When it comes to art, the ratio of time spent looking to time spent making is tricky. Value — monetary or artistic — doesn’t necessarily come from longer periods of making. And yet it stings when a viewer gives their attention to artwork for mere seconds, lingering longer on the label than the actual art. Then there’s the calculus of staying power. What if a piece of art remains in the mind’s eye for days, weeks or even years after it was experienced? Is that a kind of looking?
You can blame these philosophy 101 musings on a show about time — time frozen in photographs, time snatched between tasks, time to oneself. Will Yackulic’s Time of My Life is a big show of little art; the largest of the 30 paintings is just 9.5 inches tall. These gem-like oil-on-panel works arrest everyday life in all its mundane glory: blinking traffic signs, a pink sky over parked cars, light hitting a stack of plastic chairs. Arranged across four walls in the Mission gallery Et al., they form one long line of enchanting, beautifully painted moments.
As a new parent, Yackulic found himself unable to devote uninterrupted hours to the type of work he once made. And so he began taking pictures between tasks, of things he either didn’t want to forget or couldn’t — the way a tape had unspooled, or the colors in a stack of milk crates. Then, after dinner and bedtime, he painted the day’s images. Most of the pieces in Time of My Life were made in a single sitting.
Some of that urgency comes through in the brushwork, which can be light and dry, or thickly opaque. His subject matter is clear but not overworked. Trees, buildings, streets and storefronts are rendered with minimal gestures, with a focus on light, shadow and mood. Electrical lines are scraped through wet paint. In Scenic Area, a view of a blurry highway sign, horizontal brushstrokes perfectly capture the feeling of motion as water droplets stream across a car window’s surface.
As I moved down the line, from one small panel to the next, I found myself making sighs of satisfaction, each painting drawing out a new exclamation of pleasure. Many of Yackulic’s noticings felt familiar, like things I might also want to photograph or already had. (Who doesn’t love the way the sun rakes through a fire escape, or the comedy of a garbled traffic message?)
