If you have a philosophical turn of mind then time is one of the centers of such thinking. Time in the biological sense is like a tour the time we spend in this incarnation on this old earth. Then again time exists as a way of measuring being, as in the number of years one does something. For instance I have painted and made art for more than 40 years. But what does make art mean? And time what is time but a way to measure bits and pieces of an eternal timelessness ( which comes with our exit from lived time). My son Peter says time does not exist ( or something very alike this paraphrase) he has a master's degree in physics and he makes me wonder if time isn't a petty measuring spoon which we humans need in order to pay wages and say the boat is leaving at such and such an o'clock. You see where this philosophical speculation leads back to the realms of art. Art has no strict form like say a clock. Indeed it's an inquiry of a sort philosophical nonsense indeed nonsense maybe an exaggeration since art actually has value or has less value . The aesthetic inquiry is about beauty and it relates to ethics for it's basic structure.
I was looking at the Google picture scroll of Peter Saul's paintings dozens and dozens of his looney paintings, It was quite an eye opener, though I've made many paintings and large part of my work has been on paper. When you admire an artist as much as I did Peter Saul in my youth you find that your differences play out in your own work. It's odd to see Peter old he's 76, I knew him in 1968 when he was a guest artist and met the graduate painters once a week for criticism. Peter liked me and I of course loved his paintings long before I met him. I was more intellectual then in a more traditional way very language oriented and to me Peter was just gone very comically gone . And I suppose the experience helped me find my own way by taking off my Clement Greenburg safety belt. But along with my thinking about Joe Zucker another lost friend I began to understand that in art you have to find your own voice. You can use someone else's style for only so long and if you can't find this personal voice then maybe you aren't going to be canon. In some ways I prefer my favorite artist's solutions it's so much easier to copy than start from nothing. And we all start somewhere and in my case we become such a complex construction that the body of work is a huge tangle of ideas. images and thoughts. It's as if I can't quite explain what I had in mind but I'm fairly certain that what I make is fine art.It's not as concise as Zucker's work or as nuts as Saul's (though he might argue about that as he thinks I'm way nuts) but it's definitely mine and my voice my slice of the immortal pie. I'm not the sort of artist who could have filled up a SoHo gallery with 8 to 10 large colorful objects every other year. Or in Peter's case evinced the same sensibility and intensity for several decades no my art is rather more diverse than these men, because my interest in Marcel Duchamp also influenced my sense of what it is I do and how it relates to the recent history I most admire. I think of art being also a prediliction of our minds, a mind can get very hungry. Had a visitor threw off my concentration. Point being no one should be afraid of making personal art, the more personal the better. And their is no set time for all long it takes to make a work of art or how long it might take posterity to find your vision desirable. Time maybe the ingredient in art that is most difficult to acquire it just keeps moving like Heraclitus's river.