Our events are recorded and on-demand to ticket holders for a month. Proceeds from ticket sales benefit UK museums, galleries and other arts-based organisations.
Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878, 1878. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
We are surrounded by the air we breathe, the spaces we move in, and the light and colour travelling in constantly fluctuating waves through the spaces we inhabit. These core features of our physical world have been the same for millennia – and yet art down the ages has always interpreted them differently. These changes have gone unnoticed at the time, yet are obvious to us looking back.
This is the thought provoking theme of ARTscapades’ series of three talks by Hilary Hope Guise. Each lecture takes our exploration further, but they can be booked and enjoyed separately too.
Lecture Three: Time
How do we frame time when it is constantly on the move and nearly all art is static? First, perhaps with symbolic images, like the hour-glass, or the nails in Van Gogh’s boots? But iconography has to evolve, and become an agreed ‘language,’ and this becomes inadequate as the modern industrial world speeds up. In the industrializing 19th century we see the Impressionists’ rapid and cheeky images of an existential and changing world convey the pace of city life. Time is of the essence in the hectic “modern world” of Monet’s flag-waving Paris, but later with actual time-capture, as in the evolving colours around Monet’s corn stacks, he expresses the reality of day and night, Summer and Winter.
Brushstrokes speed up, they get faster, and eventually disappears altogether annihilating human gestures in machine-made consumerist images of the 20th century. We find that boundaries blur and structures fracture. Finally, we see in the installations of Andy Goldsworthy, that in Nature herself, time is the great destroyer. So, there are answers, and examples, to show us how artists have expressed the tricky problems of conveying the fundamental principles of physics. We only have to work to find them.
This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live with Q&A, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.