As Ernst Gombrich discussed in his book “The Image and The Eye”, time is sensed in a painting on the basis of memory and expectation. A painting offers a context for revealing the past and the future; what just happened and what is about to happen. A painting can offer a sense of time through optical illusions which appear to happen in time such as Bridget Riley’s works which demonstrate optical flicker effects. Sometimes these two conditions can be merged into a narrative image, the past and future presented with optically induced motion. In his new book ” Soul dust” Nicholas Humphries considers our consciousness with our experience of time. We don’t just experience time as a set of minutely small instants. We experience time as something with more lasting effects. The present lingers and future is suggested. This condition he calls “thick time”. St. Augustine wondered about this problem too. Very simply, how could there be short and long syllables when an instant is compressed between the past and the future unless time is not a string of minute instants which could theoretically be carved up into smaller and smaller instants. He considered that our memory extended our sense of the present so that it had continuity and substance, measurability. Or, as Humphries offered, ” thick time”. Otherwise the present is always infinitely squeezed between the past and the future. Biologically we experience color, form and motion as data arriving at different times in our brain, 25 milliseconds apart. Our brain re-organizes these data streams to give us the illusion of a single unitary present. We scan a room and think we have seen it all but, we really have focused on very small percent of the visual array while our brain lets us comfortably believe we have seen it all and, seen it all at once. In a paintng we play or manipulate the way our brain organizes memory and expectation. Asymmetry gives a sense of instability, noted Gombrich, just as symmetry gives a sense of stasis or immobility. Motion( an unfolding future) is triggered by blurring and instability. A sculptor and painter know how to give a dynamic sensation of movement(expectation) by creating a work that is not steady but leaning or falling or apparently in the process of moving. Ruskin observed that a curved line offered a greater feeling of movement and volume than a straight line. A curved form destabilized by asymmettry and not perpendiculary to the ground plane will impart a sense of motion, a sense of expectation, a sense of unfolding time. In my examples here I have a painting by Gerhard Richter in which he blurred the subject by dragging wet paint across the pictrure plane ( perhaps with a squeegee). Next is a photo of mine taken while I shook the camera. The blurring is pronounced giving the effect of sparklers twirling or streaking. The image leaves ghostly trails; the past is present. The next image of mine is painted on aluminum, . The surface shimmers with vibrations, the figures blurr, the clock has echoing images of itself resonating horizontally. The last image, a woman standing in a newstand, is composed only of dashes and quick strokes. We feel it is us who is moving because we know from experience (memory) the room does not move. This is the feeling of a fast or quick scan of a space. Try it and you will see how nothing is focused when you quickly move your head. These are functions of our sense of time. 
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