Two Minneapolis galleries join international Slow Art Day on April 9.

"Looking vs Seeing," by Minneapolis artist Dani Roach.

On average people spend less time looking at art than they waste staring at stop lights. Visitors to the Louvre museum in Paris, for instance, devote an average of 15 seconds in contemplation of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa," one of the world's most famous paintings. And much of that time is probably spent jockying to snap a photo of Mona over the heads of other visitors in the scrum that always masses in front of her.

The same is true elsewhere. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art found that people spent an average of 17 seconds looking at a typical painting. In Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum researchers said it's 30 seconds (but then everything takes longer in L.A.) Compare that to the time fishermen spend watching for a bobber to jiggle or hunters to scanning the sky for a flight of birds.

The longer you look the more you see. Such is the idea behind Slow Art Day, an international effort to encourage people to really see stuff in museums and galleries. Participants are invited to look at particular works of art for 10 minutes each and then to share observations about what they noticed, thought or wondered as they looked. Some people sketch or take notes, most just gaze.

This year, Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum are participating in Slow Art Day on Saturday, April 9.

Launched in 2009, Slow Art Day is the brain child of Phil Terry, the CEO of Creative Goods, a corporate communications consultancy. He was a lousy looker, uninterested in art until he had an epiphany.

"My wife kept dragging me to museums," he told ARTnews magazine. "I didn't know how to look at art. Like most people, I would walk by quickly."

Then one afternoon, for whatever reason, he found himself gazing at a Hans Hofmann abstraction in the Jewish Museum in New York. He noticed drips and glazes, took in the colors and shapes, wondered about the artist and his pals, imagined that Hofmann might have influenced Jackson Pollock. Or not. It wasn't a research project, just thoughts inspired by close looking.

An hour later he'd really seen a painting. And felt refreshed. Inspired, he started Slow Art Day, a purely voluntary shindig that this year will involve more than 150 venues around the world from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery, London, the Gallerie dell' Accademia in Venice and the Museum of Modern Art in Yaroslavl, Russia.

Groveland is offering two simultaneous sessions of "slow looking." In the main gallery visitors will focus on three paintings in "Stillness Arranged," featuring recent work by Minneapolis artist Dani Roach whose "Looking vs Seeing" is shown here. In the annex gallery's "New Artists, New Views" show, they will scrutinize three pictures by St. Paul plein air painter Richard Abraham. The artists will join them for a chat about their observations after the looking session. (1 p.m.-2 p.m. Saturday, April 9, free. Groveland Gallery, 25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis. Open Tues.-Sat., noon-5p.m., free. 612-377-7800 or www.grovelandgallery.com)

The Weisman is staging a watercolor workshop lead by Jim Mondloch and inspired by "Clouds: Temporarily Visible," its current show of cloud-themed paintings, etchings, photos and installations. The workshop is already fully booked, but the "Clouds" show is open. (10 a.m.-5 p.m., free. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 333 E. River Rd., Minneapolis. 612-625-9494 or www.weisman.umn.edu)