TIME
It lives inside you
A few years ago, I wrote “Paint Moves.” It was about how different painters capture life as it appears in a given moment. TIME also moves, but it doesn’t just “go by.” Sometimes it hangs around for a while. It can reverse itself physically—your mind is younger and insights get revisited. It lives inside you. This is about how those same painters continue to occupy a real space we call “time.”
The soaring paintings of JMW Turner are more than visual representations of themes—history, mythology—or interpretations of the great works of literature. The paint moves. It carries you into a swirling, living space. You have a face-to-face encounter with eternity. You can stay in that dimension that reaches deep within the painted surface for a long time. He does.
Lynn Mehta travels to everywhere, exploring the world in color and form. There is fluidness in her work that connects the oceans to the deserts, and farmlands and to the cities—backstreets and main streets. Her paint celebrates its own reason for being. Each place retains its own identity. Its own soul. And yet, there is a recurring energy that ties all of her visions together in a universe of motion. It is TIME as well as place.
They may appear to be abstract paintings but they settle into your mind and emotions as houses, ponds, or trees. When Barbara Pliskin begins to paint, she sees pigment simply as pigment. She revels in the freedom of arranging bright spaces in contrast with dark. Gradually, forms appear and begin to tell their deep-felt stories. Barbara listens. This painting is called “Dusk.” It’s not just a time of day; it’s a sensation that has moved us emotionally through our lives.
Barbara usually captures the seven color contrasts that theorists talk about: light and dark, cold and warm, levels of saturation and others. There have to be at least seven contrasts of TIME: Deadlines being one. Others?
For Steve Fleming, the power is not in the subject; it’s in the sweep of the brush stroke—the loose placement of colors that balance a composition. It’s the bright lights that are scattered through fields of warm and cool contrasts—the suggestions of real things. His “plein air” landscapes are subdued and calming. Happy. They capture a moment that never ends. You don’t want it to.
Artists of all sorts feel this. Actors can be overcome with the glow of time returned. So can musicians. Writers certainly.
It’s not just good times. Traumas can come roaring back. My personal TIME came to a halt this month when my computer crashed. Days were lost. I was overwhelmed. PTSD can shake you apart and pull you down. I was about to give up. So, what do I do? I plead for the art time—the creative time—to hang out with me for a while.
stunning picks!
Amazing how, when I zoom in some of the paintings make no sense - but zoomed out it all makes sense. Is this a metaphor for life sometimes?
Thanks for great writing and art as always.
- b