Dave,
I love a vacation where one stays in one place for a couple of weeks. I do agree that tourists in general and that includes museum walkers, move fairly fast...but for me it is just art overload. I cannot really concentrate with all those other people around me and there is a lot of bad art out there that I don't care about, including a lot that is in museums. Just because it is old does not mean I like it. I can understand its historical importance and relevance to the development of a particular style of art...but I don't want to spend that much time with it.

On the other hand, there are many I do want to look at and I do spend a little more time with those, especially if I can sit down occasionally. I think I spend more time looking at books than real art and the sitting down might be part of it! ha. I do remember standing in awe of pieces of art, but don't think it was longer than a few minutes for anything. I also remember being pretty disappointed in a lot of it.
Now for my favorites, who never disappointed me...Sargent was sure one, Picasso another and interestingly enough I saw a huge retrospective of Georgia Okeeffe at the Dallas art museum and was blown away. Books never did them justice. She was not an artist I would have thought could move me with a painting. I think my all time favorites of your work are the 4 beauties, but honestly it is hard to choose. The new work is so special because it is your own imagery. I like that a lot.I think I spend more than a minute with each one, but of course I am sitting down! And I do appreciate the time involved!
Barbara

I agree with the sitting down!
Seems like we (my husband and I) are always have too many plans and are in a hurry.
When I go to an exhibit I always get the audio-tour. You have to stand in front of the piece for a minute or so to listen to what it's telling you. It will usually point out some interesting facts that you might not be aware of also. This gives me a few minutes to stand and really look.
Part of the problem with popular exhibits is the sheer volume of people. I always feel I have to look and get out of the way so others can see. I like to get up close and look at the brush strokes, or in the case of a print see if I can figure out how it was made. So, if I'm that close I'm definitely blocking someone else's view!

In the last month, my wife and I have been to several museums to see works by Dove, Titian, Homer, O'Keeffe, Prendergast, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Sargeant, Pissarro...the list goes on and on of all the special exhibits that are available to us here. All the exhibits are crowded, people are in a hurry - yes, feet moving constantly and usually between you and the painting or print- comments from the viewers interesting, though more often than not related to their own personal taste; and yet, the art is enjoyed, though on what level it is impossible to tell. If there is a painting or woodblock print that I am particularly interested in studying, and there is no place to sit, I've developed the habit of 'sipping', get close and study the details until someone intrudes on your personal space, back away to see the whole piece until that person moves on, and then quickly fill in that vacant space to study another part close up. It works really well!

Artists love to see the process by which another artist completes a work - hey, we love to watch Dave hard at work, hour after hour, and we spend tons of time poking around his website picking up better ways to accomplish our artistic endeavors. So, Dave, your suggestion of your next exhibition of "Just one print...on the wall by itself. On the other walls of the room, tell the 'rest of the story'." is absolutely a great idea. And there is probably no better print for this than your "Forest in Summer" to tell 'The Rest of the Story"

... no better print for this than your "Forest in Summer"

Ah, but hearing you say that makes me realize that I expressed myself poorly. When I spoke about the 'rest of the story', what I was trying to get at was not particularly the question of how the print is constructed - you know, the kind of 'process sequence' that I have been posting here on this RoundTable all the way along through this project, which is what I guess you might be thinking of (I might be wrong on that).

That conversation I had with the interviewer - the 'seminar' that I mentioned above - didn't touch on the physical construction of the print at all. And yet, nor did I talk to him about the 'content' of the print in question (we were looking at a Meiji-era kuchi-e, and there is a huge back-story to each one of those, because they are actual illustrations of stories in a magazine.)

So if I didn't talk about the construction process, and didn't talk about the content, then what's left? Well, I had picked my model carefully, and there was a world of things to talk about - mostly relating to how the people who had built the thing used the woodblock technique to express ideas. In other words, exposing the thing as a print, as distinguished from any other kind of production. This can be a very fertile field to plough, although that very much depends on the work in question. In the case of prints like my 'Forest in Summer', this 'in between' zone is pretty thin, because I think that once you've worked through the construction process (how it was made), and then read about the overall story background (why we are here in this forest), there isn't actually much else left to talk about ...

I can imagine what you are thinking: "Give us some examples! Just what did you tell that interviewer?" ... and I guess I should try and do that. (If only I had taped our conversation that day!) I'm hamstrung on this right now, as I just finished making the paper wet for the second batch of the Forest in Summer, and that means my time is now spoken for from morning 'till night for the next ten days at least, but I'll start to make some notes on this.

It would make an interesting new section in the website: 'Slow Looking - What to 'see' when you look at some of these prints ...'

(Dave, get serious ... every minute you spend 'talking' is another minute not spent 'making' ...)