In the Arms of Time (For Now)

The essence of my painting, Saturn/ Kronos: In the Arms of Time (For Now), the gift it brings, comes from the cutting up of a whole. If we look at the Kronos myth from Greek Mythology, we find that the god, Kronos, afraid of the prophecy that one of his children would kill him for his crown, eats up all his children. His wife Rhea, saves the remaining children, including Zeus, by hiding them and giving Kronos a wrapped stone to eat instead. Here, I invariably remember Goya’s painting of Kronos eating his children. Indelible as that Goya image is, for my own painting, I went in the opposite direction.

For the whole series of paintings for Celestial Data for Daydreaming, I chose to reframe the myths by thinking of the gods and goddesses as forces. As I reread the different creation stories and myths of old, I imagined that the universe, before time, began as a vibration. A oneness that contained everything. The Alchemists called this, Chaos. Genesis called this, the Word. Our science points to a subatomic particle that existed before “the Big Bang which contained all the material that would later on make up the whole universe. But I saw Kronos as Time. He existed as one, undivided force that contained all. In order for the universe to be created, for everything to exist, time had to be cut up into pieces. Kronos chewed his children, parts of himself, into smaller parts. The one vibration had to be divided into smaller parts for the universe to unfold.

And so we have time. And time begat space. The vibration of the Word spread out. Kronos begat Zeus — expansion and space; and Zeus begat Ares (Mars)— the force of movement. And so we have time, as we understand it, cut up into eons, years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Changing numbers on our machines that still dictate the way our life goes. We have seasons and birthdays and appointments and hourly rates and runtimes. More importantly, time brings space and motion—consciousness, perception, experience, color, music, dance.

I chose to see Kronos as the beauty of time. Kronos is a force that moves through us as the experience of life itself. Growth, change, transformation, evolution. The original vibration of the Word continuously moving through us, right down our spine as impulses of will and consciousness and memory. A force inside us that draws to itself an ever-changing river of matter: heat flowing in the blood, air flowing through the lungs, water and minerals flowing through the systems of the body. Always changing, never the same. It seems to me that Kronos gives us all these gifts. It seems to me that the Saturn force creates the grid, the matrix through which everything happens. For this all embracing force, and for the time I have now to experience life, I am grateful.

Saturn/Kronos: In the Arms of Time (For Now) 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 60”X84”