English patience

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 July 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm 

I have been listening to the film scores of Gabriel Yared for the past week. I can sometimes get into a composer for a time, then stop and move on. Nothing like Apple Music in this époque. So last night, feeling a little homesick for Europe I saw The English Patient for which Yared composed the score. 

A curious thought came to me while watching the opening titles, wherein a simple figure is being drawn as the credits roll, a small brush draws an almost primitive-looking, sepia-coloured figure which we will soon understand to be a copy of an elongated swimmer reproduced from a wall in an Egyptian cave. So we watch the figure begin to appear out of just a few sensually precise lines that at first resembled a Japanese calligraphic letter. 

I didn't remember this opening scene since watching the film the last time. I had loved the book, and though the film has wonderful bits in it, at times it also felt like a perfume ad but I warmed up to it last night.

So listening to his music for a few weeks now I suddenly felt like a nostalgic voyage back into my past experiences around Siena where often I stayed with an old friend at her place in Sovicille. 

Sadly, she died this past January at home there. We had had a falling out over a lot of silliness which is usually the case for these breaks. I had not seen her since about 1996 in New York. I only found out about her death from her son. I had written her a postcard because I had been thinking of her for months. Alas, she received my card about a month before dying and was too ill to respond according to her son whom I knew as a child. 

Like for the doomed lovers in The English Patient my timing was off, and I was sorry I let so many years go by before finally writing to her.  

But while watching how this 'swimmer' began to appear in the opening sequence last night I began wondering about what it means for a an artist to have a concrete idea in their head when they begin work on a piece. 

One can easily forget the magic of the moment when an image begins to appear on a page, somewhat like an old Polaroid coming slowly into focus over a few minutes.

We don't know what is going to eventually appear but the artist certainly does, either consciously or not. It's a marvellous moment that can take one instantly back in time to the amazement a young child feels in front of any form of verisimilitude. 

There is a slice of a story about a young boy who stumbles upon MichaelAngelo who was at work on a giant stone from which a lion seemed to be coming out of. He simply asked the sculptor who smiled. 

"How did you know that there was a lion in there?"

So then, I thought about my own work and wondered about just what goes on in my own mind at the time of those very first brushstrokes on a canvas board. Do I think?, Intuit?, or just wing it by blindly jumping into a picture?

I think at the start of any painting, my idea is always a pictorial one, one formed by what the sky looks like and the colours I see. So maybe I see a slow-moving but bright-coloured train and I just try to hop aboard for the ride, then who knows where it will go?

Then I tried to imagine the difficulties of working as an American Abstract Expressionist, and what might have gone on in their heads when working. Where did their pictorial ideas come from? Were they even necessary? Somehow it appears that it wasn't relevant to their process of making a painting. Was this to their detriment, or advantage?

Painting what one feels, without a premeditated  thought or idea, can be a wonderful way to work at times, but over the long haul, is one working from a window or a wall?

Anyway, Here are two things from a few nights ago. They didn't knock my socks off,,, but hey! I was happy to get out and throw paint around despite the result.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 July 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm 

Eyes Wide Open!

 

The New York Times came out with this wonderful article a few days ago that invited their readers to spend ten minutes looking at a painting without any distractions. They even had a digital timer planted within the article at 10 minutes for an easy experience.

Naturally I did it, and I marvelled at the experience. My biggest take away was that paintings, (as in, all figurative landscapes), are conceived and painted through the most obvious sensory portal, the artist's eyes. Consequently, paintings can only be accessed through the use of a viewer's eyes. This is the whole point of Painting though it would be easy to overlook this because so much Painting has turned conceptual. 

But here the NYT have given us an opportunity to let go of ourselves by taking a pause from politics and wars, TikTok and Youtube, Trump and Harris, and everyone should have a go at the NYT web site. It offers a rich window out of ourselves and into the world of Painting.

Just looking at a picture sounds so simple because indeed it really is, but it also takes time and a disciplined mindset. Most of us don't know how to do it in fact, but all we need is a set of eyes and an uncluttered mind. 

It after all, an adventure, a sensory one using just our eyes. After spending ten minutes looking at this small painting I was able to settle into the calm nature of the image as a whole. Suddenly all the of tiniest, seemingly inconsequential details began to hum together in silent choir. The whole picture came together more coherently and in my imagination, it seemed to throb in sync with my own heartbeat to became a single thing of visual unity like in a symphony orchestra. All my smallest perceptions melded into one sensuous entity.

And this fact reminded me of something my teacher Leo Marchutz used to always say. 

"The more the relationships in a work of art, the greater the work" 

My experience at looking at this Whistler entitled 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver', London, 1871, also allowed me to appreciate the surface 

plane of the picture. 

In a strange way, it reminded me of looking at an intricate old Turkish rug from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul when I was there many years ago. It took several years for these craftsmen, women, and children, to complete a large rug, while Whistler painted this (I imagine) in a few hours at the most.

 

It's the unity of light that creates a good painting or any rug design because it's the light that fashions the form of any design. And the better one understands this, the better the artist.

I also became aware of the ghostly nuances of warmth and cool tones that permeate all that broken blue colour everywhere. Indeed, one sees in all that blue just how broken a colour it really is. 

Because I imagine it was done with oil paints gently washed over a coloured board, maybe a red sepia hue that was in vogue in the 19th century. Whistler used it to gently peek through the river water and offer a variation to break the surface plane.   

I came aware of the tiny lights, the more I looked at them the brighter they seemed to shine. 

Then one pulls back slightly to see it from a distance and One realises what a great picture it really is. Whistler was way ahead of his time, and this series done around the river Thames show us where his real interests lay.

Pinkie promise!!

 

This will be my last post about politics! I promise! Really! A Pinkie promise!!

But, just out of curiosity, I was wondering how many others out there have experienced the following phenomenon this past week which goes like this: How many others, friends and otherwise, have you met in the past few days who regretted Trump survival after the assassination attempt by a lone American with an AK-15 military grade weapon?

Of course, we should be glad that all the news organisations around the world, even the most renegade ones to the left, have showed discipline in their messaging that violence is not an option in America, but just how many people really feel this deeply in their hearts?

What does that say about us? In America, and for many around the globe who believe that Trump is another form of cancer like Hitler, assassination seems appropriate. 

This is an extreme position for extreme circumstances and one that I find dicey, as it raises a host of morally uncomfortable questions for me and maybe you too?

I don't have a concrete response to these nuanced feelings about this event except that I too, need to believe that political violence is a troubling path to a destructive end for America, and/or any country for that matter. 

So for me it's more of a practical solution despite my hesitant mindset and moral weakness. It's about making a wise choice for myself, rather like sticking to a diet by not consuming foods that I know I really want to eat, but at the same time, knowing they're not good for me. More precisely, they're not helpful to my decision to respect the diet I've chosen to follow in the very first place. 

Trump Squeeze

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

Will there be a place for poets in a new muscular Conservative America where its leaders have channeled fictional television stars?

While so many of us watch on with horror, the American Experience undergoes a new chapter wherein the wrench has been turned tighter to the hard right. Where will it end? Can the system withstand another round of a Trump Squeeze on our America?  

Will queer folk be carted off along with the undocumented people who pick our fruit and vegetables? Will creating Art in America return to an older and conservative postcard of America?

Like most of them, this study from almost a month ago, came quickly. We've had lots of rain for weeks on end so I've only been out to the beach sporadically. But according to the Méteo we seem to have a string of clear, crispy, and cold days ahead of us providing me with many opportunities at the beach.

But the Trump Squeeze pressing America at the moment gives me pause to reflect upon how fragile our system really is in this new world of Reality Television. Maybe it was inevitable that it came to this but nothing is a given. Look at what's happened to the poor people of Ukraine. Only eighty years ago it happened in Europe. Ouch.

The Right Wing in America (and elsewhere) is a dangerous Christian Nationalist movement that tolerates little outside of its marrow-minded boundaries. It's a kind Marxist state itself, and they must know it themselves because they try to hang that moniker on the rest of us in America. It's Trump's favourite grade school antic, accusing his adversaries of the behaviour he, himself, is guilty of himself. Ha Ha... I won't bore you anymore with this as most you all know it already. But hey! I get to vent once in a while.

I like the study above very much even if it's not great, it's mine. And in this difficult moment of gaslighting, I can at least tell the truth as I see it.    

Inside and out

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 24 June 2024 oil on canvas board 

30 X 25 cm

 

Magnificent skies over these weeks! Seas are lovely too! I didn't initially like this study from two weeks ago when I had finished it at the beach but since then I've warmed up to it. As everyone knows, it's never easy to assess one's work just after it's been finished. Best to just stay in the flow, and later see where the river takes us.

It feels like I've spent my entire life trying to adapt myself to what's on the 'paper'; What's in the 'instruction manuel'. What I mean is that I've always been trying to learn certain things in life from the outside, as if looking in, like I need to plug myself into an external power source to charge my learning ability.

Of course, that's how many of us have learned, yet for some reason some of us never found our way back to into that intuitive space held deeply inside us after all our stints at schools and universities.

For example, when I studied piano many, many years ago (as an adult) I spent too much time trying to sort out keys and chords 'on paper', and ditto for the inversions that I dutifully copied out endlessly in order to understand them. Now, yes it's great to do this work up to a certain point, but not if it's at the expense of actually 'playing' the chords and keys to sort out what's going on for the most important audience: My ear! In Jazz, I eventually understood that 'real study' comes from learning hand positions on the piano keys not from figuring them out on 'paper'. In fact most kids have always learned from just playing in a group while driving their neighbours and family crazy until they left home to become rich and famous.

But for the rest us who studied Classical music, we are condemned to a great degree, to learn sheet music the old fashioned way. And yet in previous centuries, what we think of as 'Classical' music today, was usually just always taught orally through improvisation. Lutes, and early guitars, like a Capella, and in cultures like India, where everything was transmitted one to one, either through instruments or like stories and poems, as oral history. 

But anyway, learning to paint cannot be approached any other way than to just paint. One can study colour theory till they're blue in the face, but unless they get messy with colour on a palette they probably won't get very far. 

I recently told my friend, Daniela, who has started painting this year, to make a copy of a Van Gogh to see what she could learn. In today's world, copying a Van Gogh is one of the best ways to learn about colour. 

But Non-Figurative Abstract Painters will hate even just the idea of this because it means getting their hands dirty! Ha Ha. But also, because it will prove to be really difficult, and it might disclose to them just how inept they really are when confronted with the basic craft that makes up Painting; that of colour and drawing. 

So one needs an inside, and outside, to be an artist. Here, for fun, is a magnificent early portrait by Van Gogh, who is a great example of an artist who held onto his intuitive skills whilst at the same time learning the exacting craft of Painting.