Stop rushing through art galleries. Spend 10 minutes with just one masterpiece instead
We're extraordinarily lucky in Australia that the permanent collections at our state galleries are free to attend. Our public collections are just that: owned by the public, belonging to us, there for us to enjoy.
When I was growing up, the Art Gallery of South Australia's kids program had a sort of hidden picture game where you had to find objects in various paintings around the gallery. More than anything, that program taught me that the gallery space was open to me.
As an adult, I love a day planned around the gallery, and I can spend hours with the collection. I'll visit the same exhibitions again and again, noticing new paintings every time – or new things in paintings I've spent hours with previously.
But there is beauty in building a visit around one work of art: popping your head into the gallery during your spare half-an-hour, to spend some time with an old friend.
Mark Rothko is best known for his colour field paintings, large-scale canvases, swathed with colour. In these expanses of hues, Rothko somehow manages to capture the depths of our emotional worlds.
The Rothko at the NGV is titled Untitled (Red), and was painted in 1956. The wall text features one of my favourite quotes from the artist about his work: 'I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.'
Standing in front of it during my recent visit, I found myself dwarfed by the painting. A thin dusky red barely obscures the canvas. Three squares of colour sit on top: a rich blood red, a light rose pink, and a terracotta orange. I stood close enough that it took up my whole field of vision; I stood back to take it all in at once.
A few people wandered in and out of the room – in and out of my awareness – but I just stood there, quietly contemplating my emotions. A sense of peace, calm.
Happiness researcher Arthur Brooks says that when you look at art, 'your perception of the outside world expands'. It unlocks what Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman calls our panoramic vision, where the gaze relaxes and widens to take in the peripheries. It is the opposite of the stress response, where our pupils constrict and our field of vision narrows. Art opens us up to the world.
I think about this panoramic vision when I visit the Rothko; as I have many times in many galleries in front of many works of art. When you stop in front of one piece, you allow everything to slow down. It can feel like you're being subsumed, or embraced. Everything else fades away. You can exist fully in the moment: just you, and this work of art.
I have my favourites at other galleries around the country. On a work trip to Canberra, I visited the Skyspace installation Within, Without (2010) by James Turrell at the National Gallery of Australia every sunset. The day John Olsen died I went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to stand in front of his incredible painting Five Bells (1963). I'm always overwhelmed by the intelligence in the seeming simplicity of Emily Kam Kngwarray's Awelye II (1994) and Awelye V (1994) paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia. I love the way different art works take over the Watermall at the Queensland Art Gallery, the water changing the shape of the art, as the art changes the shape of the water feature. I have only ever been to Perth in the height of summer, and so Mr Ngarralja Tommy Way's Warla, Flat Country (2021), which brings the heat of the desert into the gallery, is the work I most remember from my time at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Not every trip to the art gallery needs to be a huge outing. What a privilege – and a joy – it is to just go and spend whatever time you have to hand with one work of art. A painting, a sculpture, a video piece. Our public collections belong to us: we should remind ourselves of this by stopping by, even for 10 minutes, as often as we can.
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