Trees wearing red rubies

11 June 2020

Trees wearing red rubies

     Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The nights are chilly and a big Southerly polishes the black sky full of stars. These sessions are chilly too, as I never seem to be dressed appropriately but winter is definitely here.

This painting was kind of a surprise for me because I knew while I was working on it that it was eliciting a strong feeling from deep inside me. I really love this super pale hint of Prussian Blue broken with lemon yellow at the very top of the picture. It rises up out of the warm highlights of light over the deeper yellow beneath. “Yes!” The painter in me exclaimed to no one: “That is it !”  Something about the warm sensual colours and the gentle overall feeling spoke to me but like in a foreign language; French!

This gentle transition from one hue to another is the whole reason I still come out to paint the sea at this dusk hour. “All that for just this?” the sceptic who know little of aesthetic joy, might think to themselves, “Mais oui! I respond emphatically!” I’ll further confess that I stole these soft transitions in the sky from Mahler’s long elegiac passages in his 5th Symphony, the Adagietto. Because you see, Art, unlike the leopard, not only changes its spots, but its species as well.

It’s weird to watch yourself painting an image that comes from a motif way out there, yet at the same time it evoked up from within me a visual memory that’s really old and friendly, a feeling not unlike that of Proust’s Madelaine cookie. But in this case it was prompted not by taste but through a visual sense.

What I understand is that this study from the other afternoon brought up memories from long ago, ones that I had described in my diary from when I lived at the Châteaunoir in Aix. For the past year I’ve been transcribing these diaries into my laptop, a laboriously slow process, and one that has filled me with many delicious memories that spring back up like one of those tall inflatable stick figures at a car wash.

Two memories came to me in this instance. I remember when living there I would walk most evenings into the forest usually with several cats in tow. And often, around sunset in autumn and winter particularly, when the sun was setting, the last red rays would scatter everywhere, randomly throwing small red marks upon the forest trees. The oak and pine trees were wearing red rubies likes medals pinned to their bark for as far as I could see. 

And this triggered another memory, like it piggy-backed upon the first from southern India, where would the women paste cow dung onto the trees for drying which they then use for cooking. In that dry landscape, all the trees that lined the road were painted with pale pink polka dots like Yayoi Kusama had been there the day before. Somehow, looking at this picture brought all of this to the forefront of my imagination.

Transcribig a diary from 1980’s made clear several things to me. Firstly, is that I saw that I was so much more grateful and full of joy than I ever remembered being during all those years. I had erroneously imagined that I was eternally depressed, but the diary tells me otherwise, despite my sadness and sense of solitude that I often did feel in those years. 

Secondly, I realised just how golden it is to have youth on one’s side, but also, to have one’s good health too. This human body is a precarious life-force for most of us and to have good health is to have a greater advantage for living well. So, I was young and healthy when if I drank too much wine.

So tonight, I come away from this easy amble down through memory lane with an appreciation that if indeed there was a golden era back then, then surely today it is also just as golden too, n’est-ce pas? And In twenty years time hence, when I shall indeed be a real older man, will I look back and not marvel at how grateful and happy I also feel today? Will my future self not smile at the providence with which I am abundantly graced today?

And so thus this small inconspicuous study from the other night brought up so many things for me and I find that really remarkable for just an average normal painting session. 

Builders and electricians

18 June 2020

Builders and electricians

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In France many years ago, I dropped in on a painter whom I used to know. Instead of an education at the Beaux-Arts, he had studied economics I think. He was smart and somewhat of an intellectual even. Despite a French education that shaped him with a rational thought process I appreciated that he became a painter way outside the system from which he came. 

I visited him one Spring afternoon, he was in his garden when I arrived putting some last touches on a picture. Our usual banter immediately turned to Painting, but on this day we spoke of a programme which we had both heard the previous evening on France Musique which had highlighted the relationship between Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. They are popular and iconic composers who are played often throughout the week. At the start of our conversation, I said that although I like Debussy very much, I was really crazy about Ravel. We began talking about them both, what pieces we liked, etc, etc.

I said that Ravel feels to me to be more like a comfortable armchair straddling the end of the 19th century and early 20th century Romanticism, one in which no doubt, Brahms had certainly napped in before him. Debussy, his contemporary, on the other hand, seemed to be steering music into the 21th century on a skate board. For some reason, I wasn’t even surprised to hear him tell tell me that Debussy was the superior artist. It seemed in line with his cerebral taste and education. Though this discussion was at least thirty years ago I've never forgotten it. Like most things I found interesting during my daily life, I noted our conversation in my diary at the time. I would summarise his thinking thus: 

“Unlike Ravel, Debussy’s musical ideas were not weighed down by an excess of emotion.” He asserted that because of this, Debussy was the greater artist.

Our discussion that day was, as always, very precise, almost mechanically logical, the way they can sometimes be in France, often even, to the point of didactic exhaustion. But on the other hand, this was one of the things that I truly loved about living in France, a country of thinkers, and lovers of not only Art but of eloquent debate. It’s a kind of a giant cafe, a home to a collective cultural brawl that’s filled with hyper-reasoned participants, unafraid of verbal skirmishes. Don’t forget, France is the land where Cyrano de Bergerac slew his opponents by tongue, after all.

Our discussions about Art were also part of our own particular brawl and also the glue that held our unlikely friendship in place over the years. We shared a certain legacy over the years that was born in a fertile French soil, and allowed our discourse to replenish year after year despite our differences. And yet in this instance, I found myself annoyed by his arrogance and it rubbed me the wrong way. 

Any avid listener to France Musique receives a large dose of both of these composers on its programming on a regular basis, so I had listened a lot to both Ravel and Debussy since arriving in France back in 1973. But for me, I had learned to love artists (of every field) for lots of different reasons. With aging humilty, when it comes to greatness, I don’t generally attach my feelings to a hierarchy of that greatness anymore. I had  learned over the years to critique a particular work of an artist, not the artist nor their reputation themselves. It keeps me out of a lot of trouble, and it’s for sure, more diplomatic. But it’s also cleaner, a more precise way of exploring and evaluating the Arts over the long haul of history. I’ve found that in things artistic, all roads should never lead to Rome, but away from it, to a squirrelly destination full of diversity and surprise.   

Paul Cézanne is generally considered to be the father of Modern Art, and like Debussy, he ushered into the 20th century a new structural form which broke away from centuries of pictorial thinking as if a dam had burst and swept away most of what was already housed in the Louvre. To a great extent there is much truth to this metaphor. 

Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, isn’t considered in the same light, and he, like Ravel, was steeped in the painting structure of the 19th century, one that arrived through both Rembrandt and Delacroix, among so many others including many artists from Japan. Yet Vincent Van Gogh almost single-handedly, opened up the palette to more light than the world had ever seen or experienced beforehand. He was a new lightbulb. If Cezanne was the builder, then Van Gogh was the electrician. But according to Emile Bernard who knew them both, Cézanne had heard of Van Gogh and even thought he was a mad man who made crazy paintings. "Il est fou!" He had declared. So, you see how opinions are not facts in Art. And anyway, I'm also someone who distrusts the word genius and I try to avoid using it at all costs. But I do use the words: Greatness, Great, Good, OK, and Awful, among others, to describe Art in general, but people too sometimes.

It has been many years since that conversation with my old friend but I’ve never forgotten it. It was a learning curve for me, and I still remember being taken aback at the audacity of it. Today, even more humbled with age, it shocks me even more. 

So, all these years later, have given me the clarity to see that greatness comes in various colours and different forms, even newer tastes with which I may not yet even be familiar. And although I can be ruthlessly critical of particular works, it’s rare that I slag off an artist’s whole oeuvre, or his, or her person. I’ve also learned today, that even thinking like this is an odd form of narcissism. At such a distinguished level of artistry like Debussy and Ravel, where craft melds with vision, comparing two iconic composers is like trying to compare Cézanne to Van Gogh; an apple to a pear. 

Meanwhile, at the beach came this frosty coloured picture from the other night, the second of two studies. It’s getting chilly at the beach these days as we approach the winter solstice, and the sea looked to be a cool silver blue. I’m still not sure what I think of it but there is something Modern and flat in it that tells me I'm on my own right and authentic path. In time, it might look more interesting or less so, it might also be a dud. 

In this moment how can I know? It’s long story, this painting racket. A painter just continues forward, one picture at a time, one day at a time. One thing is sure though, I accept that I’m not a great painter, so I don’t need to waste time worrying about that form of narcissism. To be a good painter is already great enough because no one will ever paint just like me. 

Drunken Noah

2 June 2019

Drunken Noah

       Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2019, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

These are glorious skies that grace us each afternoon, and chilly nights that follow. Two studies from the other day, this was the second. I'm not sure how good it is but the session was full of colour and it was really pleasurable despite the chill in the air. 

I had a sudden insight the other night but it seems so obvious that I feel almost too foolish to admit it. On the drive home from the beach the other evening I was ruminating about all the chaos and disorder going on in the world at the moment when I suddenly wondered if maybe the whole point of ART is to counterbalance it all with order. But of course, the world has always been spinning out of control and it's mostly due to human misbehaviour.

I mused ruefully that perhaps in a world where darkness represented all of humankind's cruelties and greed, then wouldn't light surely be its opposite? Could it also be possible that artistic endeavours everywhere, might function also as healing properties, like angels circling playfully around this volatile world of humankind?  

I'm not trying to be fanciful, nor am I naive or idealist, it's just a proposition that aired itself while driving home in my old car the other night at the start of winter. 

I was actually thinking about Painting but then it occurred to me it’s really about creativity isn’t it, Literature, Architecture, and all sorts of music and dance, etc, etc? Everything, the whole kit and caboodle. If we believed that Art (unlike Nationalism), is a kind of bridge to something reasonable and beneficial to all society as a whole, then couldn't it be seen as a kind of bonding glue to connect us all?

Yes, this sounds so obvious, it's almost so silly that I hesitated to follow it further. And yet, on a personal level, when I accept that Art has fused me back together and made me whole again again, it made me wonder whether or not it's been doing that ever since humankind first began being creative instead of adversarial. 

But even further down into this rabbit hole, I also wondered just how order and disorder, are expressed through any artist? Around me (and in the world) I notice many artists who want to break the world apart in their art work through disconnected imagery and disrupted subject matter. That's cool, if it works. We all have to do what we all need to do after all, otherwise, why bother with any of it?

We may as lie on a beach in Jamaica drinking rum all afternoon. 

Why then is it that my own desire yearns for the complete opposite? Are their lives so composed and whole, that it permits them the luxury and freedom to express such formal collapse in their art? 

Me, on the other hand, I'm always trying to put things back together, to bond elements whether they be in a picture or in my life. I seem to be trying to tie everything down like I’m on a small boat in stormy seas. 

In my own case I'm pretty sure I know where it all came from, this old sense of dread and fear of being out of control. I came out of a dysfunctional house, full of disorder and violence, so I understand why I'm always searching for some kind of ordered calm, both in my personal life and in my creative one too. Are these pictures a kind of  psychological response to my place here in the world? I've always been searching for a comfortable foxhole, actually. I was a Drunken Noah, in love with sleep because I couldn’t handle the world war.

 

I’m also the guy that's looking out at the sea and sky at sunset when colours want to peel off in any number of directions and I’m the one trying to catch them all like they’re butterflies in a field. But I am trying to make sense of a motif so that its pictorial incoherence can be legible for others to read. If a painter’s job is to convey an idea, or a feeling, then mustn’t it be legible for others to also feel and experience? We're no longer infants anymore, I mean, what would be the point conveying gibberish to each other? 

I feel like I’m walking out on a tightrope with all this but hey? I like heights.

Yes, I know, I know, stop making sense, it's a clever catch phrase for a POP generation, but eventually we get to an age when we really must begin making sense of things or we start to go crazy, possibly conspiratorial and nutty because we're no longer grounded. But then, I’m not God, who knows the answers to any of all this? I’m just a painter, a drunken Noah of sorts, trying to save myself through small pictures. What could go wrong?

But another thing I realised the other night in the middle of all these thoughts is that I am finally practicing what I should have learned so many years earlier, that it’s the daily work, that's the ticket out of out of confusion for anyone who trying practice a craft. Had I known that earlier I would have saved a lot of energy.

This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever stayed so long on a motif week after week, month after month through all these seasons here, because it continually offers up something for me each new day. If it didn't I wouldn't be coming back for more. But to be fair, there isn’t a great variance to these seasons especially on a simple motif like this. But the steady attention to it over time is what I had missed most of my life. And yet, it’s everything for a painter, how could I have missed this? 

Being an artist isn’t about all my fantasies, the endless rumination and dreamy ideas that make up a painting trajectory, it's about the concrete work produced on a steady basis, and yes, a routine grounded in devotion. Everything else is just fluff, maybe interesting fluff, but fluff all the same.

When I think about how much time I’ve wasted in trying to find order in my life by thinking, I'm appalled. I’ve lived the life of the drunken Noah depicted so beautifully in stone on so many Romanesque Churches throughout Europe. But remarkably enough, something shifted for me years back in my own Dark Ages and I’m grateful for it. I feel like I awakened from a long dream and in many ways, it's this series that has jolted me upright. 

This study came after a struggle as the whole colour harmony appeared to collapse towards the end of the session and left me at a loss. But being a good fantasist, I faked it accordingly. 

Eventually, Nicholas de Staal

4 August 2024

Eventually, Nicholas de Staal

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 July, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Chilly, these days!

The other day a painter (and acquaintance) asked me what I thought of some of her paintings. I had looked at them and was at a loss of how to be honest with her without hurting her feelings. A long time ago I learned one of the best lessons of my life. It was to never ask anyone such a thing about my own work. I learned the hard way because once many years ago when I did question a friend about a painting of mine I received a negative response and I got such a resentment that I didn’t eat for a year. I vowed to never again fall into that trap, and I haven’t. 

If one can't handle someone else’s opinion, then they should never broach the question. Why didn’t I learn that as a kid? But I’ve since learned to avoid this problem by turning it around on the questioner, by asking them, “what do you think of it?”. This seems to work out and lead to a discussion about what works in a painting, and it usually diverts the discussion elsewhere. In any artistic activity, isn’t this the real question? I’ve learned that the best way to avoid such a question is to shy away from Art, but politics and religion also.

In this case, it had turned out OK, as I waded into a swamp of ideas, ad-libbing like a stand-up comedian the whole way. But to be honest, I’ve become more real in so many aspects of my personal life, that these days I can usually handle most questions, so it’s rarely a big problem. I try to just say what I mean and mean what I say in all things. 

I realise that this question of engagement is interesting. What does it mean to be engaged both intellectually and emotionally with something which we collectively assume to be Art? I know that it really doesn’t matter for 99% of the world population, but hey,,,, if you are reading this it must mean something. 

Art criticism is an age old pasttime, one which was fairly widespread in the wealthier nations up until the 19th century. All hell broke loose in the 20th century, and now in the first 2 decades of this 21st century, it’s all so contextual that it’s like walking through mine field. But I still love the debate about Art in spite of all these thorny obstacles. I’m just careful about with whom I’m engaging. Today, I generally engage as a painter and much less so as a critic. How I look at a painting is as important for me as it is for a baseball scout looking at young players. I share the same love and devotion of this game of Art.

To be in front of a painting, or any work of art one loves (which is engagement), can evoke the same kinds of visceral feelings to that of an epicurean seated in a three star restaurant. It’s an affair of gluttonous passion. In a work of any sort of Art I want to find a visual intelligence, something which comes out of a wide collection of ideas that one has carefully nurtured through discerning curiosity. 

Like with anything, if I can assert that I am engaged, then I must also be judging. When anyone asks me what I think of such and such an artist, I now always respond by asking them of which work by such and such an artist, are they referring? It’s always best to keep it specific; “Which Picasso? "Which Tintoretto” or "which Basquait?”. It’s tidier this way with no ambiguities hanging about. 

In fact, a friend in France did recently ask me what I thought of Nicholas de Staal. She had seen a large show of his and was enchanted with him, and his work (all my women friends have a crush on him). And why not? He was a very handsome man with a mysterious past of White Russian lineage and who painted very sensitive landscapes around Provence, La Drôme, Antibes and Paris. Poor guy, after a very productive life of work he killed himself at 41, by jumping out of an apartment in the middle of Antibes. So I told her, I liked many things of his very much, which was true. So yes, not only do I like  many of his pictures, but I admire him even more perhaps. He loved Art passionately and though he made a small family, his life revolved around his obsession of capturing the light of Provence. What’s not to like, as my Uncle Phil in the Bronx would ask? 

I saw a large show in Aix two years ago when last in France, and I surprised myself by taking lots of photos of his small things with my phone. This tells me I that I liked his work and was indeed engaged with it. I liked the graphic truth in so many images in the show, and though many were probably painted inland, many of them possessed the airiness of the sea. Indeed, many of his pictures exuded luminosity from every pore of the canvas.

Satie went out without his umbrella

24 June 2020

Satie went out without his umbrella

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I never really struggled with the act of painting, not colour harmony, nor with drawing once I began studying with Leo. Of course I had to learn a lot and work at it but it was never foreign to me even from an early age as I had always had an intuitive grasp of art, Being able to draw had been the ticket that allowed me to avoid being bullied in schools because I could do something that others couldn’.t. It gave me a pass, sort of. On the other hand, I also took it for granted too because curiously, I also assumed that everyone else had those skills. My real problem in Painting arose from me alone and I had to overcome all of my own personnel issues around creativity to make any progress. I was my own problem, but Art never was.

But I found a way into sorting out my issues with Painting through learning music in my later years. I had always wanted to play piano but always thought I was too old.That mind-set went on for years until finally at the age of 30, I bought an old piano and like other beginners began learning to read music and play simple things by Bach, Bartok..

It was an unhill climb because music never came easy to me like it seems to for so many others. I had to work at it in a way I never had to work at Painting. This was a great opening but at the same time it revealed to me that I hadn’t ever really worked hard enough on my plastic skills in Painting or drawing. I coasted, which wasn’t a great way to achieve anything. Most of the time at the piano I felt like a mountaineer at the bottom of a cliff and looking up to see what the task was for the day. 

So over the years I’ve learned music harmony through the Tin Pan Alley charts that became the great Jazz Standards much later on. Like everyone else, I also learned some Bach and Chopin, but it’s Erik Satie who led me to the trough of hard work. 

At the begining of the Pandemic I began memorising the first three Gemnopedies, then the first three Gnossiennes which took me two years, but now they live cautiously in my hands and my heart. I suddenly realised that if I could do this then I could certainly accomplish as much in Painting. Somehow the work on Satie helped me dislodge all of my worst creative insecurities. It felt to me that after so many years, I could finally stuff my perfectionism into a pizza oven and it would burn out of me like smokey ghost. Henceforth, instead of seeing Painting as the final exam I began to see it as a workbook. Why couldn’t I could learn to paint for the pure joy of it as I’ve learned to do on the piano I thought? 

This moody picture is from a few nights ago. It also reminds me of Eric Satie and his wistful music, but in particular, his set of piano works entitled Pieces-froides. Erik Satie, today’s much celebrated French composer lived in a tiny unheated room in Montmarte at the end of his life where he died in poverty. After he died, the story goes that a few friends assembled there and while they jammed into the small room and drank brandy to remember him, someone opened the closet and dozens of umbrellas spilled out. His friends were surprised to find their own amongst them. They say that he went out with an umbrella even on sunny days and he apparently had a habit of ‘borrowing’ them from everywhere he went, easy to do in France where cafes and shops still have umbrella holders at their 

entrances. 

But I like this picture also because it captures an instant almost like a polaroid and yet it’s a painting done live at the beach under a windy chill. At first, I wasn’t sure about it but it looks better to me after a few days. It summoned up the feeling of this cold dark and forlorn afternoon as I left the beach the other day. It’s winter after all.