Reimagining Time with Art
You are free to be present to your life
without always worrying about time.
_
If you had a box of 100 crayons in front of you right now, how would you color time?
This is something I think about when I sit down to create a piece that involves clock imagery. For me, even the smallest subversion of not "finishing" the clock I am drawing and then, in many cases, creating a whole other universe around it, is a way of creating space to think about time in a different way.
Of course, I am not the first artist to make a piece involving clocks or time imagery, but I find it important to return to this practice of drawing "little" things like clocks, even if someone else has already "done it" before. I return to images like the clock not just to make a pretty picture but to imagine "time" differently, even if it's just for a few moments.
Clocks - especially as we know them today - are not ancient. Our current ways of keeping up with time may help with modern-day logistics, but these current ways can only explain so much.
Now, one might think, "Well, this is a fun little creative exercise, but in real life, things are time-sensitive, and we don't have to think about all of this..."
To which I say this: "When you're moving through your day, you don't have to actively think about the meal you ate or every hour of sleep you got in order for it to make a difference that you got good rest and ate some food. The same could be true of art practice...it's an opportunity to sit and think about something you don't normally think about that might end up leading you to something deeper you didn't even realize you needed to think about."
Even in our digitized world, the analog clock on the wall remains a strong image, and perhaps what we can learn from this image is that sometimes there is room to see it as a "prompt" - something to work with, work around, something to find our way through, asking, "Where in my life can I forget about time?"
I cannot tell you when or where you will have to shift your focus to "time," but I can tell you that there is still room to consider for yourself the ways in which you might "color" it differently... or forget about time altogether. - MHN
