It’s small isn’t it? A church clock face, imperfect,- part of the right side is missing. The centerpiece is partially blurred. I remember being told 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 a photograph. A photo taken on a grey day with poor light, on a broken phone, of Buckingham Parish Church clock.

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, or 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. Church clocks in particular. 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 before clock faces. Timeis the one constant that binds us all. We “have our time” and talk about how “now is our time”. The hands marking the hour and minutes are defined but the colour is drained reducing the definition. Maybe it’s because we need to define our time for ourselves?
And I haven’t even started to talk of colours yet.