Just a chair

"If you're going to enjoy a painting you've got to set aside time. You must not expect that you can take a fleeting glance and reach a conclusion, any more than you can just look at a book's dust cover... When I'm filming, in between times when they're setting up for the next work of art, I've got to sit somewhere and often I've been parked in front of something that I would not have looked at twice. But forced to sit and contemplate it, I begin to warm up to it and it opens up to me... It might never be something that we would choose as our first love, but it can speak to us. It's that giving time, looking at art peacefully, that matters. Crowded, noisy museums are not conducive to this kind of looking. I forget who it was who said that the necessity for appreciating art is a chair - which I always have, you see, because I go round in a wheelchair. So I really look."

- Sister Wendy Becket, nun and art critic, from an interview in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion