“While the existing natural forms remain the same… their appearance changes with the time of day, light, and atmospheric conditions. Similar to the way memory takes things separate in time and assembles them into a new entity.
“…the actual subject of the art is not an event proceeding in linear fashion but multifarious simultaneousness of layers of time.”
— Art historian Karin Sagner-Duchting writing about Monet in “Monet and Modernism”, page 46/7
The more familiar a location becomes, the more the variations, differences and similarities created by the seasons, weather, time of day reveal themselves, filtered through mood. My paintings are not of one moment in a location, but many; often not one location but several combined in memory into one place that feels familiar. I know where it is, but you probably see it at somewhere else.
The cliffs in my forthcoming Edges Exhibition, for instance, remind many of Kilt Rock. But to me it’s not as there’s no waterfall. That cliff painting is still a work-in-progress that might still get finished in time for next Monday’s 6pm exhibition opening.
For hours on end… During four years… So many several “layers of time” or , it is the same in that case, so many thin and tiny layers of transparent pastes… During four hours. I think here of Leonardo who little by little was creating her Mona Lisa. No it is not her smile or her necklace which are really fascinating for me, no, but the result of multitudineous “layers of time” that patiently rebuilt an equivalence of a figure. A painting in fact as the sum of moments of creativity during four hours. Four years of constant adoration coming from the master, a master who felt, I presume, so many various states of mind during four years, not to forget aging… Mona Lisa is the result of aggregations of painting moment, aggregations of states of mood, and I guess that the model was not indispensable any longer: the painting for Leonardo had to become little by little only a mental representation of a moment of the past. Four years of work for a so small size of canvas… But what a result! A supernatural result, hypnotizing the crowd.
Sorry, “four years” instead of “four hours”.