Time Continuum

By: Maria Fee

What does the worker gain from his toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to the end.  Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.  T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Investing time in the studio always yields benefits. The work focuses or branches out into new forms. Pleasurable discoveries shifts the expenditure of our time, expenses, energies as we grasp towards that elusive something. The pursuit is future-oriented, but to obtain it we must be fully vested in the present, all the while sustained by positive past experiences of accumulated processes of art making.

Yet sometimes the need to create is mere burden. No explanations needed for He has also set eternity in the hearts of men. We experience something good when we make art. And just as our studio practices hones the work, it is a pattern parallel to God’s perfecting of the cosmos through time, space, the particular, through Christ. Wecannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

What does this mean for artists? First off, eternity is continuous with our present world. Time present and time past are contained in time future. And time future double backs into time present: our time. God is with us through his promised Spirit, the hallmark of a new age. This means we don’t have to get it right the first time. Just as the whole of creation is groaning waiting for God to perfect it, our art is practice. One day the grunts and groans will eventually give way to true worship of the Triune God. Christ has already set the Spirit life in motion–we have the firstfruits of the Spirit awaiting the future redemption of our bodies. He has made everything beautiful in its time.

Secondly, since forever belongs to us, time is not a burden. One of the characteristics of our culture is the weight of time. We never have enough of it so we weary ourselves with too much work, too much play. The more we invent time saving devices to increase leisure, Colin Gunton notes the less capable we are of being able to dwell “in the body and on the good earth.” (Gunton, The One, The Three, And the Many, p.77). In God’s timelessness, he sets patterns of living: birth, death, plant, pick, kill, heal, extirpate, build up. Life does not happen all at once for we are to dwell in each zone discovering its merits and faults.

Isn’t this what we also learn in the studio? Idea, concept, action, introspection, more action, wait for the paint to dry, curse, smile, scrape off the paint, start again with the marks of the old refined by the new. What does the worker gain from his toil? John Dewey remarks how “Every work of art follows the plan of, and pattern of, a complete experience, rendering it more intensely and concentratedly felt.” (Dewey, Art As Experience, p.54) Artists, think of your art making practice as a sensitizing or priming agent for the ultimate experience of eternity.

Let the future break into the present; make art.