TIME OUT OF TIME. Painting 2008-2010

Time out of time. 122x150cm Acrylic on wood. Ibiza 2008-10.

This painting had a very long process of two and a half years to complete.
The detail is so small in areas and took so long to do I sometimes don´t even remember I did it.
Last year I parted from it to a collector who has great love for it.

A few years ago I made a blog where I shared some of the impressions of what I had happened to me during the process, they are bits from my diary I felt I could share. Not great literature, just direct sensations and thoughts dabbed down on paper.
Sorry the photos are really poor quality, when I was painting it I wasn´t thinking in doing any blog or anything, so these are pics I rescued from other peoples phones and so on.

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Here is an introduction on the work that went on when this painting was being created. From the first idea, till what we know now as the finished piece.

25th of July 2008
Just before the summer of 2008 everything seem to be difficult for me and many of my plans fell through. I went through a time of readjusting myself to all that was happening out of my control.
Soon I was finding everything fitting in perfectly and in a way, better than I had planned in the first place.
As things speak to one in strange ways, one day, I came across some people who were preparing a place to celebrate the Maya Calendar New Year, they told me that this was the last day of the year, and that tomorrow was an “out of time” day between the old year and the new year. I didn´t know much about this but I liked this idea.
I went on with my daily stuff but day after, the out of time day, turned out to be just that. No plans worked out, I found myself waiting most of the day for some things that ended up being a “lack of communication”. I remembered what I had been told and smiled to myself.
So in this time, while waiting, I was drawing in my diary that I always carry around. I was thinking about time and the way it moves, and how in a way I find it an artificial way to define something highly organic. I follow no fixed ideology or organised thoughts, but these ideas came to me and I wrote them down and then I followed that idea while I created this painting during the two years it took me to paint it.

Time moves in all directions.
Sometimes images become abstract when out of a lineal context.
When time moves in this way, one can see how things from the future mix with the past and when crossings come, other moments are created. Present. Present time is out of context.

29th of September 2008
“The image that came to me was of thin silks illustrating something, floating in space, one over another at points, and as they overlapped, creating a different image with the same elements they originally had. Each part of these silks are instants in time.
I started the painting on the 25th of September. The format is quite large. I find myself feeling clumsy as I´m not used to working on such a size.
On one of the silks I see a row of trees, that when overlapped with other instants would take a different shape. I see a city, an old city with crooked buildings. I also see a bare clock where I can see all its clockwork; it is in front of it all. I see the hand that tells the time loose, floating in between the silk. I see planets. I like planets. They always remind me how small and insignificant I am as a human being. I see the human mind, where is it? It´s trapped in thoughts and memories, from her clockwork-mind I see words floating out, theorizing experiences. I can see more faces. One appears as a looking down from the sky. I might even illustrate a couple of the dreams I have had these past few days while painting”(in the end i never illustrated those dreams, neither did I leave the hands of the clock loose either)

December 2008
“The spider web.... “What does creativity really mean? It´s quite an ample concept. Aware. Being present. Finding various ways to see each other. Creativity does not mean music, dance, painting, poetry...all that is just a way of manifesting it. The web. The connections in the lines are the moments of real creativity. The web is the illustration of the various connections in the realm of possibilities.Transformation and constant change.”

From May till October in 2009 I was not able to paint because my studio got too hot in summer and the acrylics got dry too quickly on the painting. The painting was too big too paint elsewhere. So during this time I just looked at it and sometimes had conversations, but the ideas had to wait and settle till the moment was good in order to act. So many ideas came and went, and others stayed to take part in the image.

November 2009
“There is a clock that can´t tell the time.
There is the sea, it´s rough.
There are birds, always flying.
There is a line of trees.
There is a city.
There is a spider web being elaborated.
There are different planets, dimensions.
There is abstraction and patterns that repeat themselves.
The loneliness of the old person in the city.”

Thoughts in “Stop days”. December 2009.
“There is a bare seat on a street in a city. Many many people in movement walking to and from places. Behind them all i see a map. I can see them also walking over and over the same tracks. No new trace marks.”

31st January 2010
“Today as a day out of time...but as soon as I define it like this, it fails in just that quality.
Do I waste time?
How do I spend time in my head?
I need my brain to stop chatting...more time out of time. Maybe that means not even painting, since painting also has a purpose.
Less ambition. More silence. Remember.
Daniel Lanois speaks through his solo guitar while I paint and stop painting.
Stop. Breathe. Be present. Remember. Stop. Breathe. Be present.”

11th of February 2010
“For the past couple of weeks I have been painting the one called “out of time” or something like that. Still not sure which name it will end up with.
For the past week I have only been painting the puzzle of numbers that makes up the background.(I still haven´t finished. It´s taking me forever. Lots of interesting things have been going on while I was “only doing numbers”. At the beginning it was fun to fit the shape of one number into another, which would then become part of yet another. Using only 0 to 9.
The first day of this work I wasn´t sure whether i had made the right decision. It meant getting bored. My mind wanted to balance the occurrence of each number. I also found myself wanting to combine the numbers into different layouts each time. How does one make each combination different when one is only using the digits 0 to 9?
At times I see a single number fitting perfectly into all the spaces, and must try to include the others. Sometimes I let myself relax, and just do what comes spontaneously or mechanically.

The first day I realized that, as I nested numbers inside other numbers, I was always left with the same shape once it became impossible to go any smaller: a triangle. I wonder whether this means anything? Something from Physics? Illogical mathematics might bring me to Logic.

I still haven´t really become bored doing this number thing. I am taking it as an exercise to be precisely out of time. Zen.

Also, this might be working on my lack of mathematical knowledge. I usually don´t like numbers in a traditional mathematical way.
Yesterday was one of those days on which I painted for about 10 hours. And all i did in that time was this number pattern. When i closed my eyes to go to sleep, i had the most amazing hallucination. It was bright green. Lots of light coming from the left, and then from above. It was as though I looked through a tinted glass window in the shape of a spider web. I told a friend about this and he said it was probably a product of the number painting, all done in red, for so many hours Green is contrary to red and my mind probably compensated the visual information.”
(from what i can recall, approximately over the length of one week i spent about 50 hours just building the number pattern).

2nd March 2010
“The birds are voyagers. The voyager finally turns into a bird able to fly. The voyager-birds enter the clockwork “dream” of the sphinx´s mind and eventually are released, to become a part of the cobweb.
There are thirteen trees. Strange, I have just counted them and I like that number. This reminds me of something. The year of the thirteen moons. Maybe the thirteen trees are all the same one, each of them representing each of those thirteen months. The mutation of the same tree through the different times of the year.

On the green planet an angel is standing, looking into the sphinx´s eyes. She is holding the dimension of the voyager birds. The angel had lost faith in Providence.
The voyager who can´t become a bird will take the sedentary way. The voyage will only be taking place in his mind. Then he is able to transform this experience and create his own chamber.”

26th of March 2010
“Last night I was reading Krishnamurti. An image came to my mind that i would like to paint.
There is a person walking or standing. She is holding an uprooted tree in her hand as an umbrella. It isn´t raining. It´s sunny. She is using the umbrella to feel protected. She is using a living being for her own benefit, but the tree will no longer be able to continue living; it will die being used as a safety umbrella, but this is not real. It is a waste.

And here the end result...

blog: https://timeoutoftimeprocess.blogspot.com/

for more info please check out www.romanie.net

Best Wishes, Romanie