Drink to me, drink to my health

Like any other new skill, looking at art gets easier the more you practise it, especially if you’re lucky enough to have a real artist wandering around the galleries with you.

But there is a downside. Slow learners often provoke an expert, particularly if the latter is a close family member who still unconsciously resents you, many years later, for thwarting his first artistic attempts to drink pink shampoo and stick his little fingers in the electricity sockets.

So when I try to impress my now fully-grown and highly capable son by dismissing an artwork in Edinburgh as ‘a feeble attempt to paint like Picasso’, he makes no effort to let me down gently.

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ he goes. My sister looks at the painting’s label and joins in merrily. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ she goes.

You’ve guessed it. The painter is Picasso and the painting, of the American photographer Lee Miller, is quite well known, if you know anything about art. The joke’s on me.

But here’s the thing. Slow looking, as my son tells us frequently, is about you and the artwork, initially at least. You study the painting or sculpture and wait. You feel and think. You give it time. You let it percolate. You don’t read the label. You don’t ask an expert what it’s about. You certainly don’t google its context or its history.

None of this is easy, particularly when you’re just starting out. And more especially when you’re looking at modern art, which usually has scant aesthetic appeal or resemblance to anything that’s ever existed in the natural world, except perhaps in the inky depths of the ocean.

You feel the need for guidance strongly. The urge to latch on to facts that can provide a foothold in a swamp of shifting shapes is hard to resist. But you must. You’re learning a skill for yourself, not swotting for an exam or gaining erudition to impress people.

Slow looking can be practised alone. But it’s hugely helpful to have a couple of companions, and the combination of deep-thinking artist and another smart beginner is, I think, just about ideal.

So having passed a couple of pleasantly stimulating, slow-looking hours in National Galleries Scotland: Modern 1, my son, my sister and I figure we’ve earned a seat in the walled garden, bathed in warm sunshine today, along with whatever goodies the attractive café in the basement can provide. (A vegan raspberry almond flapjack and an iced americano with honeycomb syrup for me, if you'd like to know.)

‘Let’s chat about what we’ve seen,’ my son says, when we’ve got ourselves settled around a heavy-duty picnic table. ‘One of my favourites was the Katie Paterson. What was it called?' 

'Future Library,' my sister reminds him. 

'Yeah, that impressed me.‘

‘Tell us what you liked about it,’ Sis says, and he looks to the sky for inspiration before beginning to talk, hesitantly at first and then, as his thoughts clarify and coalesce, with considerable fluency.

‘For me, good art is about the process …’ he begins