Tracing Time in Art

For a long time I thought I was painting pictures of things. Lately I have come to think the work is doing something else. It holds time. A painting keeps a record of the decisions that made it, and I have started to care more about that record than about any image sitting on top of it.

Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings taught me part of this. Standing in front of one, you can watch him change his mind. The earlier moves are still there, under the surface, half wiped away and not gone. The painting is a place where looking and revising happen at once. Nothing is really erased. It just settles lower in the stack.

Joachim Koester's Kant Walks taught me the other part. Koester followed the paths Kant is said to have walked, in a city that has mostly disappeared. There is almost nothing to see. A walk leaves no picture. What you get is the shape of an action you have to put back together, inferred from what is missing as much as from what is left. That felt close to how memory actually behaves.

Somewhere in there my question changed. I stopped asking how to depict a trace and started asking whether the object itself could be one. That is a larger shift than it sounds. The painting stops standing in for a process and becomes the residue the process leaves behind.

It is also why I keep covering things over. If everything stays visible there is no trace, only information. Something has to be lost before the rest can be read as remaining. I want the person looking to finish the work, to feel the part they cannot quite see and build it back for themselves.

What holds Diebenkorn, Koester, and the things I am making now in the same thought is not memory as a feeling. It is memory held in matter, in the worked surface and in an object that carries the time of its own making. I am still working this out. For now the question I keep is a plain one: whether a painting can be a trace of time instead of a picture of it. Most days that feels like enough to go on.