(Re-print) Richard Serra and Pierre Soulages, dark cousins for dark times

 

L'enfance, oil on canvas, 1997 150 X 150 cm

This is a painting I made back in 1997 when I was in my small studio at the Châteaunoir, eons ago before I left Aix for the Drôme. I am not sure what I could say about it except that I was certainly trying to address dark issues from my own early life which we now refer to as Family of Origin problems, Hmmmm. 

These days, the contemporary method for expressing angst and existential discontent appears to make a beeline straight to the pigment generically known as Black. Most painters (because most of the original ones are quite neurotic) will at some point in their lives make a tour through the dark landscape inside themselves. The less original, but no less crazy, just paint the surface black or bitumen à la Pierre Soulages, or even Richard Serra. For painters, it does seem to be the contemporary go-to solution, though sadly it offers little inspiration in the long run because these paintings will live on, seemingly paralysed in a state of mourning, crucified, as it were on empty walls in lonely wings of great museums all over the world. And as dramatic and satisfying as it may seem in the very moment of 'self-expressive execution', it's still a cliché and it is unsuccessful in the long run. It is a cheap fix as my auto mechanic would say.

And one could say I am being pretentious, presumptuous to rip and riff through such heavy weights in the Art world, but hey! These things have to be articulated even if few want to hear it. Being critical in this art world today is a lot like being a dentist where one can use sharp, precise tools to cause pain. Ha Ha. But I speak as a painter who loves colour after all, and Painting is about the totality of colour in the natural world.

Pierre Soulages, 163 X 181 cm 2004

Richard Serra, 1978 from installation at SFMOMA

These things I have posted by them are deliberate adventures into their dark headspace and I really don't even know how I would begin discussing them if I were to have the unfortunate task of having to write reviews of each.

I have seen both of these artist's works up close over the years in various museums around the world, yet I can never shake the feeling that this is all shallow work, and moreover, even they, capable and well educated as they both are, should know better, are better than this work. They should know better than play us all for fools (at least Soulages should, because he comes from a great Painting tradition in France).

Because of this shallow trick of indulging in so much ubiquitous black, I am never allowed access to an enduring emotion from their work. (OK Black is bleak, I get it,,,,) City sophisticates in Paris and New York express more existential disdain by simply wearing black, morning, noon and night.   

So for the artist the question comes down to just how does one express this terrible darkness and angst which most stoic souls spend all their lives trying to hide? What is the creative solution without the systematic cliché?

Going to the pigment black, to keep it simple, is basically just a cliché, a hollow one, incapable of expressing the horror at so much cruelty and suffering in the world. (I am trying not be redundant) but personally, I cannot feel this work by either of these two artists for this very reason. Their abstractions, though so heavy, they still don't possess enough weight, and they certainly don't expand any more understanding of their own personal plights. Nothing opens up or goes out from their work, it's a closed circuit at the edge of a black hole sucking in everything around them.

Yet despite these condemnations, I will say that I have also seen Soulages in a bright light, and also with great success. I went to the tiny town of Conques, where years ago, I found his stained glass designs for the magnificent church there to be both imaginative and appropriate to the space. This small church in Conques is such an extraordinary example of Romanesque Art that failing this task would be a cruel fate for any contemporary artist. His response to this unique church was secular and sober. It's  austerity compliments both our own age but that of 12th century France too. And what if his large paintings opened up his own airy inner light by exposing it to the world?

Soulages exhibits the black existential fact that Life (for so many French intellectuals) is something heavy, something which weighs down our soul as we go about our daily lives.

There is no joie-de vivre here. And yet curiously, the French, in so many ways, do live a light-hearted life full of mirth and epicurean joy. This is also the contradiction I have with Soulage's work. Creatively speaking, he employs a one dimensional and predictable solution to this cultural paradox which is way too complex for his efforts. And b.t.w, where is the necessary irony in this work that seems so obviously lacking to the rest of us modern and secular souls? 

Richard Serra's work, on the other hand, often exhibits a muscular American force, the cultural equivalent to the doctrine of American Manifest Destiny which has pro-pulsed American might forcibly outward and onto to the world at large whether it was even desired or not (though to be fair in the 19th century, it probably was).

But just like Soulage, with these large black drawings Serra's work seems to declare his disgust with the American dream, and yet, his own oversized steel sculptures appear to be the artistic extension of that same expansive American doctrine, one which his black drawings at the same time, privately disdain. So it's conflictual; it's a paradox, an American one, not a nuanced French one. His dark pessimism in these drawings is also an unveiled desire to push that blackness outward to an unsuspecting world. Why such bleak narcism?

But getting back to my almost insignificant painting, I had wanted to relate an anecdotal idea in a visual way, a pictorial, poetic and sensual way, perhaps inviting someone else into it as a question, not make a declaration. 

A few years back, a friend made a comment about my work after a recent trip to Paris where museums are infinitely more important than stadiums. She had spent a few days wandering museums and galleries looking at everything. Upon her return she said to me, 

"What I like about your paintings is that they feel like surprises, questions in fact, not responses..... they are like you in fact, always full of questions!" She went on,

"Everything I see these days feels to me so oversized, so heavy, and so full of answers. There are way too many affirmations, commenting on such and such, opinions and declarations about life!,,,, everyone wants to hit you over the head with ideas and statements!"

"It drives me crazy!.... (ça me rend folle!!)"

I have always appreciated this observation because deeply inside, I have always felt the same way. I like that quality in other art I see and feel and intuitively I was trying to express that same idea in these "non-objective" paintings I was doing at the time. 

So I guess my biggest criticism with Soulages and Serra is that their work acts too often like walls which keep us all out. In French they say about someone with a big personality, and often slightly pejorative (and its usually about men) "Il a une grande gueule" (he's a bigmouth) And their work, like so much these days, certainly possesses 'une gueule'. Maybe that it is the nature of the Art world today, where to get ahead, to get anywhere, to be seen, to be heard, one needs 'une grand geuele'... Think Trump, just sayin.

 

And even if they would never admit it, (this is after all about self-expression) they may as well have a sign outside the exhibit entrance that says "Keep Out", and this is a problem for me because the whole nature of Art concerns the opposite; it is an invitation to the world to enter into the work of the artist.

In a bin or in a museum?

18 September 2020

In a bin or in a museum?

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been salty and full of humidity over the past few days, and this is usually great for painting. This is one of two studies from the other night. I am always amazed at how different each of these studies can be. Each evening light, just like me, can be so different. Lately, as we approach the end of winter, these skies have been delicious. In this one I managed to paint until just the exact moment when I knew I had to stop. It felt like I was taking an exam back in school and just as the teacher said “Time everyone”, I was putting my pen down on the desk. (of course in school this never happened, but hey!) I caught the bloom just at its climax. It isn’t often I have such perfect timing. And indeed, looking at it now, I see a ripe tomato. 

This reminds me of a tidbit about the British writer Anthony Trollope who my teacher Leo adored but whom I've read yet to read. Mr Trollope worked at several Post Office’s throughout his life and had a reputation for punctuality. He wrote 47 books during his life apparently by writing in 15-minute intervals for three hours per day when he wasn’t working at the Post office. Over the years I've read two different versions of his strict writing discipline. One, is that he wrote early morning, afternoons, and evenings, and he managed 250 words during each session. When he got his 250 words he'd stop and put down his pen whether or not he was in the middle of either a word or sentence. The second version I've heard is that he put his watch on the edge of his desk and he worked until precisely 8:00 AM, when he put his pen down either in the middle of a word or sentence, then left for the Post Office. Naturally, someone like me thinks of him when I realise how just how undisciplined I’ve been in my life. 

But today, here in the 21 century, I found myself thinking about the relevance of these small studies. It wasn’t at all in any unpleasant way, I was just contemplating their worth in the grander scheme of things. I guess it means that I hope that they do communicate something to someone else at the very minimum. Do they have an inherent worth? Are they able to convey an emotion to another human being? Would they surprise anyone? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do sometimes practice this secret way of judging them. It’s a game actually. I imagine that one of these small studies is on a wall in a Museum tucked away and off from the main gallery, then I wonder if I would notice it when walking by it. Would I make a bee-line for it? Would it take its place among the better pictures that surround it? Of course it’s amusing to admit this, but I’m not embarrased, It’s just something I do. I cannot speak for other painters, writers or composers, but I do know that everyone secretely wishes to see their own work somewhere other than on a wall in their own bedroom. Why not a museum, I sometimes think?

My little game that I play with these paintings is linked to the way I also visit museums. When I’m in a museum and move through rooms, I first like to stand in the middle of the gallery and do a 360 degree turn while scanning for something to catch me my eye. Usually, if I am not pressed for time, and crowds permitting, I like to walk briskly through to the end of the entire show only to then return to the start so that I’ll know not to miss something extraordinary at the end and I’ll have time enugh to spend with it.

I kind of like this small game because it means that I can imagine something good coming out of all this work. It could get pretty lonely if one wasn’t able to see beyond their own canvas board after all. I imagine too, if when a woman contemplates her face and hair, her neck and shoulders, does she allow herself to wonder if others find her beautiful, or even interesting? 

I remember once, a long time ago when on a hangliding weekend in the alps with some friends, I was writing in my diary at a cafe one morning. A friend and fellow pilot came by and joined me. He was used to seeing me with my diary on these trips each morning at a cafe. He asked me if I imagined about the audience which might read these pages. I said that I didn’t worry about that, I simply liked writing about things seen and heard each day; about flying in the clouds, about art, about people, everything in fact. I basically said that I wasn’t writing to be read by anyone else, I had gotten into the habit of keeping a diary for the fun of it. My friend was a well educated Frenchmen, logical and rational,  to a fault, a math teacher in fact  and he wouldn’t have any of this. He said “Chris, one writes to be read”. His remark stopped me in my tracks and I confess that I found it difficult to rebut his remark for I could understand the flaw in my reasoning. But it was too hard to explain to him that I hadn’t really thought it through enough about whether or not there was an end game to any of it. I was just keeping a diary for the enjoyable pleasure of writing. By then anyway, I was hooked already on writing about the weather, my days, my dreams, my faults, and all that thinking that we humans do all the time. Years later, I understood that if these pages weren’t read in a diary form, then somehow, there would be another purpose for it. Its reason hadn’t yet become clear to me any more than this.

In truth, There was a reason I had wanted to begin a diary but I didn’t want to reveal all that to him out of discretion. I began the diary in 1986, because like so many other people, I had wanted to create a dialogue with myself, to place myself into the days of own life. I had tried a few times earlier but like many people, I couldn’t get it off the ground. But on a boat to Greece one wintry afternoon, with a big hangover, I finally got serious. 

But there was another reason. It was because I had never known my father intimately. I knew almost nothing about his past. Due to circumstances out of our control, we became separated, so from the age of eight, I saw him only for brief moments thereafter and consequently I knew almost nothing about what made him tick. I know now that it’s through families that children find out about their parents but we didn’t have one that included grand-parents or cousins. Our past on both sides of the family were like lone continents, uninhabited and unexplored. But WW2 had severed much my mother’s family, and they never really recovered. 

But I certainly loved my father and he, me, but our life was made up of one evening here, or another one there, every couple of months, then it became years. Only the letters between us acted as small bridges, then he died during me second year in France. So, in the back of my mind I also harboured a deep secret with this diary, and it was to write about my life so that if, and when I had a child of my own, they would know something about me. 

Now, almost forty years later, and without children, my diaries are huddled together like in an orphanage at breakfast hour, all lined up on long shelf and surrounded by books in my home. I actually appreciate this irony. But what I couldn’t know when I began writing the diary was that I was learning to express myself in those thousands of pages and thousands of days. I also realised later that because I wrote, I also recorded infinitely indescribable details that became stored within me as tangible memories. Meanwhile, I also was learning to write and find pleasure in it for its own sake. 

So yes, even to paint, is inherently a desire to communicate one’s ideas however inchoate or obscure they may be, because it too, is it’s just like revealing to oneself, or to others, an emotion. But first and foremost, these crafts are both primarily created for the simple pleasure and challenge of doing these things. After all, like any kind of job one takes, one never knows where it will take them, or what they wil take away from it by the end of the experience. Like the thousands of pages and the thousands of pictures, will they end up in a bin or in a museum? Who knows? The whole point of creating books and pictures is to reveal truths to the author and painter, who, b.t.w, are sometimes, the very last to know them.

Winter Solstice, under the watchful eye of Eugen Herrigal

 

24 June 2021

Winter Solstice, under the watchful eye of Eugen Herrigal

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 June 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I had not been out much this week. The sky last night was clear when I arrived except for a thin hazy bank of clouds hugging the horizon and the colour of a corpse. I set up quickly, mixed a palette and put a white canvas board on the easel.

 

Everyone around here practices meditation. Many years ago, I overheard a guy talking about his own meditation ritual and I had found him quite pretentious. Around that time though I had thought lots of people pretentious. But hey! No matter, I imagine that lots of people found me pretentious too. I’m sure it’s a global disease (both being pretentious, and thinking others are). Anyway, this fellow was saying that after years of meditation his mantra became so ingrained in his breath work that he could no longer tell which was doing what, or what was doing which; was he breathing his mantra or was his mantra breathing through him? Regardless of hi, this fascinated me

In any event, here is where my own meditation kicks in because though I haven’t a clue how this creative process works it's surely mystery. When I'm clicked into it, I do understand that something guides me, and perhaps like a visual mantra, it must be the motif that’s steers the tiller. But the engine behind that must certainly be Nature which creates the motif for me each afternoon. It is that which informs painters like me how to proceed, not the other way around because I'm a passive actor out there on the dunes.

 

I've read Eugen Herrigel's great book, Zen and the Art of Archery, several times over the years, and like many, was deeply impressed by his experiences and yet surprisingly, I hadn't thought too much about it in regards to my sessions here at the beach until writing all this down tonight. So yes, this 'passive action' that involves the breath and pause of which he speaks incessantly is very familiar to me here as painter. 

Contrary to the way many painters might work, and in spite of my quick way of painting, I generally proceed by watching and seeing in a calm fashion nonetheless. My preference is to not dictate to Nature or impose what I think I want to do because my choices are almost entirely contingent upon what the motif wants from me. It shows me not what I think I want to see but what needs to be seen. This is the mysterious aspect of painting that I think  all creators savour. The motif, like a mantra, doesn’t give a hoot about my own volition even if I may think I’m making the big and little decisions. 

So, this was the first of three paintings. I’m not sure I’m all that wild about it but the sky had mellowed out a bit before I started, and maybe I caught some of the electricity that I perceived just over the horizon. For some earthly reason, both Solstices of the year seem to provide really wild light for days before and after each one. I'm not really a pagan but I do have a rich imagination. 

I prefer this first study more than the other two that followed. It has a fizzle about it like gulping down a cold Perrier on a hot afternoon. That is its principle appeal for me. Sometimes I appreciate things in pictures (both my own and of others) that manifest something uniquely authentic even if I don’t find them really so great over all. 

At one point in the painting session an older gentleman joined me, remaining cautiously at a safe distance while we chatted. I found myself working more nervously in his presence. He was a retired meat inspector from Victoria and he was fascinated by the speed at which I was able to work. I explained quickly that I had had an anxious childhood but he didn’t respond. I think he was a quiet fellow. 

Of course, on this night there was a pretty crazy crowd on the beach, fairly typical for such a pagan event, and it’s often that people will come by to take a peek at what I am up to here on the dune. I know I'm a strange sight for sure with my paint-speckled smock wrapped over an old white hoodie. I not only look weird but I’m engaged in this unlikely activity on the chilly beach at twilight. Several hippies came by to see what I was up to, only to scamper off down the beach like happy children. My retired inspector has left me by the time that people began dancing around small fires, and a drumming session had also begun as I packed up to leave.

Van Gogh haunts the Courtauld Institute

9 April 2021

Van Gogh haunts the Courtauld Institute

             Arles, December 1888

When in London, I often visit the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House. If I were eighteen all over again and if I had even a fraction of the Art-bug I do today, I’d re-do my life and enrol at this institute and learn everything about art history, art restoration and how to be a curator. Its collection of paintings is well-rounded and top-notch. But my real interest is the self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh which is hung on a wall by itself in a large room overlooking an immense courtyard.

On my last visit there it was somewhat empty and I had the place to myself, so I was able to completely plug into it. This amazing portrait must have been painted within days after Vincent cut off his ear. I think there are two other versions as well, but it’s this one I find the most mesmerising in every painterly way.

Here in this room are large windows with luminous thin shades pulled down to keep out the midday light. This seems only to accentuate the intensity of the cool harmonies in the picture. It’s a beautifully painted portrait of cool and disjunctive color harmonies emanating from a dominant lime-yellow scheme. Van Gogh famously adored everything yellow and to every extreme on the palette; from buttery rich cadmiums to these limey green hues. In this portrait particularly, he used an unusual combination of both warm and cool yellow tones to highlight the delicate shadowy relief in his face. It’s wild but harnessed, no one had ever done anything like it. And it’s flat, like Japanese portraiture from which he learned everything and so cleared adored. And yet it curiously falls into line with everything so classically traditional that had come before it. In it there is Holbein and Rembrandt, and Titian too. There is even a Matisse in it, but waiting to arrive.

It’s also a complex painting despite its apparent simplicity. It’s so flat, and yet there is every indication of relief throughout its surface. The Prussian Blue hat which he also wears in the other portrait, with its black fringe, acts like a kind of black hole around which everything seems to gravitate. 

Well,.. for me it is extraordinary, beautiful, and yes; perfect. But I hate that I write that because I don’t generally believe in any kind of perfection in Art and I wince at my own use of this adjective. Maybe I should qualify it by saying that it’s simply a truthful portrait, one that rivals his great hero, Rembrandt. But that would tell only a small portion of it. I'd say simply that it's the first truly Modernist portrait to appear. But it might also  be possibly the very first portrait ever painted under artificial light from the newly installed electric lighting grid throughout France. Is that why he used so much cadmium yellow paint in some of these evening paintings?? 

One can only imagine what the uncultured and equally uninspired country folk of the 19th century might have seen: Ugliness! Brutality! Hideous insanity! Fortunately, we also know that Baudelaire once declared that often new and original works of Art can look ugly upon first viewing. So a picture like this forces us (me) to be on our contemporary toes. Where are the Van Goghs of today? Would I be able to discern them with a fresh but cultured set of eyes? It’s also a great reminder that artists cannot afford to worry about outside opinions regarding their work. 

As I left the institute and found myself on the busy streets of London, I realised that mostly what had trapped me in front of his self-portrait was its humanity. So as a consequence,  as I wandered the city streets I found myself looking for humanity and finding it everywhere. Aside from its skill, it seemed to me that only a painter of such heroic empathy could paint such a portrait. And yet remarkably, within it there isn’t a hint of sentimentality anywhere, just a plea, perhaps to God that he might be understood. 

Colour enshaded in the Divine

9 December 2019

Colour enshaded in the Divine

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 December 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So, over the recent years, my interest with the painting surface has only grown while at the same time my priorities have narrowed. I’m more fascinated with the interaction of colours and how they bump up against each other, rubbing and caressing, kissing and clashing over a surface. These days, the sensuous contact of colour planes seems far more essential than even before. 

In this painting from the other evening, one of three, I am almost shocked at how it had all come together. It had been a clear sky and the bloom was as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. And yes, I really like the result here which is both personal and formal at the same time. It's decidedly more about how colours planes co-exist on a unified surface than a picture of the sea and sky. Isn’t this one aspect that helps to give a picture its subtle but rich dynamic vitality? A poor connection between colours will also mean less affinity between the physical picture planes, and this results in a weaker painting. But when there is relevance between colour planes, the whole drawing is glued together. And like at the end of any artistic process, despite everything, it should appear completely effortless even though a life may have been shed for it.

As I dives deeper into musical harmony on the piano it’s easier to see more clearly the relationships between Painting and Music. And as one begins to familiarise themselves with flatted and sharped 9ths and 11ths, etc, etc,, and those delicious suspended 4ths, it’s astonishing to hear the melding of chords as they progress through various keys and eventuate into a musical idea. In the Painting world colours behave in much the same way when they fuse onto a surface to create a pictorial idea. If in each case the drawing and the melody are strong, both organic structures will always push towards an eventual resolution. The more developed the relationships, the greater is the work.

I've listened to so many different kinds of music in my life, and it has continuously formed my sensibility over time. I fell in love with opera when I arrived in France after listening to so much folk, jazz, rock and roll in the US. France Musique, began teaching me everything about Classical music and filled me in with centuries of European music. At this same time I was also wandering around museums in France and Italy mostly, but also in Spain and Holland, and everywhere else I could during this pivotal time in my young life. Just the sheer volume of Painting I had looked at during these early years gave me a visual foundation which formed both my conscious and unconscious feelings about Art. At the same time I was still trying to make sense of it all while learning to paint. But as a student, and possibly a painter, and like most young people, it made me impatient to want to be further down the road of life already. I wanted to take everything in, but I also desired to find a path for myself alone towards some meaning.

Here, in Australia so many decades later, I discovered that painting a seascape is really more just about the sky because painting the sky is essentially about depicting the nothingness of air in fact. Like for this picture, the air appeared to me as pink cotton candy, the kind found at country fairs everywhere. But on other days, for other pictures, it could also appear like tomato soup. Yes, it’s oxygen and nitrogen, but it's also just water vapour, and that’s what a painter has to work from. This gaseous air is a chameleon and it can appear any which way depending upon the local weather. 

So, the sky here at dusk, being empty of substance, unlike even the sea, or the woody forests or stony mountains in the landscape, holds its colour through some atmospheric nuance of aerial magic. For the painter, there is nothing less solid to work from than this fulgurant airy substance where there are no love-handles onto which one can grab because there are no hills, no arms, no trees, nor branches to hang from. There are no roofs or bricks; no ears or noses to latch onto, for it is an ephemeral world of pure nothingness and working from it can make many painters crazy. Air is a colour enshaded only in the divine; it’s a luminous hue embalmed in the scent of a pale perfume of light. And yet, these frail elements of the picture plane must also be joined and reconciled to make up a whole image. The conundrum! How to paint something from nothing? How to paint the wind?

Somehow, I've managed to find my own way into a form for it, but only through the endless repetition forced upon me in this twilight series at the beach. Clouds of every shape and colour are great teachers. 

Thankfully, I've always suspected that the Muses have a special affection for all artists, but seascape painters in particular, are dear to them. They guide us around the sky, in and out of all sorts of weather like we're lost pilots. Why do I feel this? Not sure, it's just a feeling I have. 

This study from the other night might be the most Cubist image I've made here at the beach. It's unusual because I never found a way into this movement enough to explore it even out of curiosity. But no matter what kind of painting one makes I think every painter has to deal with the essential problem of connecting one plane of colour to another in order to form the image as a whole unit. How we build an image is a communal problem for us all. A picture can succeed or fail from this one structural issue alone. It's the ligaments beneath the sexy colours on the surface that hold everything in place in a painting.

So, like all those flatted 5ths and sharped 9ths that smoothly blend one chord into the next, these planes of colour in this study fuse together the fractal edges through airy sensual brushstrokes.