l'air de rien
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24 April 2024
STOP! when the going is good!
16 April 2024
Grace in all forms
These two pictures are from a few nights ago. Though I don't generally spend a lot of time on these things, these took about twenty minutes each which is a lot for me. There are a little more developed than usual because I'm piling on pigment in layers and trying new things.
It was a magnificent 'Bloom' yesterday but it didn't last long. There are nights when it can go on till dark but this week they're not there. It could be the small half moon watching benevolently from high overhead that disturbs the light.
But to be out again and painting at the beach is a great pleasure and privilege, so Grace reminds after each session.
"Be Grateful, be graceful"
She says to me every occasion. These are not admonishments, more like gentle mantras in my ear.
Having this motif so close at hand, one that despite its obvious finite boundaries, is still opening up new avenues for the painter in me. And with Grace so close at hand in my life, I'm able to cruise more easily as a person and painter.
30 March 2024
Painters and Pianists
This morning I spent over an hour playing just two measures of a difficult piece by Erik Satie. It took me a short while to get into it but then after I did, time melted away.
It was difficult tempo that had to be burned into my head and fingers through concentrated repetition. By the end I got up and made more coffee and then I suddenly marvelled at how I was able to do this at all because for most of my life I had been so ill-constructed for any kind of concentration. And as a child I could never pay attention for longer than the time it took to scratch my own nose. Unlike today, they didn’t have fancy names for this sort of demeanour back in the 1950's, nor was their any medication for it. But I would have been a fine candidate for it all. The best explanation they had for me was that I was a redhead.(!)
27 March 2024
Vincent Van Gogh, the biggest con artist in history!
There are presented as they were successively painted. This top one, I really liked it right off the bat and for once, I stopped just in time because my guardian angel came to me in the form of a magpie which wandered around my easel while looking straight at me, she gently sang in that warbling kind of way they do here in OZ. So I said,
"OK, Grace,,, I hear you, and thank you."
So I dutifully stopped work and left it despite my inclination to continue. It had come very quickly and I was grateful because when I haven't been painting out here so regularly I feel nervous. I'm badgered with questions on the 12 minute drive to the beach, (What am I doing? Shouldn't I find something else to paint? I'm too tired, too sore, so maybe I'll stay on the sofa and read). But somehow I almost always seem to show up regardless of ME. And like they say, I'm always taken care of,,, always.
In the second one, the sea had turned pale blue and afterwards when I had finished it felt a little spooky to me. Today it still does. I'm not sure why but maybe the orange sky feels a little too 'bloody'. But as many landscape painters will tell you;
"Hey! it really looked like this!! No kidding around!"
But actually, I've got news for you, if the viewing public hasn't figured it already, I'll let you in on a big secret hiding in plain sight: All artists are liars! We're all liars, all of us,,,, we're con artists because the motif never really looks like we say it did, ask anyone. Ask Vincent Van Gogh, the biggest liar in Art history!
Everything we do is distorted (ask Picasso), twisted (ask Chaim Soutine), fanciful (ask Marc Chagall) theatrical, Philip Guston, long-in-the tooth, ask Giacometti.
Everyone of us is a Pinocchio in a hoodie.
But regardless, it was wonderful to be out painting with a small breeze on my face and a rather empty beach save the usual suspects; beach walkers, a few surfers, the late afternoon bathers who finish work and come to jump in for a short splash, then back to family dinners or take-outs, and then Netflix for everyone. This Australian beach life is pretty laid back like most Australians are in general, pretty much everywhere around the world.
The last painting (below) was somewhat of an afterthought. The 'Bloom' had almost evaporated but I thought I might eek-out another study from the light traces of colour still imprinted on the sky.
It's a strange picture that began with such promise but I lost it and my heart sank. Here it is anyway. As I say, all too redundantly here in these pages, only Time will tell if it's true.
19 March 2024
Mail from beyond the grave
16 March 2024
Tolstoy and death and painting
This is a reprint of a small piece I posted almost three years ago.
11 August 2021
Tolstoy and Christian Martel, peintre de Montpellier et La Drôme
07 March 2024
The Japanese architect, meets Billy the kid and Ockam's Razor
A few years ago I read about a Japanese architect who was explaining about the best placement of a garden pathway from the driveway to the home he had recently designed for a couple. He told them that he had not planned for it but wanted to let the pathway "just happen naturally over time" as the began couple living in their new home. Only then would the new occupants figure out where their pathway would spontaneously appear.
I loved that. And it came to mind the other day during my piano practice. As I've just started another learning a new piece by Satie, one I hadn't planned to memorise, (too much work and time!) I was faced with the notation for the fingering. This is the 5th Gnossienne, and the delicate fingering is really tricky.
Like all amateur musicians, I note the fingering whenever I begin a new piece in pencil just above the notes on the manuscript. But they can often change as I look for the better fingering to get me through each measure while preparing for the next one. So like the architect advised his clients, when working this out, I allow my fingers to find the most natural pathway throughout the piece, measure by measure.
So regarding Painting, I wondered what the correlation might be between this procedure and how I go about Painting. This question asks me to analyse my habits already developed over a lifetime of experiences and to which I don't think I have any answer.
In this beach series where the focus is particularly narrow, with little or almost no deviations from a drawing perspective, there is a simplicity that borders on the austere because the motif is so Zen simple. In other words I don't have to subjugate myself to a procedure for these sessions. My procedure is already simple.
But, this architect's advice can work in every other part of my life and it can also sharpen the edge of another of my favourites maxims; Ockam's Razor, already, a practical vehicle for navigating intelligently through Life.
The picture above is from last week, it's one I like. Initially I thought it too sloppy, but now I'm not so sure. In fact over this past week I've come to really appreciate things about it.
Below, is another picture from the same night. They have both been big hits on Instagram. Though I like the one above I don't care for the one below. It's a study that doesn't really do it for me at all. It seems to work, everything is in place, but it doesn't grab me, certainly not the way the one above does. So I am trying to see what others see in it.
One thing I have shared often in these pages is that I really appreciate social media. It is a godsend for painters like me who live like spiders, high up in the corners, out of reach of life below, where civilised, normal people go about a practical life.
I am continually surprised at what many people like and dislike in my work. I'm never offended just curious. I say this, but I admit that I didn't like someone the other day who wrote me to say that, "all of your pictures look the same". Hmmm, I fumed.
Of course, I immediately unfollowed him. So, evidently, I am curious what people think, but I don't want to put up with snarky comments that are just made to offend me. After all, I'm not famous enough to be trolled.
And hey!, as my cousin Billy in the Bronx told me; "Thump the mother****er" first before he thumps you". This was advice that took me a long to time to exercise in my own life. But then, I'm still alive while cousin Billy was stabbed in the Bronx in a street fight back in the 1990's, so go figure.
Anyway, like the Japanese architect suggested, don't make a plan, but live first, let the plan unfold in the right place for you. Apparently, Cousin Billy had the plan but was just too early, and it killed him (just sayin).
In this series, I don't have a plan but I do have a motif in front of me, and I use a simple palette of just five colours. I work quickly without hesitation, and also without conscious thought. Is that a plan? I'm not sure.
But I'm still not nuts about the study below. Maybe I will change my feelings over time, but maybe not. Feelings about art do change often over time. Things I liked years ago are a no-go now, but conversely, studies I didn't see just a short while back can suddenly look like genius to me.
Because I'm the beholder, beauty is alway in my own eyes, that's just the way it is because it's a rigged system and the painter always wins in the end.
27 February 2024
Beginnings and Endings, veracity and tenacity
24 February 2024
A cuneiform kiss
11 February 2024
Let them eat clouds!
06 February 2024
Twin sisters, the taming of the shrews