SLOW ART

Slow Art is the perfect antidote for ourimage-saturated age. Exploring the work of a rangeof contemporary artists who use a meditativeprocess Slow Art argues for a counterpoint to thedisposability of contemporary culture. The authorasks why we as artists make art and what it mightdo for all of us - artists and viewers. Cancontemporary art reach beyond the need forentertainment and the shallow currency of fashionablesocial and political issues - or are we faced withthe seemingly endless variety of what has becomestandardised as International Biennale art: consumeddigested and discarded as readily as last year'swardrobe?Slow Art argues for a new art based on the hand andthe body unafraid of history and willing to talkabout what it means to be human. Drawing on objectrelations theory and examining the evidence of thework produced by a range of Australian and International artists the author looksat the words of artists in notebooks diaries andinterviews. Slow art also examines the work of Vermeer Sanchez Cotan and Francisco Zurbaran as exemplars of a meditative mode of painting.