A giant hug from Earth

7 October 2021

A giant hug from Earth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 October 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

To my great surprise, two nights ago, several small studies rose up and out from the sea as if it were a field of daisies, violets, bluebells and bellflowers. And the sky made a magnificent ‘bloom’ also, but I almost didn’t make it out to the beach. I had been in the studio all afternoon and was full of myself in doubts about everything I was trying to do at the beach and in my whole life that I didn’t have the heart to go to work. Imagine brain surgeon saying such a thing?

Like dominoes falling dark thought about everything sprang up just like the flowers.  

“What more I can I possibly generate from the this motif anyway?”

It may have been precipitated by a remark a friend had made earlier in the day,

“You should move on from these little paintings and work on your big ones in the studio.”

I knew he liked the things I was painting in the studio much more than what I was doing at the beach but, “Hey!  My pride growled, “Who was he to be telling me anything?” Although at the time I didn’t seem to be bothered by the remark except that I had had a difficult painting session on the night prior, one, which without words, pretty much told me the very same thing. It’s one thing when some else makes a critical remark about your work (or life), but another thing altogether when your own work speaks directly to you through itself. 

But in the end, Really, all I needed was a great session, a big beautiful evening ‘Bloom’, blushing wildly and unabashedly for me alone to replenish my curiosity anew for this motif. I really needed a big hug from Mother Nature. After all, it is for me alone, and similar to this diary, the results may or may not please others but the real pleasure of ‘doing’ is all mine, mine alone. I am responsible for myself, no one else.

And this takes to something that I experienced in the studio a few days earlier. A remarkable discovery just for me alone. It was getting late so I decided not to paint at the beach. I had put on France Musique and reclined on the chaise lounge in the studio by the large window. Once in a when I’m there I like to stay and watch the setting sun hide behind the forest as dusk descends quietly. Last night I noticed a star appearing through the trees and leaves. It was quite high and I began to focus in on it. After a few minutes I noticed how it appeared and disappeared because of the wind, but also by its own slow movement as the earth moved through space. The star, a bright one, began to align itself to my focus as I squinted to see it more clearly. As I watched the star I began to perceive that it actually had the specific form of a cross. I kept looking at it contiually, as it appeared then disappeared between the gentle sway of distant leaves. But by now, it always re-appeared as ‘the same cross’ each time to my astonishment. It was a cross, but one with extra smaller rays going out at different angles of ‘the clock’, 1:30 o’clock, 4:30 o’clock, 7:30, 10:30 etc, etc. It reminded me of the gold stars painted on a deep Ultramarine background that ones sees often in Italian paintings everywhere. Giotto I think even made them in the frescoes of Padova. I was simply astonished to witness such an example of science melding with memories of the Early Renanaisance. And I realised that this cross was of pure light as if nothing could have been lighter in value, nor anything in the spiritual sense to sully it. 

 

I made a drawing of it yesterday in my diary and indeed it looks like something extrapolated from religious iconography. No matter that it disapeared momentarily, it would quickly reappear immediately by taking its unique shape. They say that all snowflakes are unique, is this somehow related to that mysterious idea? Would this cross also have its own visual DNA make-up, one unique in the universe?

After a while I noticed another star appear through the forest, slightly smaller but it too, seemed to possess its own unique shape, different from the first cross. It was shaped in the form of a trianglular cross resembling the iconic Christmas tree in a simple graphic form. Again, it was made of a splintered kind of pure light, and every time it disappeared behind the distant tree leaves it quickly came back into view, it would always only return as the triangle. I began to look up at the first star, and again after focussing and squinting my eyes, it too held true to the same shape of cross as before. I began to look back and forth at each star, each time they retained their unique shape. I was dumbfounded like an infant who discovers the switch to a lightbulb turning it on and off again with curious alacrity.

And like the infant, by the end, as I sat in the darkness of my studio, I reasoned that these two stars seen through the filter of the tree leaves far off in the distance must also posses their own original shapes much like snowflakes. But unlike the snowflake, I should be able to see them again on any clear evening through the filter of leaves to confirm my discovery. I was astonished.

This is a curious picture that appears slightly illustrative which I usually frown upon but there is something in it I like. It’s certainly got a lot going on in it. What I like is   the light that separates the large rich yellow stripe from the pale layer above it. The light is actuelly the white of the canvas board that I left. That kind of nuanced transition interests me more than pretty much anything at the moment. 

Veins of light

22 March 2021

Veins of light

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Heavy rains have again returned off and on which complicates things yet I did manage this small thing in between a few squalls the other night. 

When I arrived at the beach it didn’t look brilliant and I initially wondered if I could find something to grab hold of long enough to make picture as I could see rain menacing both to the right and left of me. As I unpacked and set up a palette, indeed, some patches of pink opened up almost as if I had commanded “Open Sesame!” Faith or superstition? More like just dumb luck I think but I took it gracefully.

A parallel to rock climbing is always my go-to analogy in this business of painting at the beach. Arriving at the motif, I will immediately assess the wall of fragmented and uneven clouds above me, looking fo a point of entry. If it isn’t opaque there will usually be some veins of light running through it to provide me with a idea and a few handholds. Without light there is less of a chance for colour. Alas, the maxim is alway: no light, no colour. 

Like the climber, a painter is a child of patience, mostly. Without it, one could be reckless and cannot proceed as easily with care. But in failure, obviously, the climber has more far to lose than the grounded painter. And yet, arriving at the summit, the climber and painter both feel an enormous relief and a great satisfaction too.

Despite the worry of rain, I love these afternoons when low cotton balls of colourful cloud gently roll overhead like bales of hay offering a jolt of warmth quite separate from the cooler tint of clouds higher up. Happily, on this night, there was both light and colour. The result isn’t exactly fireworks, but maybe there is enough subtlety within these harmonies that might lead me to newer images in the near future.

Swiss Time

8 March 2021

Swiss Time

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I think it took about 15 minutes, and though it’s not terribly exciting, it works in a certain way. It was a great exercise, but then, aren’t they all? Like a battery, there’s enough truth in it to power it forward, maybe even forever, but we’ll see. It is of a specific place and time, one that gives it a particular feeling about that exact moment in the afternoon, and this for a painter, is reassuring. The painter will be long gone and forgotten, but no worries, like we say here DownUnder, for what remains of him will be perhaps a melancholic relic of his own ecstasy.

I’m a fool, but not a big one, I fully understand that these small studies are of little value to anyone beyond the walls of my own home because let’s face it, there are already way too many small pictures on millions of walls around the world. Think of all of them in just one country alone, a place like Switzerland. How many cute chalet walls, celler taverns, and gasthofes must share their wall space with cuckoo clocks and small seascapes from Sorrento or snowy depictions of the Materhorn seen from sunny pastures full of cows? Goodness! And inversely, what about all those views of the Materhorn that adorn the hotels of Sorrento and Anacapri? 

But yes, little pictures of all subjects are cranked out for hotel and motel walls the world over. I wonder, does anyone ever look at them? Older couples may get into lumpy beds underneath them and quickly fall asleep but young couples will make crazy wild love underneath them in large king-sized beds, and sometimes even, one of them will find themselves looking straight at the Matterhorn against cheap wallpaper in absolute ecstasy.

But for me, the point isn’t to cover walls, but to find joy in these painiting sessions. Because that’s why we should do any work or sports we’ve chosen. I heard a guy at the tennis courts the other day say that he never played any sport except to win. I thought to myself, how strangely different we all are, because I only ever played any sport for fun and the enjoyment of it. 

So what happens to these studies is always secondary to the challenge of making them. This is a very un-American notion, I know, but hey, I moved to France early on and adopted their highest esteem for arts (and artists). This may come as a surprise to many in the public, who like Swiss bankers might only think of the financial upside (and downside risk) of each activity we perform in life. But even some artist like me who take this long view, may also be foolish enough to believe that making Art (writ large) is right up there with one of the greatest things to do during our short and insignificant lives here on earth.

I used to imagine that all my self-worth was contingent on commercial success or whether or not people liked my work. I soon realised that people can like and admire the work but still not buy it. It’s better to learn that early on in life, I soon came to understand, though not early enough. My pictures may never find walls upon which they’ll find a home, so what? They’ll be homeless. So again, my validation always come from how this artistic life allows me to live better in an oftimes difficult world.    

And because the Painting experience is the joy, not the result. If one makes a living, so much the better. A friend once told me that an artist must embrace poverty but that only sounds heroic when one is young and life appears long, deep and wide. Being poor and older is another story, doable, but still abnother story.

I think it was Bernard Berenson who once said that Painting is an impossible vocation if one desires fame and fortune. He said that the only way to make it work was to either come from wealth or marry ino it.  He cited Tiepolo (the elder) and Guardi, as two Venitean painters who embraced this idea and made it work for them. Of course they were also brilliant too.

I had a headstart when my parents died early and left me with a small inheritance. Because I decided upon an artistic life and I had fled to France early, money was a means to an end not the other way around. Free time was both the ends and the means to being able to paint. Shortly afterwards, I luckily bought a large empty space downtown in New York in the 1970’s, and I was able to stretch it out slowly into a life in France until like bubble gum it eventually popped. Money afterall, provides one with time. What we do with it? Waste it? Kill it? Squandor it with inattention? I’ve done a little bit of all these things actually. 

With attention, or with inattention, bank accounts rise and fall, they can fill up but empty out just as easily. Isn’t it how we spend our time that’s more important than how we spend our money? Most of us choose to have more time, or more things in our life, but the lucky few usually have both. The majority of people around the world live hard lives in poverty and with almost no choices. But for those lucky people who do have choices, isn't time the most expensive gift in the world? So a fine Swiss watch piece is a grand metaphor for both money and time. 

Mantegna’s cap

30 March 2021

Mantegna’s cap

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the first of three pictures from the other night. This unusually austere but sensual study reminds me today of Andrea Montegna’s magnificent portrait of a young man in Napoli at the Capodimonti museum and personally, I think he was the greatest painter of the Renaissance. This is a very small portrait, maybe only 25 X 15 cms tall and seen in profile. He wears a rose-coloured cap virtually identical to this pink sky, hence my association. I can often fall in love with certain paintings but this intimate portrait by Andrea Montegna, I place in a special in my memory. How does one fall in love with a work of art? It’s easy for some of us, it’s certainly as easy as falling in love with another person and less problematic too. But the feeling is the same if you are a painter, because you are pierced right through the corps of who you are. A work of art is a top-of-the tree sort of love, and it will always grow taller for you, and will never deceive you or let you down, or talk back. Whether it be an opera aria, a film, a book, a picture, or a small Mayan figurine, the love of an artwork can a perfect and everlasting union. But obviously it’s not for everyone. Some people love their cars to death, polishing them each weekend, while others worship their dogs and cats more than their spouses. It’s a deeply personal thing and that is the way it should be. Isn’t that what is so wonderful about Art? Like a girlfriend or boyfriend, our love interests come in all shapes and sizes, with or without tattoos. It’s our own imagination that creates such attraction, our lust and affection. It’s a true democracy of feeling and we’re free to love what we love, but even better, we can make of it all what we wish. It’s like a giant food hub like one sees in Singapore where our choices are almost limitless and where the varieties on offer makes one hungry or horny by just having a peek at it all.

So, that said, I house an enormous affection for this small study of mine own from the other evening. I think it’s actually my very, very favorite one out of several thousand done so far from the beach here at the evening hour. In fact, if it had been painted by someone else it would still not dim my infatuation for it, not a bit. That it was painted by anyone and that it exists somewhere out in the world is already an extraordinary thing. Why? Who knows? Let’s just say that it rings my doorbell.

I sometimes imagine that I can traverse culural time zones in a flash with the ease of a child’s flexible imagination. It’s one that allows me to 

It’s a cockeyed world where I can flit about easily between pictorial things and intemporal places. 

exists in my head of course, because all these artifacts from so many periods of history long gone.: pre-Columbian, Cycladic, the Middle Ages, the Rennaissance, and Africana and Asian art to our own ‘Contemporay’ world of Post-Modernism. Everything in my time-bending cultural mind is completely fluid as the painter I seem to be in this 21st century. It’s confusing because it asks me what it means to be authentic. That’s always a great question to ask one’s self in every circumstance in life. How often do any of us contemplate our histories both personal an collective? We sit upon a treasure trove of riches going back 10,000 years, or longer,  and yet we don’t seem to use it as either artists or philosophy students. Why not?

Lucky for me, this humble motif seems to be my own private philosophy teacher. By day it’s just another humdrum-looking tropical beach but by early evening it’s transformed, like watching a woman dress for a night out, it’s magnificent thing to behold. And just like a person whose life is enhanced by a partner, I too, can be transformed by this motif at dusk, and it completes my own sense of well-being, 

It’s such a small picture to get all worked up about. I freely admit, but then I think it must be not unlike how any engineer might feel when the project he’s worked on has left the hanger and now flies overhead transporting millions of passengers to far off places around the globe. Is it pride one feels, or love? Or both? Does it matter what it’s called? Isn’t it that sensation that arises in a person who has discovered both of these feelings all wrapped up in a bundle like they’re a proud parent? Painters too, can feel like parents sometimes. 

So yes, I really do have an emotional connection with this picture for some odd reason. It may seem strange to hold such feelings for a picture but I would add that it’s not just a picture or the motif, but more specifically it’s a space in which an artist has fallen in love. It has meaning. I’m reminded of one of my very favorite films from the 1990’s called The Object of Beauty wherein a poor deaf maid working in luxurious London hotel steals a small Henry Moore statuette from a room. When asked at the end of the film why she had taken it, she replied to the police, that it had spoken to her. And that, is what Art is all about for many of us.

So, I spoken of my emotional attachment to this small picture, but now critically speaking, I’ll address why I think it works. As a painting it’s as inventive and concise as any painting I’ve ever admired anywhere. Though I may come off as pretentious, this small thing is itself quite unpretentious. I daresay that a young child with talent could very easily have come up with such an image because it’s a simple idea is reduced down to just a few stripes of colour. They are however ones that correlate to Nature via the motif at the beach. My only regret with it is that I cannot seem to ‘scale it up’ to a larger format successfully in the studio. I cannot seem to get close to the same spontaneity of it. I hope in the near future that will change for me.

Doubt is our passion

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The weather has changed again, after intermitant weeks of rain the skies are mostly now clear so I am again allowed to get to the beach. As we approach the Winter Solstice here, the afternoons begin to clam up like heavy iron doors each day before 17h. But hey! Soon, I tell myself, that by the end of next week the days will lengthen and again grow optimistically.

When I returned to the motif the other night for a string of good days to paint, I felt like a novice, a beginner like I knew nothing at all. This feels strange but it can equally feel invigorating. I guess it depends upon how much or how little sleep I’ve gotten the night beforehand.

So I approached the motif with a little trepidation but full of excitement too. These two studies both came quickly and just a day apart. 

What they share is that pale lime turquoise sea right before the onset of dusk when the sea is flat. Many other pictures can dig deep into the violet sea which come later as twilight melts the night. But these in particular have something in them which I really like; They possess that incredible ‘lightness of being’, to borrow from the title of Milan Kundera’s brilliant book of yesteryear. I am always amazed and grateful that this motif is a gift that keeps giving ever more generously over time. 

Of course it’s the same motif I first approached five years ago and its mercurial behaviour hasn’t altered an iota. What has changed has been m. I’m a better painter today only because I’ve learned to see better, and that is what a good and hardy motif can teach even a mediocre painter. 

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion (cont)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Like all work, the quality of one’s paintings goes up and down in accordance with the mood of the muses.  I think it’s the same for every painter that once in a while, having just one great painting session can awaken one and silence our doubts. After all, isn’t this why all artists, writers, musicia  keeps showing up day after day, trudging through all the seasons? 

For Henry James once wrote, “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion, and passion is our task -- the rest is the madness of art.”  Henry James (1843 - 1916) What artist could argue with this?

What I like especially in this study here, the first from the following night, is its immediate feeling of joy, for it sings. I can say this because it’s so rare that I’ve been able to access this quality. Too much of my work has rarely exhibited love for joyous things. I’m melancholic fella even if people find me jovial. I’ve always drawn to darkness, and sadly, pathos for me, has been a stronger bridge to others than joy. But hey, maybe I’m changing?

But here, even inspite of myself, the joy is apparent and I’m so glad for it. I painted it quickly, it was one of three two nights ago. I even like the wonky horizon line that droops slightly on the right, but even this, is just a part of an organic whole, a creative mishap, not really a mistake, more like a misstep, and these misteps reveal the process of painting and give it its originality, like it or not and for better or worse.  

It’s a flattened picture, compressed like a candy wrapper one might find on a city street. This flat quality is everything I’ve been secretly coveting ever since ‘seeing’ Matisse decades ago. I just didn’t know how to get there authentically on my own. Such a conception of painting one cannot fake. It has to be ironed out slowly from lots of failure. What I also really like is that this picture is not locked to the horizon line but exists beyond it, in a world of make-believe and into the realm art. 

These are now winter skies and winter seas that sparkle and glow as June appears to calm the ocean down by turning it a sublime lime. But how to capture it?

In the end, I’m so grateful that I’m the author of all these things for better or worse, even for my most worst things because they’re still like offspring to me, and I accept them all. If I saw this one study somewhere for instance, on any wall, celebrated or otherwise, I would rush over to it embracing it like a young mum to her infant son after school. Is this vanity? pride? or perhaps just foolishness?

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion (cont)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.”

I believe this was lifted from an address by the art critic Robert Hughes at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Academy of Arts, in London years ago. I came across it somewhere online. In a nutshell, aside from the fact that any real craft comes from centuries of long tradition, one born of experimentation and failure, I think he means that art needs to be separated from the clever world of Advertising. I think it began back in the 1960’s with appearance of POP Art when these two worlds became entwined. 

I love the idea of ‘slow art’, even though I work quickly at the speed of light. But of course, he’s not really referring to the speed of the execution of art but of the mind-set behind an artist’s entire oeuvre which is in direct contravention to the entire idea of advertising and selling. But anyway, it’s a pretty self-explanatory. 

It especially fascinated me because he made reference to the ‘skill and doggedness’ that makes one ‘think and feel’. Without saying it, he is really speaking of craft, something that has come up often in these pages. And a possession of craft is the vehicle from which all creativity is born. It’s the one that shows up everywhere from lute makers to a potter’s wheel. Generically speaking, it’s the undercurrent of how we all share our skills and intelligence, is it not? Isn’t it also true that for any creative act, the quality (with few exceptions), always proceeds from one’s command of their craft?

This picture was the third one from the other night. Does it manifest craft? Many might not think so, but of course for the painter, he must absolutely believe that it does, because for him it is matter of life or death, at least in his fragile heart. From my diary the other night: 

“Cold evening! Ouch, I made a fire with what little wood I had cut in the afternoon. Three studies last night, a lovely bloom in a gentle slow motion expanding warm yellows and pink into an arc. The waxing moon eventually brought it to a sudden halt. Tonight might be still be possible but the full moon arrives in a few days and may kill it.....I am nonetheless into some wilder colour harmonies; more pure colour pigments, and when I can; flatter drawings.”

So this harmony in various violets from cool to warm, came after the ‘arc of colours’ had passed in ‘slow motion’ leaving a kind of afterburn which lasted only a brief moment but was prolonged by the generosity of artist-licence.