1 Marking Time

It’s small isn’t it? A clock face, imperfect, part of the right side is missing. The centrepiece is partially blurred.

I remember being told, as an artist, to only paint what you see. If I’d been painting from life, I might have added those missing details in the ironwork, but I was working from photographs. A photo taken on a grey day with poor light, on a broken phone.

The missing and vague parts reflect how time actually is. Sometimes we miss things, other times we have a vague sense of the passage of time. Einstein talks about the time being relative it’s dependent on what’s going on around us. The lesson where 5 minutes feels like an hour and the time spent in an evening laughing with friends gone all too quickly.
“Where did the time go?” you say perplexed.

I’ve always had a fascination with clocks and their faces. This one has the minutes clearly marked so it gives you “up to the minute” time. Yet the numerals are Roman, a hint of the past. Like time, the one constant that binds us all. We have our time, now is our time. The hands marking the time are defined but the colour is drained so the hands are less well defined. Maybe it’s because we need to define our time for ourselves

And I haven’t even started to talk of colours yet.