Continuity

16 February 2022

 Continuity

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A study from last week, the first one of the night and this morning it made me think of Pierre Bonnard. It’s probably due to the colours he loved so much. He seemed to love those warm delicate violets and sharp flaxen threads that break the bright airy Veronese Green. 

It’s a very nervous-looking picture but I like it. It reminds me of my Sodastream thingie that transforms tap water into Perrier in seconds. Indeed, the painting has a fizzy side of it that surprises me because I certainly wasn’t feeling all that effervescent whilst painting it. It had been a hot humid afternoon and I would have loved to have a waiter arrive at the dunes with a cold Perrier on a silver platter. But hey!

Regardless, it has a curious colour harmony from the very start of the session when the sky was just starting to turn. I’m always partial to that lime-green hue that seems to kick off the colour wheel into all that hot melodrama of yellow and pink. It vaguely feels to me as if it were born in the future somehow, an image only half-understood in my hand but already forming in my thoughts for some time now. The direction will easily clarify itself if I remember to remain true to my real loves; light and space.

But at the same time I’ve been struggling with finding a way into ‘something new’ in this series like I have a kind of writer’s block, but one particular to painters. The only answer is to persevere and remember that one cannot give up before the miracle, as my friends say. While it is wise to keep at it in a disciplined fashion, there are also ways to shake things up at the same time. But how?

I made a design to clean out lots of older pictures that don’t excite me much. It’s usually because they are boring for one reason or another or they just don’t work. So, on many of the better ones that could be touched-up I’ve started adding some fresh bits of colour. Some nights at the beach I patiently look for a way back into them hoping to find an answer from the distance of both time and space. In each of these pictures I’m looking for a resolution to finish them like a writer in search of an end to their novel. 

The idea in this series was always to get it right in one session as if it were a small watercolour. Work quickly, and do or die. My biggest weakness is I’ve always had the greatest difficulty going back into working on an unfinished landscape. Most painters don’t appear to have this problem but for me at a certain stage of the process, a painting already has a personality of its own and though unfinished, it’s already got a history behind it that’s hard to change. The problem is that its history also possesses its own movement jumping on a train as it’s leaving the station. I need to be in sync but I never am. Is it my anxious spirit or just a fear of failure? For me, it means changing everything to go back into a painting. But to be fair, I’m usually also bored and no longer  interested. But anyway, there is also the complex issue of syncing up the overall light. This is the continuity problem, like in films.

It’s one of those things that drives  directors and editors crazy I imagine, and it can wreck a film sequence. Although not at all as dramatic a problem, painting a landscape on different days used to make me so crazy that I forsook working on large pictures that required me to return again and again to the same place on different days. Why bother? It’s too much trouble doing that out in the landscape.

Imagine having to shoot film sequences out on the water over the course of a few days during a film shoot. The weather tells the sea and the wind how to behave each day, and because it’s rarely ever the same, the problem of continuity figures into it. It’s near impossible on a tight filming schedule to find consecutive days to find the same wind and sky even if the sea remained the same colour. Everything is different, mostly the wind which dictates what the water looks like. The most clever directors can coerce their actors into brilliant performances but they cannot bribe the weather God. 

I am particularly obsessive about these continuity  issues when seeing a film. At a certain point, I think the line producers just say: “Screw it” the audience will never notice, and most might not. Alas, some of us obsessive film nuts actually do. But I think we’re also rather forgiving too because we know that no one can boss around Poseidon.

So, for me to avoid this whole drama of weather I just work quickly and small outdoors, hoping to get it right in one go.

And all this makes me think of Pierre Bonnard, the Patient King. Apparently, (and unlike film crews) he had no schedule and so he worked on canvas’s tacked up on his studio walls for months and years on end. He worked indoors to evade the disturbance of the weather. He painted (I speculate) with a painfully slow deliberation as if all the clocks in his home ran slow. Really great things in Art possess that awful cliché of ‘timelessness’, but there is truth in it nonetheless. Once a successful artwork lives, it lives forever; music, books, poems, paintings, they’re created in their own time, and they’re loyal only to their own destiny, be it fire or flood. So I’m not sur why but this leads me to some of Bonnard’s famously discreet but brilliant things he wrote in letters to various friends. Here are a few which I read continuously in times of difficulty in my own work. These are my own translations which may not please some academics.

“L’oeuvre d’art; un arrêt du temps”  

(A work of art is a pause in time)

“Ce qui est beau dans la nature ne l’est pas toujours dans la peinture. Examples : effets de soir, de nuit” 

(What is beautiful in Nature isn’t always in Painting, ex. effects of the evening light)

J’espère que ma peinture tiendra, sans craquelures. Je voudrais arriver devant les jeunes peintres de l’an 2000 avec des ailes de papillon. 

(I hope my pictures will outlast their cracks. I would like to meet the young painters in the year 2000 on the wings of a butterfly)

Élément étranger: souvent le blanc pur ou le noir.

(the foreign element; usually pure white or black)

Il y a une formule qui convient parfaitement à la peinture: beaucoup de petits mensonges pour une grande vérité.

(There is a formula that works well for painting; lots of small lies to create a great truth)

Tout le monde parle d’une soumission à la Nature mais il y a aussi une soumission au tableau.

(Everyone talks about a submission to Nature but there is also the submission to the canvas)

The simpleton and the scorpion

 12 July 2022 

  

 The simpleton and the scorpion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From last week came some curious studies as the Winter Bloom has kicked in with a small moon. The light in the Western sky has turned electric, and sometimes I have to pinch myself and wonder if I’m not hallucinating.

At the moment there are so many colourful ribbons cruising overhead that I sometimes dream of hopping aboard any one of them like I’m a cummuter in London catching a double-deck bus on the fly.

So, I work swiftly and the speed of execution might seem frantic to an observer but to me the sky is like a colourful pin wheel spinning in the breeze and it’s just beyond my reach. At the same time for the painter, it’s also a double-edged sword, one that slices through the whole world of both the catastrophic and the serendipitous in one quick blow. 

This was one of several, from four nights ago, and it’s my favourite. I like it because its idea is complete, yet at the same time so simple. It’s something whole from which nothing can be added or removed. It says exactly what I saw with little adulteration as if me, as the artist, was invisibly present.

I also like it particularly because it still surprises me even after just a few days of looking at it. I think the point of painting is actually to surprise us, not just once, but continually, forever and ever in fact. A really successful picture is an anomoly, for it breaks Nature’s tenet which says that all things that grow old will also die; fauna, flora, and even us. But a work of Art of any kind, when it really works, it lives on beyond us and it’s something we cherish all the more so because of this fact. Our Art is passed down and protected by subsequent generations. I believe we value it because it teaches us something new about ourselves, and it does so because its creator also learned something new from its act of its creation. Yes, I know, climate change will eventually either drown it, or burn, but hey,,,, I’m not putting a timer on it.

I also like it because it dares to ask a question, another vital sign that a picture is alive and lives out in the the world of humankind. This is picture that does not have an answer for anything. But like A.I, it might possibly have a consciouness all its own and could ponder its own surprising existence. My own search for self-expression, that Holy Graal of creativity for so many artists I think, might just be as simple as painting what’s in front of me because implicit in this action is already a kind of self-expression purely manifested. 

I don’t often look at many of these pictures after they’re finished, I put them away in book shelves in my home where they suffocate all together in tight communion. But within this community they’re at least protected from the mildew of this seaside weather here. 

In any event, like for any creative act, the goal is to enjoy it always but also improve. Because I love tennis and I play regularly, I learn continually from both on the court and at the dunes where I paint. In both activities I’ve learned to act and react quickly by seizing my subject at once and striking like a scorpion with full trust in my intuition. Though I may still be a crap tennis player but decent painter, I’ve improved considerably in both domains, and happily so, because if having painted or played tennis this long without making progress I would certainly be a simpleton.

Red Riding Hood

18 June 2022

Red Riding Hood

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Like any creator knows, sometimes a work of art surprises its author by coming out unexpectantly for the better and leaves them surprised and a little delirious. I imagine young parents feeling that way when their sullen teenager ripens into a thoughtful, intellegent and sane young man or woman. But like childbirth and child rearing, that doesn’t mean that the work came easily or that it lacked all the little choices that make up the process of the piece.  

I am not even sure I know what I mean by all that except that I am touching upon a place where one’s personal willpower or ego has been left on the bench over on the sidelines, it’s where the artist has been kidnapped or seized by the capricious but benevolent hand of a drunken thief sent by the Muses.

Often in this work, a sky can lead me astray and I’m quickly distracted like little Red Riding Hood on her way through the dark forest. But this night was a little different and the sky felt like the diffident girl at a dance, standoffish and aloof, as I approached her. She gave no sign of approval but I asked her to dance anyway and we did, and this picture was her. 

It wasn’t laboured but it came up quickly and only took about fifteen minutes. But like the girl at the dance, the sky had been uncertain, ambiguous and even unfriendly at first. It was a leap of faith as it so often is with creativity and things of the heart. Somehow, I was sure I would find a path through it by sheer stubborn force of habit which I did in the end, for the picture came out as a surprise. 

At the beach, I sometimes feel like an inbriated husband outside the front door without a key. It forces me to sneak around through the back window or any opening I can find. The other night I mixed a palette and proceeded with the confidence of a thief. And, what with so many recent rainy days I had really wanted to get out there by hook or by crook.

For me, and others I sure, I’ve discovered that I always seem to be most present when I’m most absent. It’s because when I am most completely engaged in something I really love doing, I’m elsewhere, or nowhere at all. It happens while playing tennis or the piano when they go well, but I always feel it most preciently while painting these days. Everyone has confirmed this wonderful space; writers, musicians, athletes, car mechanics, neurosurgeons, and even the stone masons in Venice, for it’s the empty space of absentminded-focus where this magic happens. Why didn’t I learn this in grammer school? I wouldn’t have wasted so much precious time.

But this marvellous state of quiet cannot happen all the time because painters must fail a lot, over and over, it seems. It’s the entrance fee for everyone who dares to live fully.

The Zen wise guys call this space the ‘Beginner Mind’, that ‘in between thought’ before one acts. The Ancient Greeks called it ‘The Muses’, the invisible angels who guide us, pushing us relentlessly and who allow us to accomplish the task at hand despite our human inclination for despair. The ‘Muses’ drive the motorcycles and we just get on for the ride I think. 

I know that everyone has felt this from time to time, Thank God, we do feel it at times. (There! you see, I have used the G word after all,,,, after I had promised myself I wouldn’t go near it)

Inmates without doctors

6 September 2020

Inmates without doctors

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This came from an odd experiment the other night. I had gone out to paint with an idea in my head without paying attention to the motif in front of me. I wanted to impose a visual idea upon the session which is already an il-fated proposition. But because this idea had come out of something I had seen in the sky the night before I couldn’t erase it from my head. Maybe like a child, I had wanted something to appear so much that I imagined it would magically re-appear again the following night. 

So on the palette I was also trying to prepare for a sky of a few olive coloured clouds I had seen the previous evening. I was so sure would they would re-appear that funny enough they actually did briefly at the end of the session, but quickly dissipated at dusk when I had already finished and even forgotten about the clouds. But even still, I left with this study that for some reason reminded my of a sticky date pudding.

But I like it anyway, it feels compact and centered around the nebulous block of sea that I had just left in its deconstructed state. I packed up a little early because the sky had died out but to be fair, I was also distracted by an eccentric fellow who has dug out a small camp not ten metres down below where I paint in the dunes. He sleeps on the beach each night in a kind of foxhole in a warm swag, and when it rains, under a colourful canvas top that distracts me. He has showed up these last few years for several months at a time. He is fabulous fabulist, and for a while, he had me going. He was a secret millionaire, a yachtsman, a learjet pilot, an entrepreneur with several properties around he world, etc, etc. He amazed me with a steady stream of carefully crafted name drops , one where stars fell under his magnetism and who put him up for weeks at a time on visits. But, Australia, in the end, is a small pond where all the minnows know each other so I through friends eventually figured him out soon enough. Yet I liked him at the start because I like eccentric folks in this square world.

Sadly, he was always trying to get away from this ‘horrid’ country and back to some unnamed Italian town on the Amalfi Coast. I, on the other hand, had only just arrived here, and I love Australia. But somehow, through his charm and my laissez-faire affection for oddballs (not unlike myself), I left ajar the precarious door to reason and let him into my life likeI would a stray cat.

So the other day, he had come to say hello while I was painting. He quickly launched into a nervous pitch about how the skies were crawling with UFO’s. Apparently, he watches them intently each night from his small foxhole and he loves to tell anyone about how amazing they are. When I arrive to paint in the afternoon I’ll hear about how fast they move until “they stop on a dime” hovering over the horizon but then, just as quickly, they’ll zip back overhead glowing with colour. They return to repeat the same patterns again, and again, much like his fabrications, over and over again.

So as the weeks and months have gone by and the UFO”s have gotten bigger and faster. I smile and feign interest because, like I said, he was kindly, a little crazy, yes, but a gentle soul I thought nonetheless. There are lots of curious souls who inhabit the many small corners of life around here in Brunswick Heads. They are off the grid, as they say and ‘doing it tough’ like they say here in Australia. 

As I move through this contemporary life of craziness, I discover that it’s often hard to discern the bona-fide inmates from the straight civilians in this seaside town. And, I sometimes wonder if there is there a doctor in the house, and would they even make beach calls? But at the end of the day I look at my own life, and is painting this mysterious sky any different than watching for UFO’s each night? 

Like all artist’s I know that Imagination is pretty much everything but not everything at the same time. Somehow, we need to be tethered to the earth if even to have a roof over our heads and enough money to buy food each each. But I’ve wondered also just how long can all this last? Rents are impossible, andI don’t know many poor souls could live in a foxhole on the beach for too long. We are coming up to the end of winter and there are too many young mothers with children who sleep in cars and camper vans around here. It’s heartbreaking. Like they say in Australia, “They’re doing it on the tough”. 

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

4 June, 2020

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

While America seems to swim in turmoil at the moment, I find myself in Australia living a quiet life near the sea centered around Painting and far from the chaos. Many years ago, all of this would have certainly raised my anxiety levels enough to paralyse me but I changed, although maybe aged is a better description. Resistance to mask mandates for protection against COVID-19 seem to be right up there with racism as a social divider. I’m old enough to realise that there is little to nothing I can do to make our society any better than to simply be a person who is respectful of others, kinder, and without consideration of race, gender, or religious denomination. Be gracious everywhere, is my prayer. And yes, I’m a polite, old school American liberal. 

This painting, was the last of three from the other evening. The session had seemed to be coming to a close and I was about to pack up when I looked up and saw a pink field within grasp high in the sky. It could have been my last handhold before reaching the summit so I decided to grab another board and tempt fate.

A winter chill set in and I regretted not wearing a second tee-shirt under my hoodie. The warm ‘glow’ was evaporating from the sky and twilight appeared like a stealthy thief yet something skeletal of it remained in my memory. It was a bit like when you have stared at a bright colour for the longest moment but then quickly turn away and see its complimentary replacing it in your mind. 

This hint of colour was just enough to allow me in to improvise this small study. The ‘bloom’ had mostly faded away by now but what remained in my perceptive field was enough to allow me to invent this. It’s pretty straight forward, perhaps even a little too much so, maybe too conventional even, boring perhaps. But looking at it this morning, it looks pretty straight-forward, nothing to write home about, but correct and works well ticking all the boxes. 

I think paintings like this just pop up once in a while by there own volution as if to say to the painter: “You may not have wished to paint an image like this today, but we, the Muses did,,, so there!” 

It’s funny how, like in a Communist country, you never get what you want, you get what they give you. I’m pretty used to this. It’s one of the more quirky facts about Art. So like every creative person, I’ve become adaptable. In my van, I was driving through Bulgaria back in 1986, and stopped in Sofia one evening. Tired and just looking for something to eat with no fuss I found a pizza joint. To my amazement there was only one kind of pizza on offer; cheese with meat. Being a non meat-eater I ordered two to go and had to scrape off the meat and get outta town as fast as I could.  

But there is a ring of truth in this small study regardless, because it’s so simple and everything in its right place. There is a foreground, clearly delineated, and the grey clouds sit comfortably on a firm horizon. By this I mean that the process was authentic. I often need to re-assure myself with sentences like this whenever I’ve just done something a little boring. But the more I look at it, the more interesting it becomes as a picture precisely because all these mundane elements appear to work somehow together so fluidly. The truth is that when you paint a lot, there seem to be less fireworks. Like a regular sex life over the years, the act can often be just a cheese sandwich and not always caviar. But this has gotten me into a lot trouble when I’ve tried explain that to various partners. 

And yet, like a partner one has loved through thick and thin, it may also be why a painter returns again and again to the same motif at the beach. Not only has this twilight sky proven its fidelity, but it’s shown me my own innocence and vulnerability in front of such beauty. The pink glow at dusk, a young woman’s blush have killed this painter.

Addendum: I really like the sky, those small spontaneous blobs of blue violet that break the swarth of Pink field high above. They were the reason I wanted to attempt this image. To have seen that, and actually painted that whole zone is enough to make a painter happy for a week at least.