Finding time for excellence

September 7, 2018

Artistic crafts require time. You cannot become a master without spending hours, days, years honing your gestures and constantly improving. Homo Faber is intended to be a celebration of the slow, solemn and fascinating timescales of artistic crafts; this is a message perhaps going against the trend with respect to the supersonic speed of technology, but for this reason all the more poetic and human.

If you read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, you realise that the youngsters are in a great hurry. Tybalt is in a hurry to expel Romeo from the house of the Capulets, Juliet is in a hurry to marry, Romeo is in a hurry to steal a kiss from Juliet and then begin his life with her... the older characters, on the other hand, are slow: the Nurse takes ages over her stories, Friar Laurence does not see Romeo’s banishing from Verona as a calamity because he knows that there is time for everything.
Artistic crafts are a constant invitation to reflect on the time “necessary”: the time necessary to create, to realise, and also the time to enjoy these marvellous objects. When we are young we are in a hurry with everything: also with becoming masters. We are in a hurry to grab hold of our dreams and make them real. Life is there to be built and there is never enough time to do it.

Whereas the art masters teach us that we need to learn to allow ourselves more respectful rhythms, because if we want to achieve excellence we cannot do otherwise.
If we want to have the great privilege of growing old as the objects created by the great art masters grow old: slowly, and gracefully.