The only time you ever truly exist in is right now. I have a problem with my perceiving time, so life is a little challenging. I spend time wishing I could make it stand still on a certain moment, memory, or feeling and just live in those Perfect Moments forever. My work explores how, through art, one can almost achieve this impossible phenomenon. My drawings, paintings, and text-based works memorialise events which, if possible, I would revisit whenever I choose.

 

I began with poems I had written in the past as inspiration for imagined paintings, not using reference photos. My painting, ‘I know a girl with the power to make time stand still’, explores the transference of emotions from my mind to the real world. The bold colour draws the viewer in. On closer inspection, the flecks of different coloured paints, which seem anomalous, comment on the shaky and fragmented nature of memory.

   Upon reflection, I decided to recreate real-life scenes and set out photographing moments that sparked joy. Candid and unposed, they were shots of my friends in mundane settings. The ordinariness is what makes these moments perfect to me. They represent peace and stillness in an ever-moving world.

I felt moved to physically memorialise these moments in a more inventive manner than photography and to see ‘a moment and a feeling committed to paper’.[1] The sketches I produced were imperfectly intriguing, though sometimes did not appear as I had envisioned. The magic of certain facial expressions or body postures were absent, and the backgrounds empty. Also missing was the emotion that colour can bring to an image.

   Next came some paintings, including ‘Promise to stay, forever just like that’ with a bright orange background added to convey the warmth on the evening the photo was taken. Yellow flecks allude to the low lighting which I envisaged as fireflies flitting through the air. The plant had not been in the reference photo, but the magic of painting allows us to edit where we see fit.

Recapitulating my struggles with time, I was quickly running out of it. Then, I remembered the artist, Colin Chillag, whose work exposes the ‘pointlessness of fully finishing something already photographed – and therefore already represented with more detail than possible by the human hand’.[2] He never finishes a painting, leaving his sketches visible as evidence of his conception.

   While working in this less time-consuming fashion, the works began to echo the historical process of hand-colouring film, frame by frame. ‘In these early days of film coloring, dyes were used primarily to accentuate important objects in the frame. Much of the shot was left black and white, with hues adding blushing details: a blue hat, a pink dress, a yellow star’.[3] This sat with my work as I too was editing already captured images.

   When COVID-19 restructured everyday life, I had already exhausted my photo bank. My friends were no longer around to be photographed; I turned once again to imagination. My neighbour regretfully recounted a missed opportunity to photograph my friend and I eating dinner socially distanced in my driveway – she felt this summed up the present situation. This prompted me to revisit my textual practice. In a style inspired by Fiona Banner’s 2006 painting ‘Nude Standing’,[4] I created works which narrated real-life missed moments.

 

This practical journey heavily influenced my final piece. The title, ‘You live inside my eyelids’ comes from one of my earlier poems about remembering special moments. This emerged from the desire to exist simultaneously in multiple Perfect Moments, without the real world tarnishing the experience. Consequently, had I the chance to exhibit in the studio, I would have displayed the work in a blank white space where viewers could not see anything else in their periphery. The work consists of painting, sketching, and text work – all aspects of my project. The large canvas which forms the base was an old painting I never finished. I painted over it, but the former colours bled through, mixing with the white paint. Incidentally, the effect embodies the essential notion of this project – the magic of life’s perfect moments are really found in the imperfection.

 

[1] Sherin Aminossehe, "The act of drawing is… a moment and a feeling committed to paper," Radius Data Exchange, last modified June 5, 2020, https://www.egi.co.uk/news/the-act-of-drawing-is-is-a-moment-and-a-feeling-committed-to-paper/.

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[2] Dea K., "Colin Chillag," Widewalls | Modern & Contemporary Art Resource, last modified March 9, 2015, https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/colin-chillag.

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[3] Amanda Scherker, "The Forgotten Women Who Hand-Painted the First Color Films," Artsy, last modified April 10, 2019, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-women-hand-painted-first-color-films.

 

[4] Fiona Banner, Nude Standing, 2006.