301th post – (very) Slow Blogging – Off Season Plein-air

This is the 301st posting.

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SLOW BLOGGING

The New York Times has an interesting article about ‘slow blogging’. Basically, it’s Slow Movement meets blogging.

Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace

 

A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s tenets. “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy,” he wrote. “It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly.” (Nor, because of a lack of traffic, is Mr. Sieling writing this blog at all these days.) Ms. Ganley, who recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College, compares slow blogging to meditation. It’s “being quiet for a moment before you write,” she said, “and not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head.”

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“It is an investigation into the Internet’s attention span,” Mr. Davies said by telephone.

Even Mr. Sieling, the writer of the Slow Blog Manifesto, gave up his personal blog because he felt no one was reading it. “I called it the Robinson Crusoe feeling of blogging,” he said by e-mail, “and I think it’s common.”

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I discovered this via BookGirl who asked the question about how slow blogging effects arts/artist’s blogs.

 

BOOKGIRL : I wonder how arts/artists’ blogs fit into the discussion? Most of them, I find, are less about analysis (e.g., political blogs) and more about sharing and inspiration, and that may set them apart.

 

ADAM COPE : I’ve been thinking about this for the last three or so years.When I did finally take the plunge & start ‘a painting a day’ blog it was a painting a week, with the proviso: ‘FAST…SLOW…FAST.
Creativity is pretty mercurial but a blog can help discipline output by the simple fact of having a deadline. Some types of creations respond well to this. Others don’t. No matter what speed.

I greatly enjoyed this blog dawlr

It’s a good twist to the ‘postcards meets blogging’ intrigue. Slow & fine & intelligent, beyond the DAILY POTBOILER.BLOGSPOT.COM syndrome, which risks places quantity above quality & repetition above innovation. Well, that’s just my opinion, so don’t worry about it. It’s not meant to insult anyone, just clarify my own practice & expectations. Do wish that I could do some more painting than this rather slow output however 😉

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OFF SEASON PLEIN-AIR

Chit-chat asides, the weather has been rainy & grey this last month so not much scope for plein-air painting. Winter time here in the Dordogne can be really beautiful. Here’s one from last Feburary. Just to remind me that it can be done.

‘Landorre, Quercy Blanc’
Oil on canvas
50 x 61cm (19,7 x 24inches).
© adam cope
800 €

A very stoney place. Drystone wall to the right, a ruined drystone barn to the left and a huge mound of stones in the middle, possibly a tumbled down collapsed old sheperd’s hut (‘borie’).

A path through the high grass. Wild scrub oak & acer, furry with lichen.