Slow Looking: The Art of Nature

(Hardback)

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'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

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.

Author Bio

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.