In a tangible sense, art can be made of anything. Traditionally, it’s created with materials like paint, canvas, clay, metal, wood, and stone. But modern and contemporary artists push boundaries by incorporating unconventional materials like digital pixels, found objects, sound, light, living organisms and waste.
But of course, that’s just the modern way of saying that art isn’t just about physical materials. It also includes the ideas, emotions, and meaning behind the work. So, in a way, art is made of both tangible things and intangible creativity.
What is art made of? How about time?
Art takes time. It therefore contains time. In fact, you could argue that, above anything else, art is time.
Creation. Yes, there is art that takes three minutes to dash off, but that’s not that common. Far more frequently, art takes years to realize. And even those three-minute sketches rest on a history of other sketches, all of which telescope into that one final work.
“How long did that take to paint?” we’re asked. We answer, “four hours, plus the fifty years I’ve been practicing my craft.” For the artist, all the effort of creation coalesces into their most recent work.
Time as a medium. Many art forms, like performance art, film and music, unfold over time. These temporal arts could not exist without time itself.
Time as transformation. Down the street from me is a statue of Rockport’s most famous citizen, Andre the Seal. A few years ago, his marble nose cracked, necessitating some plastic surgery. Paintings crack, sculptures erode, and even digital art is lost as technology shifts. Nothing lasts forever, at least in the form in which it was created.
Time as context. Shakespeare and John Donne may be responsible for much of modern English, but their writing is not always easy on the modern ear. The same is true of memento mori or any other artform resting on symbolism. Can you decipher the objects in Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres? Meaning changes constantly, and culture discards ideas that are no longer relevant.
The time we put into viewing or listening to the art. I spent a long time with the Wilton Diptych at the National Gallery in London, with its White Hart badges and strange prefiguration of Shakespeare’s Richard II:
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.
Yet I don’t remember anything about George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket. It is in the same museum and is a painting I love, but I was tired when I got to it. The time we put into a painting influences what we take out of it.
Time and the narrative painting. The challenge of the narrative painting is to tell a story in a snapshot. When we’ve painted them, we’ve frozen time.
Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:
- Canyon Color for the Painter, Sedona, AZ, March 10-14, 2025
- Advanced Plein Air Painting, Rockport, ME, July 7-11, 2025.
- Sea and Sky at Acadia National Park, August 3-8, 2025.
- Find Your Authentic Voice in Plein Air, Berkshires, MA, August 11-15, 2025.
- Immersive In-Person Fall Workshop, Rockport, ME, October 6-10, 2025.