Between Then and Now – Memory, Time and the Distance We Carry

Have you ever watched a season change and felt, just for a moment, that you were standing in two times at once?

Here in the UK, you don’t even need to wait for a new season. A single summer’s day can do it.

The morning arrives warm and generous, the kind that makes you believe it will last. By afternoon the light has shifted. By evening there is rain, and more than once the barbecue has been driven back into the garage.  

Within a few hours you have lived through what feels like several different days, and something in each of them is familiar, recognised, already lived before.

The same stillness before a change. The same surprised realisation that the warmth was never guaranteed. And suddenly Then and Now are not separated by years at all. They are still right beside each other, almost touching.

That is the space this abstract painting and this series of blog posts tries to explore. Not time as a sequence of events, but time as something we carry inside us, layered, unresolved, alive.

We tend to think of the past as something behind us. Fixed. Done. But if we are honest with ourselves, it doesn’t quite work that way, does it?

Then has a habit of surfacing, in a familiar smell, in the way someone laughs, in a landscape that matches one we once loved. It rises through the present the way colour rises through layers of paint. You don’t plan for it. But there it is.

And Now, our present moment, is not the clean, clear thing we imagine it to be either. It is built from everything that came before it. The choices we made and the ones we didn’t. The people who shaped us, some of whom we no longer see. The younger versions of ourselves who had no idea what was coming, and who somehow still live in us, quietly, in the background.

Between Then and Now is not a gap. It is a kind of country, one we all inhabit whether we are aware of it or not. A place where memory and the present moment exist side by side, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension, always in conversation.

The abstract painting that opens this series tries to hold that space visually. The layers beneath the surface, the marks that show through, the atmosphere that is neither fully one thing nor fully another. It is not an illustration of an idea. It is an attempt to sit inside the feeling itself. To stay there long enough to let it mean something.

We spend so much of our lives moving forward, as we should, because we can’t go back. But there is something valuable in pausing occasionally at the threshold between who we were and who we are now. Not to dwell. Not to wish things had been different. Simply to look. To acknowledge that Then is part of us still and that Now carries more history than we sometimes allow ourselves to see.

So I will ask you this, not as a challenge but as an invitation. When did you last allow yourself to stand quietly between your Then and your Now? And what did you find there?

This is the first painting and blog post in a series called Between Two Points, an exploration of the threshold we all live between. Each painting is accompanied by a reflection on its subject.

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