Could you look at a painting for 10 uninterrupted minutes, without pausing to glance at your phone? This is the challenge brought to us by Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan in “Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes with One Painting?”, and if it sounds overwhelming to you, you’re not alone. Looking at just one thing for so long may strike fear of boredom into your heart, or, deeper still, fear of being alone with your unfiltered thoughts. No distractions. Just you and the object of your gaze.
This experiment is actually adapted from Harvard art history professor Jennifer Roberts’ assignment to her students: look at one painting in a museum for three hours. The idea, of course, is to tame our wild and frazzled attention, to draw it to a single focal point, that we might see things we’d ordinarily rush past. Our screens have trained us to fleetingly scan things that are in constant motion. But it’s still possible for us to quiet our attention, and to focus it on something that echoes our stillness back to us.
The article runs a timer as you look at the painting, James McMeill Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Silver,” with periodic pings to let you know how many minutes remain. I spent my time zooming in and out on various details, puzzling over what shadowy brushstrokes represented, and moving from corner to corner with my gaze, seeking out any little surprises the painting had in store for me.
I am certain I would never have given this painting more than a glance, either in a museum or online, had I not been explicitly invited to do so. But by the end of the 10 minutes, I was both charmed by the painting’s beauty and moved by the very human creativity that brought it to life.
Try it. And then keep training the muscle of your attention. Look at a streetscape, the wind moving the branches of a tree, the artful pile of papers on your desk. You won’t walk away empty-handed.
For a follow-up on their challenge, read Buchanan and Paris’ “‘Weird and Daunting:’ 7,000 Readers Told Us How It Felt to Focus.”