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John O’Connor

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John O’Connor - "Hitchcock's Rope," 2019, Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 48.75 x 36.75 inches. Sold In this drawing, I was interested in exploring my personal sense of time, and how it relates to “real” time. I was thinking about how Hitchcock played with our perceptions of time in Rope. In this lm, the skyline light fades more quickly than in real life but, as viewers, we attribute real time to the coming of night. We therefore experience time as passing more slowly than it does in the lm. The concept of ‘mind time’ has always fascinated me—how we sense when to wake up, how we unconsciously read the visual stimuli around us as temporal context, how the physical world affects our sense of what time it is. I’ve also been long interested in self experimentation, so for this drawing I decided to test my own perceptions of time: At various points over the course of several weeks, I attempted to guess the correct time. I then noted this guess in the drawing and compared it against the actual time of my studio clock. I used the difference—the time error—to mark points on a grid I had drawn over much of the paper—minutes off of the real time translated into spaces between colored diamonds. My timed guesses and resulting differences are noted around the drawing. If I guessed before or after the actual time, I made a pattern on the grid (the concentric circles and shapes) in a warm or cool color. I continued this in a clockwise motion from the center outward, until the shapes began to intersect with the noted times. I then connected these patterns and developed the form more fully. The movements of the external shapes and arrows are counterclockwise. The whole piece is a time machine based on my temporal fallibility.

“Hitchcock’s Rope,” 2019, Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 48.75 x 36.75 inches. Sold
In this drawing, I was interested in exploring my personal sense of time, and how it relates to “real” time. I was thinking about how Hitchcock played with our perceptions of time in Rope. In this lm, the skyline light fades more quickly than in real life but, as viewers, we attribute real time to the coming of night. We therefore experience time as passing more slowly than it does in the lm. The concept of ‘mind time’ has always fascinated me—how we sense when to wake up, how we unconsciously read the visual stimuli around us as temporal context, how the physical world affects our sense of what time it is. I’ve also been long interested in self experimentation, so for this drawing I decided to test my own perceptions of time: At various points over the course of several weeks, I attempted to guess the correct time. I then noted this guess in the drawing and compared it against the actual time of my studio clock. I used the difference—the time error—to mark points on a grid I had drawn over much of the paper—minutes off of the real time translated into spaces between colored diamonds. My timed guesses and resulting differences are noted around the drawing. If I guessed before or after the actual time, I made a pattern on the grid (the concentric circles and shapes) in a warm or cool color. I continued this in a clockwise motion from the center outward, until the shapes began to intersect with the noted times. I then connected these patterns and developed the form more fully. The movements of the external shapes and arrows are counterclockwise. The whole piece is a time machine based on my temporal fallibility.

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