Dancing with Time: The Artist’s Most Elusive Medium
Time. It slips through fingers like water, resists capture, and mocks even the most careful plans. For artists, time is more than just a background hum — it’s an invisible collaborator, a constant tension, a onlooker breathing over the shoulder of every creative act. The artist’s process is not only about pencils, paint or clay. It’s also about wrestling with time itself.
The Illusion of Having Time
The greatest lie we tell ourselves is that we’ll “make time.” As though time is a material we can conjure from thin air, like pigments mixed on a palette. The reality is harsher: time exists only in fleeting moments we choose to carve away from life’s demands. And in the spaces between work, sleep, errands, relationships — the artist must slip quietly into a stolen hour, hoping inspiration remembers to show up.
But time, for all its slipperiness, is also a necessary boundary. Without the ticking clock, would any piece of art ever be declared finished? Deadlines — even self-imposed — are the imperfect guardians of completion.
Flow: When Time Vanishes
The dream, of course, is flow — that mythical state where time dissolves entirely. The brush moves without hesitation, the hands know what to do before the mind catches up, and hours shrink into minutes. Flow is rare, magical, and unpredictable. It can’t be forced, but it can be invited.
This is the great paradox: time is both enemy and ally. The pressure of time creates urgency, but the absence of time allows freedom. To work within time is discipline; to forget time is surrender. Personally, I used to count every hour that went into a drawing and see it as some kind of accomplishment that a drawing took 30, 40 or 50 hours… no more. Especially since switching from pencils to paint, I have found that it matters less to me. Perhaps this is because the audience doesn’t care as much with painted artwork? Or perhaps its jus a thing that happens as the years pass by, these constraints matter a lot less.
The Slow Work of Fast Art
Some pieces take years — returning to the same canvas, revisiting the same draft, layering the same melody until it feels right. Other works arrive fully formed, born in a single burst of clarity. But even quick work is haunted by slow time — all the unseen years of practice that made speed possible. A single expressive line can hold a decade of training.
Time hides inside every piece, a ghost embedded in the layers. Every unfinished painting is haunted by the time that got away. Every finished one holds the echo of the hours that made it whole.
The Fear of Time Running Out
Every artist knows this fear: that there won’t be enough time to make everything they dream of making. I return to this thought a lot when deciding what projects to embark on next. Will the stories die untold, the images unpainted? I find this fear can paralyze, or it can propel — the knowledge that time is finite can sharpen focus like nothing else.
And yet, part of the process is surrendering to time’s control. Some works need to sit. To rest. To ferment. Rushing art can starve it of meaning. Letting time into the process, instead of fighting it, allows the work to breathe — and sometimes, to bloom.
A Final Question
If time were infinite, would art still matter? Or does creativity exist precisely because time runs out? Perhaps every brushstroke, every note, every word is a small defiance — a way to carve something permanent into the fleeting fabric of time.
For artists, time is not just a clock on the wall. It is the pulse beneath the work, the invisible collaborator, the muse and the menace. Every piece ever made is, in its own way, a love letter to time — and a challenge to it.
More details to follow,
.M.