Focus, people!

Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (you may know it by another name). File information

A week ago a bout of insomnia found me web-browsing and coming across this challenge in the New York Times – Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes with Just One Painting?

The authors, Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan, started out in this vein:

OUR ATTENTION SPANS may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way.

In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted.

Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her students. She asks them to go to a museum, pick one work of art, and look at only that for three full hours.

We are not asking for hours. But will you try 10 minutes?

At Roberts’ suggestion, the authors chose Nocturne in Blue and Silver, by James McNeill Whistler – a painting that happens to be in the Harvard Museum.

From my point of view, they made a felicitous choice. I’ve long been slightly familiar with Whistler for a couple of reasons. To start, Whistler was for a brief time employed by the U.S. Survey of the Coast, the progenitor of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. His tenure had once been the subject of an article in an in-house NOAA publication (decades ago). Then, a few years after I’d moved from Boulder to DC the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian had a Whistler exhibition that I attended. The Wikipedia article provides more material on Whistler and his life (much of it colorful): Whistler’s childhood, how he washed out of West Point, his unsatisfying Coast-Survey stint, Charles Lang Freer’s patronage, and the Freer Museum’s Peacock Room (one of Whistler’s creations), his extensive series of Nocturnes paintings (many of which were displayed during the exhibition), etc. Incidentally, the Nocturnes are amazing! (Click here to see an array.) It’s a shame he’s remembered primarily for his Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1

(A word to the wise. Taking a few minutes to read the Wikipedia article will help you retain focus on the painting for the full ten minutes and enrich the entire exercise.)

Focus is not just a choice but an important life skill – even in the tumultuous, chaotic 21^st century.