Thinking time vs doing time by The Shape of Time

March 26, 2021 1 Comment

Orlando, the titular character in Virginia Woolf’s novel by the same name, awakens at age thirty, to an awareness of time as being psychological as well as biological, offering a familiar adage: “time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short”.

Inscruitable time

There is an inscrutability about time being described here, as it acts and is being acted upon by a mind...one might even say in all seriousness and humour, as my friend Patrick Calhoun Hickox did while staying up for days to complete his masters degree in architecture at Yale, that “time is funny stuff”. He and his friends laughed and laughed and laughed until all they could do was cry.

Artistic paradox

Artistic paradox is knowing that whatever one creates may outlive the creator anyway. Time as acting upon an artist and being acted upon by anyone attempting artistry is indeed, funny stuff.

Linear and circular art

The duality of fairy tales is that they happen to be both linear and circular (it is a story about particular characters and a revealing archetypes of nature). In real life we struggle to locate the memory of this split, to see where or when it first began….To do so would also mean to attempt to explain how the arts began….The split between the Good and the Bad, the morality of shame is what fuels the search for what is lost, always in the mists of time. The restlessness of spirit and any conflict juxtaposed. Because real life, like art, is also circular and linear as a narrative. Each moment threatens to overwrite everything that came before it with new information and inspiration. Threatening total devastation of status quo: a divorce, a death, a disillusionment, and unfortunate social media envy…

These things feel real, all too real. And the sobering thoughts can only be achieved through a kind of personal philosophy, as George Satayana writes in ‘Reasons in Art’: “A complete mastery of existence achieved at one moment gives no warrant that it will be sustained or achieved again at the next”. So in its many visions, sounds and sensations, it is artifice which allows us to move from one moment to the next freely, without constraints or limitations, and this is nothing of which to be ashamed.

Here are some original artworks by the Skylark artists that play upon the themes of linear and narrative structure, its tensions and revelations:

Sempervivum by Michael Frank. Giclee print on hahnemuehle baryta fb inkjet paper, 16x16cm

This artwork is part of a body of work he did during lockdown in 2020. Having to shield his ability to move and search for things to photograph shrank to his household and garden. He really got fascinated with plants, leaves and various states of decay. There is definitely a beauty in nature when it has gone beyond its prime.

A pair of guardian angels by British figurative artist Heather Tobias. Vintage tobacco tin, hanger on the back. Man 11 x 9 x 5cm, Woman 11 x 9 x 2.5cm

 

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