A Clock Without Hands / Statement
Paintings included in this exhibition fulfill competing desires. Individual works may exist simply out of a longing to experience as directly as possible a particular thing in the world. My approach to painting is wedded to Modernism – direct and directly perceived, but it is a relationship that I play with. Modernist painting tends to eschew features like the texture of things in favor of an underlying form. Yet in several of these paintings I have deliberately chosen things with a varied surface such as prune plums or figs that challenge that notion of an atomic Modernist world where texture is uniform. I do my best to fit their mottled quality into my painting language. I will also paint a subject several times in a variety of configurations to familiarize myself with it completely.
In other cases, for what I think of as “memory box” paintings, I will assemble a troupe of “actors” – favorite objects, photographs of relatives, natural forms – that I feel a kinship with. The objects carry emotional baggage: crab claws are faintly aggressive; a piece of chain implies bondage while a wing suggests freedom. I have a relationship with the people in the photographs – a favorite aunt who attended art school, a beloved uncle who joined the priesthood and died young that I have only dim memories of.
Objects exist in themselves, but they also elicit a sympathetic felt response from both artist and viewer. Things arranged and paired in turn affect and change one another. The chosen subject may resonate poetically in a variety of ways yet have no fixed symbolic meaning – or have no inherent meaning at all. Objects inhabit the space of the painting and conversely the surrounding space presses in on and affects them in turn. In the still life motif color, texture, quantity and the quality of light all impose their own demands – which alter our response. An artist never simply duplicates the observed world, he analogizes it. Painting things changes them.
Time is flattened in the world of still life. A favorite trope of Morandi was to include a clock in his configurations of objects – always viewed from the back where the face of the clock would not be visible. Time, mortality is always a feature of his world but is never directly seen. In Cézanne’s The Black Clock, an early painting from 1871, a voluptuous pink conch shell is paired with a black mantle clock – without hands. I will occasionally include clocks in my compositions – for similar reasons. Time is frozen – as viewers we are held captive by the painting like flies suspended in amber.
Tim Kennedy
Hartsdale / April 2026
