal was maximum engagement at minimum depth. The result is a kind of skimming, a perpetual shallowness, a life lived in the aggregate rather than the particular.
You know many things about many things and have been fully present for almost none of it. Which is why I've been against sending links to people who seem to only gather them for later.
I am not exempt from this. I feel it in myself; even in the way I catch my own eyes moving across a painting I love too quickly, already ready for the next thing. The way I read the first sentence of an essay, my hand is often reaching for the phone. The way I walk past a morning light in my kitchen — the particular yellow-white of early March, through old glass — and don't stop, even though stopping would take three seconds and would change the character of the next hour.
Attention is a practice, the same way painting is a practice. You get better at it by doing it. You get worse at it by not doing it. It's not science.
Paul Cézanne worked the same view — Mont Sainte-Victoire — for twenty years. You think it is because he couldn't find another mountain? Because he hadn't yet seen it. He hadn't extracted everything that was there. Most of us would have been bored after the third painting. We would have been looking for something more interesting. Cézanne understood that interest isn't in the object but in the quality of attention brought to the object. The mountain didn't run out. His looking deepened.
This is what I mean when I talk about beauty as [...]
