THE PLEIN AIR PAINTING won first prize. Its beauty and skill were apparent, but the title was also a winner: "Golden Moment." The nighttime scene showed a Texas train yard at the desert's edge under a full moon. A streetlight illumined the tracks, a shed, and a crossing signal.
The painter had indeed captured a "moment," and for several reasons. For one, the painted image froze time. Second, those who looked at the painting, their eyes rapidly and minutely darting around, were really taking in countless moments, forming an illusion of a whole. In other words, the painter did not paint the picture in a moment, nor do we see it as a whole in a moment.
So why does the concept of “capturing a moment” endure in painting?
True, if this was a photograph, we could have the exact time the shutter flashed and how fast: a precise moment. The photographer, evoking scientific measurement, could argue that because it takes a painter seconds, minutes, and more to view the scene, sketch it in, locate the rising moon, and consider how the atmosphere might be changing the light, the concept of a "moment" is absurd.
Fair enough, the painter might say. But at some instant—some moment—the painter froze the scene in memory, there to look at as the painting process was underway. The moment lives in the memory, a slippery proposition indeed (given how memory works).
The “moment” is even more complicated if the panting is of a sunrise, when the sun is moving, light shifting, and breezes moving things as the warm and cool of the Earth's surface interact. In this case, memory of a split second perception must pin down the “moment” to be painted.
The problem is solved, of course, if we say a moment is not really a moment. Instead, we could say an extended period of artistic manipulation produces how a frozen moment might look. The real, bygone moment is faked, though skillfully and beautifully.
When painters say, "I want to capture the moment," it’s understood that this involves a lot of invention and adjustment. Time is passing at incredible speed. In the end, the moment is really an invention.
Well, so what? If the painting works, and it’s suggestive of a moment—indeed the painting itself is not moving, but staying the same moment to moment—what is at issue? By convention, really, nothing is amiss in speaking of a moment, at least until one becomes philosophical.
This is what the Greeks became. Remember the race between the tortoise and hare? The Greek philosopher Zeno argued that a line, or progression, moving forward can be infinitely divided into points (or moments), and thus the swift hare never overtakes the slow tortoise. A seeming absurdity in Greek thought, yet a conceptual foundation for future arithmetic and geometry.
For centuries, human perception of time and moments was taken to be a kind of holistic power, the mind and consciousness being much like God's mind, able to know things as they really are at any point of cognition. First came the skeptics (skeptical of knowing a real thing, let alone a moment in time). A more significant revolution on the topic came with the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who argued that all human perception is a string of moments, each perishing into the next, yet we have a unified “intuition” called time. His writings on the topic earned him the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature.
Then came the American psychologist William James. Taking a clinical and experimental stance, he expanded on Bergson. James said that we know reality in many separate instants, all dictated by the way biological cells, eyes, and brains process data. Memory is all that holds it together.
Before long, painters, too, were making much of memory. Every time a painter turns his eyes from a scene, he has only split-seconds of memory to recall a color and shape he wants to put down on the canvas to imitate what was seen (a moment ago). Naturally, a lot of trial and error, back and forth, and constant adjustments produce a facsimile on the canvas. But time has passed. So, what happened to the "moment?"
I suppose, in the end, we must accept that romantic painting titles, or claims of “capturing the moment," are just poetry. Photographers are off that hook. Their wristwatches and shutter speeds can identify moments exactly (though Zeno might quibble). Physicists have reduced the smallest moment we can know to the time it take an electron to make one vibration, hence the atomic clock.
Next time we painters want to say we are "capturing the moment," it’s good to know how much we are really out of our depth. At the least, the final painting is, in fact, some moment frozen in time, but it's really a moment we have invented. The real thing was moving past at just incredible speed.