I’m Chris Melchior, the founder of UnconstrainedTime. I love working with aesthetics in many different mediums and I created all of the initial UnconstrainedTime watches.
My artistic journey:
From an early age I was fascinated by aesthetic experiences including the beauty of nature as well as man-made arts, and had strong aesthetic preferences which applied to any medium, such as being fascinated by organic and abstract qualities.
I’ve always much preferred creating rather than merely duplicating what others had already created. When only a few years old as I was learning the recorder I sometimes chose to play an invented harmony instead of the melody I was supposed to be playing. and was very frustrated to be told that being my authentic self, and being creative, was “wrong”.
While I also had ability in the visual arts, most of my experiences in the arts up to the age of eighteen was in classical music. My father had wanted to be a classical violinist when he was growing up, but wasn’t given access to decent lessons or instrument, so gave my sister and I those advantages when we were young.
Like any child, I wanted to do what my parents most admired and praised, so classical music was the most effective option. While some of the resulting aesthetic experiences were incredible, the skills I learned were very valuable, and I could have gone into classical music as a career (at the age of eighteen, I was the co-leader/principle of the foremost youth orchestra in the UK), the non-creative nature of classical music was definitely not a good fit for me. I later got involved in the creative side of music, including being probably the only musician at the time writing original dance tracks live on stage, and loved it.
A couple of years later, I started studying Communication, Information and Electronic Engineering (a straight-to-Masters-Degree course), intending to get into creating electronic music, which, at the time, could only be done by working for one of the big studios such as the BBC radiophonic workshop. I was disillusioned with the course which involved things like rote-learning of pointless mathematics (because it hadn’t been done by humans in decades) taught without any understanding of why it worked the way it did.
I happened to write letters to a friend of mine (this was in the days before the internet), painted copies of Roger Dean images (who was my major inspiration at the time), on those letters and creating lettering in his style etc.. Her mother was an art teacher and said that I had some obvious talent.
Revelations, discoveries and continued evolutions . . .
I learned a very valuable lesson from that course, while studying the history of business, which was that I didn’t want to get paid for turning up somewhere from 9 to 5 doing part of something for someone else, I wanted to get paid for making my own very personal creations that I cared deeply about. (I later discovered that the creation part can be a lot easier than the getting paid part!). So I quit doing the course which wasn’t a good fit for me, and . . .
I then embarked on educating myself as an artist. I attempted to apply to the prestigious graphics course at Middlesex university, but wasn’t experienced enough to be accepted, so they walked me down the hall to their Foundation Art course. I was too late to apply there but they recommended a good pre-foundation course as a starting point. . .
So I did a year of pre-foundation art at Camden Arts Centre, which was excellent. One of the best teachers there watched me for the first few weeks in his life-drawing class, with all the other students crowding around admiring my work and saying they wished they could draw like that. He then told me that if I really wanted to improve, I should instead be totally honest when I worked . . . any line that I drew which was not 100% perfect, re-do it, and most importantly, don’t look at the results or care what anyone said about them, just keep doing the work honestly, then after a few years I might happen to glance at my work and notice that I’d made real improvement.
This was profoundly helpful advice, and although it was challenging to let go of doing what other students admired and enjoying the emotional validation from that, that valuable lesson improved my life-drawing enough for it to be the significant factor in getting me admitted to my first choice, which was the Middlesex University Foundation Art course, the next year . . .
I’d looked around at a few other foundation art courses, but what I needed to improve most was the underlying power and structure of my work . . . I could do fine detail well, but what was behind and “underneath” it was weak, at that stage in my development. The Middlesex foundation art show displayed lots of bold, powerful work, and they were obviously challenging students to go beyond their comfort zone, so it looked like the best fit for me.
Finding my focus.
My year at the Art Foundation course at Middlesex University was the most intense and valuable year of education I ever experienced. I learned so much, including eventually getting to understand and experience the concept of fine art (which few people comprehend, and some reading this will no doubt disagree with):
Fine Art is a process. You create something, compare the results with your reference material, clarify the focus on whatever element interests you most in your work, and then you create some more. Repeating this cycle causes the results to become gradually more powerful and authentic, and leads you somewhere you could not have imagined when you started . . . it’s a real exploration of yourself and reality, but to do it honestly requires contact with “the void” (known by some of the Eastern philosophies), which can be terrifying at first but can also be very addictive.
By contrast, imagining something in your head then rendering that in some physical form is design, which is a very different process. This difference relates directly to the focus of UncontrainedTime, which I explain on our home page.
I realized from my experiences there, that Fine Art was what interested me most (although design and graphics skills have been useful too, over the years), and I went on to study fine art and music (and some philosophy as well) at Middlesex university which, at the time, had one of the best broad-based fine-art courses in the country, as well as being the foremost course for general performing arts. That was an amazing three years of my life, including a semester on exchange in the US, and travelling there before and after which was a life-changing experience. I was awarded a First Class Honours Degree (and later did some Masters Degree classes at the same American University, including digital fine art, and also wrote my Masters Degree Thesis on ambient music (below)).
One of my most significant artistic obsessions is organic forms and textures (which overlaps with my love of fractals, see below). Here are a couple of my paintings of large chalk stones which reflect this obsession (the one on the left being the centre area of a triptych), created during my Foundation Art course:
Since then I’ve created lots of art and music, as well as making good use of my design skills in my web-design, logo design, graphics, etc. and as enjoying photography. More recently I’ve enjoyed getting into both the creative artwork and the practical aspects of product-design (with help from outsource experts) for the UnconstrainedTime project.
Inspirations.
Many things in life inspire my creativity.
Examples of profound aesthetic experiences which I have found hugely inspiring include driving through London in early evening with the sound of a helicopter taking off juxtaposed with the echoes of the call to prayer at a mosque. Another example was a street musician playing an simple form of bag-pipe made from an animal skin and single pipe, making an unexpectedly interesting fit with the harmonics made by the shrieking metal of the escalator he was standing near.
Travel has given me lot of inspiring experiences, such as the fascinating pinks, reds, oranges and creams of rock layers in Morocco, evening light on winter trees covered in frozen-rain in the Blue Ridge Mountains (see below for my water-colour of that), and the warm late-summer scents of grain and dust as wheat fields are harvested in rural England, with the sounds of birds and insects and the colours of the flowers in the hedgerows creating such an evocative atmosphere, helping inspire one of the UnconstrainedTime watch designs: Poppy Seed Pod watch.
I find many aspects of nature inspiring, from the fascinating organic shapes and textures to the colour palettes of different landscapes, whether subtle blends or dramatic contrasts.
Most natural shapes are fractals, which is an area I have been deeply fascinated with for many years (both in terms of natural fractals and relatively “organic” ones created by humans). I remember looking at some oak trees, thinking of the profound concepts they embody . . . each oak tree is unique, yet they have characteristics which make them easily identifiable as oak trees, subtle differences in the simple basic principles making them distinguishable from all other species of trees, implemented such a vast number of times, influenced by their context and by random chance, creating such beautiful results. I wrote a piece of ambient music inspired by those oak tree concepts, which included use of a percussion instrument I invented and made.
Here are a few examples of my fractal artworks (below). Upper-left,: mixed-media on board (print, acrylic, conte crayon, charcoal) based on a printed IFS fractal.
Upper right: mixed media (inks and acrylic on watercolour paper). I created a fascinating fractal with relatively simple curves, printed it and carved it into a flat piece of wood leaving the fractal as ridges, placed that carving on the centre of a piece of paper , added inks and acrylic paints into a damp surface, then placed a layer of plastic on top which creates its own fractal shapes, and added more inks and paints manually after it dried clarifying and strengthening the composition.
Lower left: a heart-shaped flame fractal digitally melded with painted textures and added colours. Lower right: flame fractal.
Exploring possibilities for the initial watch to launch our brand with, I was overjoyed to find that creating what is almost certainly the world’s first 3D fractal watch, made sense as our ideal launch watch.
Many visual artists have inspired me. From early almost-abstract painters like Monet’s water lilies and J,.M.W. Turner, to more recent abstract artists such as Mark Rothko and Howard Hodgkin.
I also find some music (from a wide variety of genres) to be profoundly inspiring. Starting from being mainly exposed to classical music, I developed a love for progressive rock as a teenager, then got into ambient music as it arose as a genre. I later wrote my Masters Degree dissertation on the subject of ambient music, which can be seen as part of the most significant revolution in Western Art Tradition music for more than a thousand years.
More recently my musical tastes include dance music as well as such diverse interests as Max Richter, Snarky Puppy, Solar Fields, and Plini.
At the time I began focusing on visual arts, one of my main influences was Roger Dean. I love the atmospheres of the beautiful worlds he creates and the magical, ethereal nature of his creations. I was told during one of my interviews for foundation art courses, that I would be better not to mention that I was inspired by Roger Dean, because that’s what most people were saying at the time. I prefer being authentic to my own nature than following trends, especially these days, as can be seen by Unconstrained watches, which have almost no influence from the watchmaking tradition at all.
I also love how an inspiration in one medium can lead me towards creations in another. For example, when I read some simple fractal algorithms in Scientific American magazine in the last ’80’s, wrote some computer code and experimented with their visual manifestations myself, staring in wonder at the complex and fascinating shapes, my though was “what would those sound like?” Which led me to invent a pure, direct fractal sound synthesis algorithm, and, ultimately back to my visual fascination with fractals. But that’s another story. Back to the topic at hand . . .
My Other Visual Art.
My major fine art project before UnconstrainedTime was a large series of organic abstracts created using an evolutionary process where one image becomes the basis for the next, combined with other elements:
Over the years I’ve created a variety of other work (which I’d define more as “popular art” than fine art), including one of the paintings below which was part of a best-selling range of greetings cards for many years (published by Gallery Cards of Muswell Hill, London).
The evolution of UnconstrainedTime.
It started with a dream, while I was travelling. I have had other dreams which presented original creative content, but this one was extraordinary . . . the dream showed me, in the fascinating but somewhat vague ways that dreams often do, a simple, minimal time display and a wide variety of different design aesthetic creations which that enabled, including the basic concept of one creation which I may release as an UncontrainedTime watch at some point.
I then spent some time thinking though the practicalities of making the ideas into viable products. I drew on a variety of inspirations and developed six different initial watch creations, and paid 3D modellers to create and render them. I did a small amount of social media promotion at that time, got no results from that, and forgot about the whole idea for ten years.
Coming back to it (after ten years of making unusually effective progress with the advanced self-development and spiritual work that I am a leading practitioner of) I was able to start working with the whole project on a vastly more professional and realistic way. I delved far more deeply into details of product design and the business side of things, adapted some of the original creations and added some new ones, to get the project to the point of having enough of a range of watches to give a realistic starting point for people to have some understanding of the brand and its potential.
I’m excited to have chosen Fractal Emergence as our launch watch, since fractals have a special place in my heart:
I look forward to collaborating with established artists (whether creators of art jewellery, fine art, sculpture, ceramics or other mediums) to add to the range of UnconstrainedTime watches, as well as seeing the ideas submitted to our open design competition, and making the best of them available on our website. It will be fascinating to see how these inputs, along with my own ongoing explorations, and feedback from our customers and fans, directs the evolution of the UnconstrainedTime project.
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