Hi, 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 watch designs.
My artistic journey:
From an early age I was fascinated by aesthetic experiences including the beauty of nature as well as man-made art, and had strong aesthetic preferences which applied to any medium, such as organic and abstract qualities.
I 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 a invented harmony instead of the melody I was supposed to be playing. and was very frustrated to be told that being myself, and being creative was “wrong”.
While I 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 a decent 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 just 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 tracks live on stage, and loved it).
A couple of years later, I studied Communication, Information and Electronic Engineering, 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 pointless (because it hadn’t been done by a human in years) mathematics 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), and painted copies of Roger Dean images (who was my major inspiration at the time), 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 . . .
So I quit doing something I wasn’t enjoying, but 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 personal creations that I cared deeply about. (I later discovered that the creation part can be a lot easier than the getting paid part!)
I then embarked on educating myself as an artist. I attempted to apply to the presitgious 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 pre-foundation year 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 be totally honest when I worked . . . any line that I drew which was not 100% perfect, erase and re-do it, and most importantly, don’t look at the results, 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 difficult give up enjoying the emotional validation, that 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 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 and clarify the focus on whatever element interests you most in your work, and then you create some more. This cycle 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.
I realized from my experiences there, that Fine Art was what interested me most (although design and graphics skills have been useful too), and 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 America, and travelling there before and after, which was a life-changing experience. I was awarded a First Class Honors Degree.
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 and practical aspects of product-design 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, and 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 layers of rocks in Morocco, evening light on winter trees covered in frozen-rain in the Blue Ridge Mountains (see below for my water-color 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 colors 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 to the color palettes of different landscapes, whether subtle blends or dramatic contrasts.
Most natural shapes are fractals, which is an area I have been fascinated with for many years (both in terms of natural fractals and 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, which are 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 concepts, which included use of a percussion instrument I invented.
Exploring possibilities for the first watch to launch our brand with, I was overjoyed to find that creating what is almost certainly the first 3D fractal watch ever made, was our ideal launch.
Many visual artists have inspired me. From classics like Monet’s water lilies and the almost-abstracts of Turner, to more recent abstract artists such as Rothko and Howard Hodgkin.
I also find some music 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 developed (I 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 worlds he creates and the magical, ethereal nature of his creations.
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 (and experimented with them myself), staring in wonder at the 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, 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 vague ways that dreams often do, a simple time display and a wide variety of different design aesthetics which that enabled, including one design 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 designs, and paid 3D modellers to create and render them. I did a small amount of poorly planned social media promotion at that time, got no results and forgot about the whole idea for ten years.
Coming back to it (after ten years of making unusually effective progress with advanced self-development work) I was able to work 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 other people to understand the brand and its potential.
I’m also 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.
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