Visual artists are rarely beholden to strict time management. Regardless of whether their work is time-consuming, they mostly operate on their own creative clock. When the job does not require exact timekeeping, then wearing a watch becomes purely a form of personal expression or an extension of identity. Our selection of seven artists from the 20th and 21st centuries looks at the reasons behind their choice of watches, shedding light on how these timepieces reflect specific moments in their lives or align with particular sensibilities. Each wristwatch narrates a unique story, providing an interesting glimpse into the psyche and style of the artist.

A native Neapolitan, Mr Francesco Clemente moved to India at age 19, where he discovered a shade he called “shocking pink”, which he concluded was “the navy blue of India”. A nomadic spirit with a powerful sense of colour, Clemente used great fields of pink in his work throughout his career, often as a reference to his beloved India. In 1981, Clemente moved to New York, about two years before Swatch revolutionised the watch world with its brightly coloured plastic quartz watches, a game-changing alternative to the classic Swiss timepiece. The bright pink Swatch had Clemente’s name written all over it.

When Mr Andy Warhol died in 1987, some 300 watches were found at his uptown New York City townhouse. Sotheby’s auction of the artist’s collection – a sizeable trove that included luxury brand names from Rolex and Patek Phillippe to Cartier – set a historic milestone in auctions of single-owner watch collections. His watches are still highly collectible, like his rare Rolex Chronograph ref 3525, which sold for six figures at auction in 2019. But Warhol was mostly fascinated with aesthetics, especially the classic lines of his favourite Cartier Tank, a watch he rarely bothered to wind. “I don’t wear a Tank watch to tell the time,” he once said. “In fact, I never wind it. I wear a Tank because it’s the watch to wear.”

The photographer Mr Clive Arrowsmith once visited Mr David Hockney’s Kensington studio for a portrait session. When the English painter answered the door, he was wearing a paint-stained pink cashmere sweater and a Mickey Mouse watch. “I like your Mickey Mouse watch,” Arrowsmith said, to which Hockney replied, “I know. It’s fab, ain’t it?” The Mickey Mouse watch, licensed by the Walt Disney company, first debuted in 1933, and has now been produced for decades by many brands, including Seiko, Rolex and Omega. Beside the Mickey Mouse and an elegant Cartier Tank, precious little is otherwise known about Hockney’s watch collection. But as we can see, his tastes are eclectic. To the Mickey Mouse, we can add what looks like an early Swatch day-date and – if you take a look at the image at the top of the story, the kind of 1950s or 1960s ultra-thin dress watch familiar to collectors of Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet or Piaget.

The Los Angeles-based artist Mr Mark Bradford had an unconventional journey into the art world. Until the age of 30 when he enrolled in art school, Bradford spent his days styling hair in his mother’s salon. Years later, with earnings from his art, he transformed that same salon (and a few other nearby buildings) into a community art centre and non-profit foundation, dedicated to helping underprivileged youth from LA’s South Central area. His large-scale paintings, which sell for millions, are made from densely textured layers of paper, detritus and other street-found materials, and delve into social issues such as racism, migration, homophobia, sexism and poverty. But Bradford is rarely seen dressed in anything other than a plain white T-shirt and white housepainter’s pants. His Timex Easy Reader (retailing for about £30), too, is a deliberate choice.

Mr Pablo Picasso liked to be photographed wearing one or more of his high-end watches: a 1940s Jaeger-LeCoultre, a 1950s Patek Philippe, or a Rolex GMT-Master. As coincidences go, Picasso’s full name was 12 letters long. In 1960, he had the good idea to use the letters of his name as the hour markers of a watch. Thus was born Picasso’s own 32mm stainless-steel wristwatch, produced by the Swiss watchmaker Mr Michael Z Berger, and set on a fitted, expandable bracelet. That piece became the first-ever watch signed by an artist, a testament to Picasso’s vision and power of self-publicity.

Mr Julian Schnabel burst onto the New York art scene in the 1980s as part of a generation of painters known as the neo-expressionists. That is when the young and dapper Schnabel was photographed at Claridge’s hotel, sporting a Rolex, an accessory well chosen to manifest his new-found success. It is a photograph that stands in stark contrast with the image that, decades later, an unapologetic Schnabel would show the world in a photograph by Ms Annie Leibovitz: lounging on a sofa in striped pyjamas, buttons undone to the navel, an abundance of chest hair in plain view, but no watch in sight. By then, having excelled in pretty much every medium from painting, sculpture and interior decoration to several critically acclaimed films including a biopic of artist Mr Jean-Michel Basquiat, he had no one left to impress.

For the first 40 years of his career, the British sculptor Mr Henry Moore used stone as his preferred medium. His white marble sculptures evoked the timeless elegance of Renaissance sculptures, in shapes he carved in a unique combination of abstraction and figuration. The son of a mining engineer, Moore was in the eyes of the British public, a symbol of both “ordinary Britishness” and of the “gentlemen artist”. A man who was very conscious of his own image, Moore would wear his fashionably elegant ultra-slim dress watch – a style made popular in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to the fashion for the thinnest hand-wound movements – even when highly impractical, like when touring a marble quarry.