On Time; January 2024

Now that I am once again living on an island, Island Time is a real phenomenon. It feels like there is more time but the priorities for how to use it have shifted. It is more important to sit on the beach watching otters play than to be on time for an appointment; more important to cloud-gaze than to do chores. For some time I have suspected that time is not the clockwork mechanism that we have been taught to believe in, but something elastic that stretches and contracts according to the mindset. Here time is of longer  duration but the days fly by.

In John Banville’s novel, Ghosts, the protagonist comes to live on a sparsely populated island and reflects on the slow pace of life there:
“Time. Time on my hands. That is a strange phrase. From those first weeks on the island I recall especially the afternoons, slow, silent, oddly mysterious stretches of something that seemed more than clock time, a thicker textured stuff, a sort of Seadrift, tidal, surreptitious, Deeper than the world. …This is a different way of being alive. I thought sometimes at moments such as this that I might simply drift away and become a part of all that out there, drift and dissolve, be a shimmer of light slowly fading into nothing.”

So it is less productive  in terms of paid labour, but more productive of relaxed charm, friendliness, and ease.

My art practice has responded to Island Time by allowing for more detailed, labour-intensive work that might take all afternoon for an almost unnoticeable addition.  And it has led to the creation of artwork that owes some of its technique to a time before mass produced printing when artists carved images on wood, rolled ink on top and pressed the image onto paper. They became astonishingly skilled at depicting the world using cross-hatched lines to convey light, shade, form and texture. Later they used this technique to create line drawings of incredible detail etched into metal plates. Many artists keep this time-honoured and highly-skilled tradition alive and I have studied both the early and more modern practitioners to develop my own style.

For many years in the 1980’s and 1990’s I worked as an illustrator for editorial, advertising and book publishing using this style of drawing. I sometimes carved my drawings into linoleum to make lino-cut prints, but due to the short time-lines in publishing, I usually used scratchboard to create cross-hatched black & white drawings that translated well into print media.

To sharpen my technique, I also made drawings of landscapes, portraits and still-lives that were not for commercial applications.

Then I got into sculpture and later, big, full-colour oil paintings and away from 2D black& white images.

But having moved to this Island, removed from urban assumptions and pressures, I have once again taken up the challenge of creating detailed, labour-intensive line drawings with the cross-hatched drawing techniques of an earlier era. But now the original B&W drawings are digitized and printed using contemporary technology so they are an interesting mix of the traditional melded with current technological advances. As it is neither old or new, my current work feels that it is aiming at something timeless or outside of time.