These three photos evoke the concept of time me because art and the passage of time are a pair that cannot be separated from each other. Art cannot be created or improved without the passage of time. With each piece I created time never stopped even if the world seemed unmoving with each new lined that was drawn onto the paper or burned into the wooden plaque. In my mind time doesn’t exist, I believe we are just in a constant state of being until we are not. Time helps us to track where we are in the present, and to remember where we were in the past. In this regard art is the same. It is the documentation of your creativity as it happens to you in that very moment, and when you begin and finish a new piece you look to that other piece and remember where you started before you got to this new work.
The first photo is a drawing I did as part of my final project for an art class in high school. This was a period in my life when art was at the forefront of my life. I drew new things everyday, and had even managed to win a few art shows. Art was my escape from a very stressful world during this point in my life. I found it again when the pandemic hit the world, faded and unfinished. I realized that I never got the chance to finish it, and remembered what my art teacher told me when I attempted to ask for an extension on this part of my project. She told me to leave it as it was because it had its own unique charm that way. When I first picked it up again after two years, I was tempted to leave it as it was, just as my art teacher suggested, but I remembered the idea I had for it back when I first started. I wanted to play with lights and darks and create a swirling ambiance in the background like a storm. So after two years I retouched my sketch.
The second photo is a piece I did a few months into the pandemic. During the time I did this piece, I had realized I bought a wood burning tool a long time ago that I’d never used. It was one of those impulse buys you do when you see a really great tutorial randomly thrown at you by Youtube’s algorithm and think, “I want to do this”. However, as with many impulse buys, time and motivation quickly became fleeting until I was a few months into the pandemic with nothing but time and an increasing motivation. So, I picked up the tool and got to work with a wooden plaque I had lying around my house, and this owl happened.
The third photo is my most recent drawing that was done just last week. I’d drawn a few things last week, but this piece was my favorite. It was my gem for the week because it was unique in many ways to the other things I drew. It was a drawing done entirely on impulse. I was with my friend who was feeling down on this particular day, and I simply said, “Come on, let’s draw”. I had none of my usual tools, and on any other day this would have killed my motivation, but that day I just wanted to be there for a friend who was having one of those days. All I had was just a simple mechanical pencil and some printer paper, but it felt right. It felt like the first time I picked up a pencil and some printer paper in my house as a child and just drew Mickey Mouse for hours, dreaming of becoming an artist someday. I wanted to make sure I drew something I knew she would like so I drew a member from one of our favorite bands; a German metal band called “Rammstein”. I liked the challenge of being limited to just a mechanical pencil and printer paper, every part of the drawing was difficult, but it was all part of the fun.
These three photos all relate to the passage of time for me because they all represent a different and unique point in my life.