Art and Time
The Hour That Isn't an Hour: What Art-Making Teaches Us About Time
I had a student in a workshop last month who set down her brush, looked up, and said, "Wait — how is it 4:30?" She'd walked in at 1:00. Ninety minutes had vanished, or so it felt to her, and she was almost shocked about it, that somehow she had disappeared for that time.
I get some version of that reaction almost every session. And I've come to think it's not a side effect of art-making. It might be the point.
Clock Time vs. Felt Time
We live most of our lives on what I'd call clock time — the relentless, evenly-spaced ticking that runs our calendars, our inboxes, our commutes. Clock time doesn't care how you feel. An hour of dread and an hour of delight are, to the clock, identical.
But there's another kind of time, one that psychologists have spent decades trying to name. The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow — a state of such complete absorption in what you're doing that self-consciousness drops away and, with it, your ordinary sense of time. He first noticed this phenomenon studying painters, who would become so engrossed in their work that they'd ignore hunger, fatigue, even the need to sleep — and then, oddly, lose interest almost the moment the piece was finished. It wasn't the finished painting they were chasing. It was the state itself.
That's the paradox at the center of every art workshop I run: people don't come for the object they'll take home. They come for the hour that stops behaving like an hour.
Why Painting Does This and Scrolling Doesn't
Flow has a fairly precise recipe: a challenge that's matched to your skill level, clear enough feedback that you know how you're doing moment to moment, and a task absorbing enough that it crowds out the mental chatter. Brushwork qualifies on all three counts. So does felting a bowl, or figuring out how to render the particular gray-green of a eucalyptus leaf. Your hands are doing something specific and slightly difficult, your eyes are giving you constant feedback, and your inner narrator — the one drafting emails and replaying conversations — finally has nothing to do.
Compare that to scrolling a phone, which offers plenty of stimulation but almost none of flow's structure. There's no skill being built, no real feedback loop, nothing to get better at. It fills time. It doesn't transform it.
The Body Notices, Even When You Don't
This isn't just a nice feeling — it shows up in the biology. Researchers at Drexel, led by Girija Kaimal, had adults spend 45 minutes making art — no instructions, no pressure to be "good," just markers, clay, and collage materials — and measured their cortisol before and after. Cortisol is the hormone most closely tied to stress. In that study, roughly three out of four participants showed a measurable drop, and it didn't matter whether they'd ever made art before in their lives. Novices benefited just as much as people who'd been painting for years.
That detail matters to me more than almost anything else in the research. You don't need to be good at this for it to work on you. You just need to do it.
Why This Matters More, Not Less, in an AI World
There's a real conversation happening right now — among business leaders, researchers, and working artists — about what's left for humans to do once a machine can generate an image, a poem, or a melody in seconds. A lot of that conversation focuses on output: whose work is "better," whose is more valuable, who still has a job. I think that's the wrong frame for what I do.
The World Economic Forum has been blunt about it: as AI absorbs more of the mechanical work of production, human creativity is becoming more valuable, not less — precisely because judgment, taste, and the ability to make meaning are the things algorithms are worst at supplying on their own. Some business leaders are making the same case from the inside — that the organizations that will do best in an AI-saturated economy aren't the ones with the most powerful tools, but the ones with the most creative people using those tools. And researchers looking at how people actually experience art in this moment have found something interesting: knowing a piece came from a human, not a machine, tends to make people value it more, not less — the labor and intention behind it become part of what they're responding to.
None of that is really about competing with a machine, though. It's about something a machine can't do for you: sit down, lose track of the clock, and come back different.
The Healing Is in the Losing-Track
I don't think it's an accident that "losing yourself" in something and "healing" get talked about in almost the same breath. When you're anxious, your relationship to time gets distorted in a particular, painful way — you're either trapped in a spiraling future or replaying a fixed past. Flow interrupts that. It pulls you into a present tense so absorbing there's no room left for the spiral. That's not a metaphor I'm reaching for; it's close to how clinicians describe why creative work shows up so often in trauma recovery and stress management. The hands are busy, the eyes are busy, and for a while, the part of your mind that keeps checking the exits gets to rest.
So when someone in one of my workshops looks up, startled that ninety minutes disappeared — I don't think of that as a distraction from their day. I think of it as the most productive kind of forgetting there is.
If you've ever come out of a painting session and realized you have no idea what time it is — I'd love to hear about it. That feeling is exactly what I try to build into every workshop, whether we're painting side by side in a studio or gathering a team on a screen.
— Kathy