There is a quality of time in the studio that has no name in English. In Polish, we might call it czuwanie — a vigil, a watching-over, a being-with. I am not working. I am not resting. The particular alertness of a body that has set down its agenda and allowed itself to be present to what hasn't arrived yet. But I can sense it.
I used to call this procrastination. I no longer think that.
Again, my favorite Byung-Chul Han inspires this writing. In a slim book called The Scent of Time, he argues that what we have lost in the modern acceleration of life is not leisure — leisure we have in abundance, in the form of entertainment and scrolling and the rapid consumption of stimulation. What we have lost is lingering. The vita contemplativa: the practice of staying with something long enough for it to show us its depth. Han says that time has lost its scent — and I can relate, as I'm hyper scent-sensitive— because it no longer has the conditions that make scent possible: the slow accumulation, the settling, the development of complexity that only comes from watching, waiting, anticipating, remaining.
“Although hesitation is not a positive act in itself, it is constitutive of the act. What distinguishes acting from labouring is not a surplus of activity, but the capacity to pause. Whoever does not know how to hesitate is a labourer.”
―
A painting is not made in the hour when paint meets surface. It is made in the hours before and after.
The long looking, the not-knowing, the nervousness, the cleaning of brushes from yesterday, the tidying up of the studio. Actually, the studio is a place of suspended time. It functions differently from the hours organized around production.
In the studio, a single minute can hold a great deal: a shift in the light, a decision not made, an image arriving from the peripheral vision of the mind, a spilled ink becoming an idea, the dying plant all of a sudden, well, saddening us. But this only becomes possible if the studio has been protected from the logic of the schedule.
I know this in my body. There are mornings when I enter the studio carrying the momentum of everything else — the emails, the posting schedule, the need to document, the knowledge that what I make today will also need to be photographed, captioned, optimized. On those mornings, I paint efficiently. I complete things. I produce, send emails, market myself, inquire, respond, tick tock tick tock, and on and on.
And then there are mornings when the momentum doesn't follow me in. When I sit with the paper for longer than is sensible. When I notice the way the light falls on the water in the jar and stop there, just there, for a moment that expands slightly outside the clock. Those mornings, I don't always finish anything. But what gets started has a different story.
It has the seed of accumulated attention. It has — I want to use Han's word — scent.
If you know what I'm saying — change the story.
See if what you're dealing with is procrastination—as per the crowd constantly optimizing themselves—or is it a seed of something only an artist can plant, nurture, and harvest.
End of Part 1 / see Part 2 here.
