‘I always like a painting that’s both thick and thin at the same time.’
This was a passing remark by the Australian artist Jude Rae recently in praise of a painting she’d selected as part of the Vincent Prize, hosted annually by my partner’s art transport company. Her off-the-cuff remark about Stephanie Eather’s ‘Packing the Ranger to Head to Toganmain’ was very compelling to me for some reason, and I tucked it away in my mind.
Around then I’d been lamenting the problem of time in art-making – specifically, the feeling so many of us have that there’s never enough. I for one am always in search of it, trying to guard and protect it, constantly bemoaning the particular lack of that glorious, spacious, uninterrupted time when ‘real work’ can be done. I’d frankly been growing a little depressed about it.
In the days after Jude spoke, though, I realised the source of my gloom was possibly not so much my lack of time, as the way I was conceiving of it. I’d been thinking of time only in terms of its quantity: there are 24 hours in a day, and if other things use some of those hours, that time is unavailable for writing.
But one morning soon after the show I woke with this thought: what if time was like paint? What if there were more to time than simple quantity? What if we could have both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ time?
I sat on the couch and looked around at the paintings on our walls. Those I liked best did indeed appear to use both thick and thin paint. Sometimes the thinner pigment was an underpainting and hardly visible; sometimes it was a final layer, changing the colour and texture of what was beneath. Sometimes whole parts of a canvas seemed to be made with thin paint, thicker only applied in judicious dabs. None of the pictures would be as interesting if they only used one or the other. They needed both.
I began to think of measuring my ability to write not by the volume of available time, but rather its texture. If I could think of time as a medium to be applied in different ways for different effects, rather than a simple commodity that was available or not, what might happen?
I started to get excited.
‘Thick time’
It’s obvious what ‘thick time’ might mean: that idealised writing time – luxurious, uninterrupted, bountiful, the kind filled with silence and space for idling and walking and resting and reading, time largely available for devotion to a single project. It’s the sort of time one finds most easily in separation from ordinary life – on retreat, or on holidays, when the hours and days seem to stretch out, unscheduled and open before us.
When we think about how serious artists work, this is our default conception of the time at their disposal.
I am fortunate to be writing this newsletter draft at the start of four days of thick time, away from home in a quiet house, with only a few other minor obligations.
When you can get it, thick time allows slow thinking and sustained attention to complex problems. It allows immersion in the work across days, not just a few hours, especially if one is either alone or in the company of other working artists, as I am right now. The thread of connection between one day’s work and the next remains unbroken, sometimes even entering one’s dreams, and concentration and momentum are allowed to build.
These blocks of time are, to me, crucial. I’m lucky enough to find them several times a year, and I while I’ve written many novels while also working at full-time jobs, even then I would try to manage one or more periods of invaluable thick time each year.
‘Thin time’
But while I yearn always for thick time, thin is the type I normally get, especially in the midst of year of travelling and public speaking for book promotion. Thin time means a half-hour or several fitted in between other obligations - interviews, teaching, festivals, travel administration, life administration. Enough for scribbling notes or catching the edge of an idea, but not for exploring its full meaning or import.
My thin time is filled with the ‘outwardness’ I discussed in the last newsletter - public-facing, social-media oriented, filled with interruptions, bitsy and distracted. I’ve increasingly come to see this thin time as deficient, even largely useless.
But many artists reading this will rarely or never manage to find thick time, especially if they have children or other exhausting and demanding responsibilities – babies or ageing parents to care for, housing instability, troubled teenagers, full-time jobs and/or supporting others through the normal travails of life.
I don’t know how it is possible to consistently make good work when only thin time is available, but I know it has been done. The painter Ann Thomson told me that when her two daughters were small, she painted in the night after they were in bed and before she began teaching work the next day. In this excellent piece about Ruth Park by Tegan Bennett Daylight there’s a famous photograph of Park typing at her table while a toddler plays between her feet. Park’s literary output was staggering in the face of unending physical and mental labour, poverty and violence. Talk about thin time.
I’m not saying Park’s is an existence to aspire to. But when I find myself whining about my terrible lack of writing time while I spend swathes of it doomscrolling on news sites or sucked into an Instagram reel vortex or flipping between streaming channels, the examples of Park and Thomson, or Oodgeroo Noonuccal or Frida Kahlo, or single mother-of-five 1960s folk singer Rosalie Sorrels or any of the other thousands of artists who have overcome enormous real obstacles to make their work – well, perspective is a fine thing, is all I’m saying.
‘Enabling limitations’
Sometimes too much freedom is a trap. And I’ve always loved the way creative thinkers take problems and turn them into solutions.
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