'This is a jewel of a book: an invitation for us to practise the essential art of looking, of slowing down. An animate celebration of nature and the myriad ways we have interpreted it across history.' - Edmund De Waal
'The only way to see something is to look more slowly. That's what this book is showing us how to do.' - Jeanette Winterson
'Olivia Meehan has gathered together an intoxicating world of images. Her book awakens the ecstatic potential in the encounter and contemplation of both nature and art.' - Sophie Fiennes
'This beautiful collection of artworks and equally moving essays is the ideal guide for anyone wanting to adopt the ethos of slow looking - a practice perfectly suited to viewing and experiencing art in nature. It will be a constant on my bookshelf, and I have no doubt I shall be regularly reaching for it.' - Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate
Slow Looking: The Art of Nature is a unique celebration of the relationship between art and nature across millennia. Eschewing a linear narrative of art, this inspirational collection of global artworks allows readers to make connections between the nature that surrounds them and the vision of a dazzling wide range of artists. Readers will encounter motifs, colours and subjects that have mesmerised artists - and viewers - throughout history. In the process, readers will develop their own understanding of how they see the natural world.
Art historian Olivia Meehan has mixed paintings, drawings, sculpture, textiles and decorative arts from across the entire period of human creation and territory - Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australia and Africa - in thought-provoking juxtapositions. On every page, the reader is invited to find something new in a familiar landscape and to experiment in the observation of nature's wonders.
Exploring the various intersections between artistic techniques and thematical elements across land, water and sky, the pages reveal the deep-rooted connections between human beings and our natural world: the form and colours of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting of a shell echo a carved fossil from 500,000-300,000 BCE; Van Gogh's olive trees (1889) are juxtaposed with ancient Egyptian carved limestone dated between 1353-1323 BCE; and while waterlilies captivated Claude Monet, their allure also travelled as far as Japan to Kawase Hasui (1929) and to mid-18th century India in Hunhar II's watercolour work.
Following nature's patterns, Slow Looking: The Art of Nature takes readers on a journey from fields, mountains, forest and glaciers to lakes, ponds, waterfalls and rivers and on to sunrises, rainbows, comets, clouds, constellations and so much more. This guided observation of nature offers a whole new way of contemplating the world.
Series description:
The Slow Looking series tells the story of art through humanity's most powerful themes, offering a contemporary reshaping of art history as we know it. The next title in the series is The Art of Home.
Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION – THE PRACTICE OF SLOW LOOKING by Olivia Meehan • LAND: TREES | PLANTS & FLOWERS | FARMING | FIELDS | FORESTS & WOODLANDS | ROCKS, MOUNTAINS & GORGES | VOLCANOES • Regarding Flowerbeds by Harriet Baker • The Fragranced Dutch Flower Painting by Lizzie Marx • WATER: SEAS | COASTLINES | BEACHES | CORAL & SHELLS | SEA CREATURES | WATERFALLS | RIVERS & WATERHOLES | LAKES & PONDS | GLACIERS & ICEBERGS • Swimming in Ponds by Alice Vincent • SKY: CLOUDS | WIND | WILD WEATHER | RAINBOWS | SUNS | MOONS | CELESTIAL BODIES & THE NORTHERN LIGHTS • Clouds, Air and Weather Systems in Print by Miya Tokumitsu • Biographies and suggested slow reading
About the Author :
Dr Olivia Meehan is an art historian and object-based teaching specialist. She received her MPhil and PhD in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge. Her graduate research focused on the circulation of cultural material and ideas in early modern Europe and Japan. She has also trained at the V&A Museum, London (International Initiatives) in Creating Innovative Learning Programmes. Since graduating she has worked in museums and galleries in Australia and abroad, and as a lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge, Australian National University and University of Melbourne. She also regularly contributes to The World of Interiors and TOAST Magazine, London.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Alice Vincent is a internationally-published writer, broadcaster and multi-platform storyteller. Her books include Hark: How Women Listen, and the bestselling Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival and Rootbound, Rewilding a Life, which were longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She is a columnist for The Guardian and The New Statesman, and also writes for Vogue, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Observer.
Dr Lizzie Marx is the Curator of Dutch and Flemish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Marx received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge with the thesis 'Visualising, Perceiving and Interpreting Smell in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art'. She has worked on exhibition projects in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands, including Fleeting - Scents in Colour (2021) at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Vermeer Visits (2024) and Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer (2024) at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
Dr Miya Tokumitsu is an art historian who has written extensively about the cultural values that work holds in the 21st century. A former Fulbright scholar, she holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is a contributing editor at The Public Domain Review. She is the author of Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success & Happiness (Regan Arts, 2015).
Harriet Baker is a writer and critic. Her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, Paris Review, The New Statesman, the Financial Times, TLS and Apollo. She is the author of Rural Hours (Allen Lane, 2024), which won Young Writer of the Year Award in 2025.
Review :
Slow Looking encourages restful, reflective reading... With a PHD in the History of Art, Olivia brings together paintings, illustrations, textiles and sculptures to explore the intersections between people and the environment. Moving across waterways, landscapes and galaxies, she finds patterns in unlikely places, linking Claude Monet's waterlilies to 18th century watercolours from India. Astounding.
Reviewers don't hang on to all the books they review, but it was quickly clear that this was a keeper. Slow Looking: The Art of Nature is an exceptionally beautiful collection of artworks.
