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What is Time?
Is this a question for a physicist or a philosopher? I'm not sure. I'm not even sure if time is relative or not, but sometimes it sure feels like it is. Recent experiences certainly seem to prove that time is relative. The recent quarantine or stay at home orders have had most people feeling like time moved by much slower than usual. Did you have the sensation early in the quarantine timeline that two weeks seemed like four weeks?
Have you ever wondered if time is only a modern construct? Prior to the onset of mass productions, time was even more relative than it is now. People didn't set appointments by time but by day. They arranged to meet on a certain day, but not at noon on July 5th. The time of year was much more important than the time of the day. With factories and mass production beginning, people needed to be at their shift at a certain time, whereas farmers needed only start their day at sunrise and end at sunset. Is time only a fairly recent construct?
Regardless of the seconds and minutes were being marked before the invention then widespread use of the clock, time still moved regularly with the changing of the seasons. The day is divided up into smaller units just as the year is divided up into smaller units. As a society we now measure time.
One Thing You Can't Get Back is Time
You can make more money, replenish your pantry, build a new house, get a new job, paint a new painting, etc, but you can never get time back. Time is always marching forward, whether we are good stewards of it or not, whether we like it or not. In many cases, time is the most valuable commodity that we have available to us. We can't make more of it and we can't get back what we've lost. We have to be good stewards of time each and every day.
Artists Need Time
One thing Artists need is time, more importantly, time at drawing and painting. A painter needs to create a lot of paintings to really learn how to paint. Then he or she needs to spend even more time perfecting his or her craft to become a really good artist. A big part of it is time at the easel, but not all of it.
To become a master, an artist needs to spend time not only practicing but also be a life long learner. Practice, life long learning, and more and more practice. Why is this so important?
Art is a Bit Like Chess
You can learn the basics of painting in a short time, but it takes a lifetime to master the intricacies of creating great pieces of art. This is the same thing often said about chess; however, one could learn to master chess before they could learn to master painting.
Everything boils down to time, doesn't it?
I have been working against time as soon as I started to learn to paint. I only began to apply myself to learning to paint in five or so years ago. Mind you this was after completing medical school, residency, many years of working as a physician. Many people start to learn to paint much earlier in life. With a full-time job and starting later in life than most, I've been behind the eight ball. I have had to work harder at time management than most artists.
I essentially work a full-time job as a psychiatrist and a part-time job as an artist. How many people can say they hold down a full-time and a part-time job at the same time? It takes this much commitment to overcome the time handicap. While it appears on the outside that it has been difficult to work on both my regular job and my art, but I don't even think of my art as work. I love every minute I spend in my studio or even writing this posts for this blog.
Time certainly makes for a worthy adversary, but I'm up for the challenge!
