Time

I've been to college twice. First, in my early 20's, to study commercial art with an emphasis on photography, second, in my early 30's to study fine art with, once again, an emphasis on photography. During my days studying commercial photography I once had a well know photographer come to my class to speak. Excited about getting to hear the profound wisdom this wonderful photographer had to share, I was in awe at what I really walked away with. In awe because it wasn't until I began studying fine art that I realized the impact the few words he said, had on me. At the very beginning of the class he stood there, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other, (yes, I'm old enough to remember when you could smoke in the school) and he asked the class what the most important thing in photography was... not just photography but in art. A few of the students raised their hands and spouted off what they thought he wanted to hear... composition, lighting, the relationship between light and dark....

He set his coffee down, put out his cigarette, picked up the chalk and on the board, in big, capital letters he wrote, TIME!!!

How profound. In the technical sense he is right. The time to expose film and print, the time to compose. For location shooting the right time of day. In the commercial business side of it... getting the job finished, on time for the art director. It's implications in the fine art sense where true as well but in a more existential way for, your life is your art.

I've spent the better part of my life trying to figure out what it means to be an artist and much of that during a time when I hated the title artist and wasn't quite sure I had a definition for the term art. During that time I have come to one conclusion... it never ends.

Time is not a deadline, it's a journey. I spend a vast amount of time considering what it is I do, for my art, for myself, for my surroundings. How will the world define me during this time and the next. "Now," never exist. The present always rolls over to the past and we can't foresee the end of the journey. Being an artist never ends.

We can set down the camera, the brushes, the chisels, the clay... but we can't stop the process of being an artist. Our minds move through the journey of time, always creating, always seeing, always speaking. Art manifest itself in the tangible. It is not the painting or the sculpture or the photograph that is the art... it is the never ending thoughts that go on in the artist's mind and it's only during the course of time these visions manifest themselves and become a part of the tangible world in which we live.