Flow of Time

How we read pictures, whether we know it or not, is often the result of a combination of factors. Of course, a prominent one is our own personality, the essence of who we are, regardless of our upbringing and all of the other common associations gravitating around our culture. But our own culture, its language (spoken and also its wider context) and the set of beliefs we adopted from it still has a great part in it, sometimes so deeply embedded that we won’t notice it.

This latest picture was the occasion for me to remember that simple fact.

When one attempts to interpret —to make sense of— a picture entitled “Flow of Time” (I was aware during the making of the picture that it wanted to deal partially with time even without having named it yet), one cannot avoid dealing with setting the picture in one’s own cultural background of reference.

In Western cultures, we have tenses: past, present and future (a minima). And usually, if we are asked what is the flow of time, we are prone to draw it from left to right. After all, it’s only natural, since we write that way, and the flow of a text (unless we are Leonardo) naturally follows this direction, from its past to its future.

I don’t know for Semitic languages and cultures which have the opposite convention, but I know that there is also another direction we wouldn’t naturally think of.

As a matter of fact, in Chinese culture for instance, time¹ is conventionally flowing from top to bottom, because time is often associated with the flow of a river, and its cascading from the top of the mountains to the depths of the sea.

And this convention is also very ingrained in the language itself, since you’ll say for “next month” 下月 (down a month) or for the previous week 上一个星期 (up one week), even if due to the influence of Western cultures, writing is now done seldom from top to bottom.

Of course, an image incorporates more than one reading, and once it is finished it is always an interesting game to interpret it against various sieves.

But one can imagine the other kind of fun it may be when you are actually painting it, and you start to pay attention to the various fluctuations of your own associations as they go from left to right, then from right to left (when you mirror the canvas to detect some errors in perspective, even if it’s still technically left to right, some habits are deep-rooted!), and all of a sudden from top to bottom.

Finally as Chinese philosophies often highlight, focusing on the center, the balanced pivot of action is always the best way to not get too dizzy.

Or to conjugate it, that would be… living in the present, or being present.

• ¹ Another particularity of Chinese language is that the action, the verb doesn’t carry any indication of time; there is no conjugation per se. The indication of time is given by the context… A lot could be said on that alone!