Between Distance and Time Abstract Art

On Feeling That Travel Further Than We Do

There is a particular kind of wondering that arrives quietly, often when you least expect it. You are going about an ordinary day, perhaps making tea, watching rain move across a window, walking a familiar road. and something surfaces. A feeling that belongs to another place entirely. Another time. Someone you knew when you were a different version of yourself, in a different country, in a chapter of your life that closed long ago. And yet here it is. Alive. Present. Crossing all that distance and all those years as if neither of them mattered at all.

How does it do that? How does a feeling travel so far and still arrive intact?

We understand distance in physical terms easily enough. Miles, kilometres, oceans, borders. We understand time the same way, years counted, calendars turned, the steady accumulation of days. But feelings do not obey these measurements. They do not weaken proportionally with distance. They do not fade reliably with time. They have their own logic, their own quiet persistence, and they are not always willing to be left behind simply because we have moved on.

Think of somewhere you once lived that is far away now. Not just geographically, but in terms of who you were there, the person you were becoming, the things that mattered to you then, the way the light fell on a particular street at a particular hour. Can you feel it still? Not just remember it, but feel it? That slight shift in the body, that inner weather that belongs specifically to that place and that time and no other? That is not nostalgia, though it can resemble it. It is something more precise than that. It is the feeling itself, preserved, waiting.

And then there are the people. The ones we knew in those other places, in those other times. The ones who were part of a world we no longer inhabit. We carry feelings about them too, sometimes without fully realising it. Warmth that has nowhere particular to go. Gratitude that was never fully expressed. A kind of wondering about who they became, about what became of what passed between you, about whether any of it meant to them what it still means to you.

Distance separates us in space. Time separates us in years. But neither of them, it seems, is quite strong enough to dissolve the feeling itself. It changes, certainly. It softens, deepens, loses some of its urgency and gains something else in its place, something more considered, more generous, more aware of its own fragility. A feeling that has travelled a long way becomes something different from what it was at the start of the journey. But it is still recognisably itself. Still there. Still true.

This abstract painting tries to hold that. The vast space between where we were and where we are now, the time that has accumulated between then and this moment, and somewhere within all of that, the feeling that made the crossing anyway. Look into the layers of the canvas and you will find it there, not on the surface, not announced, but present. The way feelings are always present, beneath everything, patient, enduring, quietly astonishing in their refusal to disappear.

Is there a feeling you carry that has travelled further than you expected across more distance, across more time, than you ever imagined it could? And does it surprise you still, to find it there?

This is the third painting and blog post in the series Between Two Points, an exploration of the thresholds we all live between. You can also read the first post, Between Then and Now, and the second, Between Two People.

More paintings and posts will follow soon. I hope you will stay with me.