While internet browsing I stumbled upon this blog post about the 2018 show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: "Time and Again: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art." https://unframed.lacma.org/2018/05/02/time-and-again-intersection-past-and-present-iranian-art
I'm very curious to know if anyone on the miniature forum had seen the show or read about it. I think the subject is fascinating and important for anyone in seeking to express their orientation to time and place. And that probably means everyone! Please let me know what you think.
Time-traveller, here. Painting can express time and timelessness, even though perhaps static to the viewer, methinks. Not just reflecting the time in which it was done, not just the frozen-in-time aspect of a scene, but that which we are all seeking -- the beauty of the art of the past, when people had more time to pour into exquisite artworks; every hour shows. We as artists are lucky, as we can create little timeless paradises on paper or vellum in which to spend our time. Our time that passes in that odd dilated outside-of-time way when we paint.
Yearning is precious, methinks. Sorrow deprives one of enthusiasm, a bleak feeling indeed. Yearning contains energy, precious energy. The energy to create beauty to gladden the eyes, to heal, to inspire. As you do.
Hi @Mary Yaeger , thanks for sharing. Seems like a very powerful show. I think here we all like to mix elements of the past and bring them into the present. In a way it's a way of keeping it alive and as a continuum. Theatre seems a particularly good way of doing that, a way of 'punctuating' time and our days as a live window into the past, a reenactment. Can painting do the same thing? I think so, but with a different sense of time. Paintings, books, theatre shows, films and performance art all have different ways of presenting time to audiences to encounter them so I think this has to do with the medium itself. Me personally, my orientation to time and place: I am always looking to the future as something to aspire to, and to make better, and to the past, as something to learn from, and perhaps a kind of yearning for a lost golden age if it ever existed, I like to think it did. Of course I live in the present but, like Janus, one eye on the past and one on the future. And the third eye in the present! I also wish I were travelling the Silk Road, or somewhere on an island. And when I'm there, I'll probably miss London. Constant yearning which is in a way not very 'here and now', which is the ultimate aim for Buddhists and probably mystics of all religions... I like movement a lot. And also the pleasant present. What is your orientation to time and place?
Thanks bunches, Mary!!