Time flew on, and when she became an adolescent, she felt that Time had put on heavy boots and that it had stamped on her dreams, putting her through the drudgery of school, unwanted homework, and her mother’s rebukes. During this period, much to her own dislike, her mother kept a photo album of her as a baby and as a young child. Amser hated her mother photographing her. She didn’t want to be enclosed in that album, and she would scream if the photograph didn’t resemble the image that she had of herself.

She grew into a forceful character, and when Time marched on to her eighteenth year, she left home for work.Much to her dismay, life was then regulated by the shrill and strident sound of her alarm clock.Amser’s deeply felt resentment toward this uncalled-for authority led her to escape its daily wake-up call by deciding to become an artist. She judged an artist’s life to be less regulated; to be more open to life; to be freer and easier than her present one. There, at her ease in her artist’s gown splattered with paint, she spent the next three years expressing herself in various mediums. This, she thought, was real freedom.She could be herself and put her feelings onto the canvas. Art allowed her to experiment; it gave her a feeling of an unlimited space that was all her own.

When she painted, her own large collection of clocks stood by her side, some of them originating in the seventeenth or eighteenth ...