Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood but God too

26 October 2021

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood but God too 

                                  

    Portrait of first wife Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Garmen (1947) 

                       portrait of Caroline Blackwell (1952)

I love these two portraits by Lucian Freud. The one on the left is his first wife Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Garman , painted in 1947 in London. On the right is of his second wife Caroline Blackwood, painted in 1952. They have everything I love in a portrait, sensuality, detail and humanity. They feel so differently perhaps because they are created in different mediums but also because they’re separated by several years, and of course, there are two different wives. In any event his rigorous discipline to detail commands my attention, a great gift when this skill hasn’t damaged the overall pictorial, or graphic unity. 

Lucian Freud had a very colourful love-life to say the least, even for a man who was married just twice. Unlike his paint-laden portraits which came later these early pictures appear sober, stylised and minimalist. The left one of his first wife Kitty almost feels like an illustration, a poignant yet slightly antiseptic expression, and for the life of me I cannot decipher her thoughts. Is it ambivilance, or just impatience for the ordeal to be over already? Because of the oddly complacent cat, held firmly in her right hand, it feels like a whimsical cartoon, the poor cat! There is obviously a hidden joke here somewhere, maybe, even an erotic one. The British are wonderful with this kind of wry, eccentric humour in Art. 

This portrait of his very young and new wife Caroline Blackwood in bed, is my real favourite. Its sensuous rendering in oil is delicious. It’s a mastepiece of technique but of great humanity too. It’s as good a Portraiture as has ever been painted I believe, and it rivals the best from any century. Like a hummingbird, this modern spirit of Holbein seems to hover over and around every one of its delicate details. It fascinated me so much that though I haven’t yet read a biography of Lucian Freud, after seeing this portrait of Caroline Backwood, I immediately ordered the biography about her called A Dangerous Muse: the life of Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger. A great read. 

Though I’m sure many Americans would disagree with me, this is the kind of thing that Andrew Wyeth, for all his technical virtuoisty, just couldn’t attain despite his devotion to realism. Personally, I think it it has to do with the luminosity that pervades every tiny millimeter of the surface. It’s ‘plasticity’, so apparent yet subdued, defies the era of Modern Art being made at that time in both Post-War England and France. Of course, at that time in America, being so obsessed with ‘self expression’, this old idea of Renaissance ‘plasticity’ had already been jettisoned by the The Expressionist Movement.

There is so much to say about Caroline in Bed 1952 that it almost makes me dizzy so I won’t, not today anyway, another time perhaps. It’s a thing of such rare and singular beauty that it wipes away all those ineffectual adjectives normally employed when looking at Art. But, I will cite what Freud himself once said about Painting that I like enormously:

“An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.” 

Morandi’s light and brief shadow

10 October 2019

Morandi’s light and brief shadow

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 October 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

This is a very relaxed painting, almost like a pair of stone-washed jeans. Actually, it also looks like the way I dress evach day;  a clean but rumpled white tee shirt and old jeans. 

It was the first study of three when the sky appeared as a pale Prussian Blue with a hint of lime to it. The cloudbank has peaked in pink, its state before going warm red and the sea below wass almost black. I was happy because I always look for an occasion to put black and pink together, but the sea and sky aren’t always so cooperative, nonetheless I’m crazy about the Art Deco feel to these colours. The sky today looked soft like when one wears a grey cashmere on a cool afternoon. 

I like it the better than the other two. Sometimes I just like something for the feeling in it, not because I think it’s particularly good or not. I am grateful for that because it separates me from the academic mindset. I have a few academic friends who teach and I’m always amazed by their clinical approach to Art. Of course, as a painter, I’m critical but my sensibility is personal. Though I’m equally uncomfortable by just a purely emotional to a painting, it’s still my primary reaction to Art, But from it, I then go off to figure it out, its assets and faults.I may just like something for a few instances, days or weeks, years even, or the opposite, because I’m human. not a binary machine.

But to be fair, I think a lot about painting, most of the time actually. Music too, like any vocation or sport, one execrcises it’s hard to get it out of one’s mind because it’s always there, like the sun despite the weather. Come to think of it, it may be like being a teenager in love. Sometimes it’s intense but I can withdraw when I have had to much of it, yet I’ll always go back to it.

And although I can frequently think about other painters and their work depending on the moment, I generally I don’t think about them or their work when out painting at the dunes. Of myself, yes, like an old flame, I often carry the memory of the previous day’s pictures’ effect upon me, still simmering in my head or maybe others from either the recent or distant past. Curiously, seeing how the sky looks on one afternoon will suddenly re-configure other images in my imagination. I don’t think we never completely forget anything we’ve loved deeply. But do I think of other painters when working? No, never. Not even Turner, and I am glad for that. 

Looking at this dishevelled-looking study today in my home, I see that it reminds me of my early love for Giorgio Morandi. That may be a stretch for others to believe but I think it’s the sensuality of it. I think of just how much Morandi’s whole oeuvre has infected my artistic sensibilities over these 60 years or so. He was one of the first painters I immediately responded to as a child. My father had lots of Art books and several about Morandi. I looked with a great wonder at how his intimate oil paintings seemed so alive to me. 

I was keenly aware that it was his sensuous use of paint that made them real. In some of his intimate assemblies, the squiglly and unctuous layers of light that cast brief shadows have also managed to long stay with me like an early childhood crush. These are emtional memories, things that possess their own logic and cannot be altered like the present or the future. This is the world of imagination, memory and art.

My father was also a painter, but in a halfhearted sort of way. He had lots of talent but he also had a life apart from it had, and this kept him from the discipline of being a working artist. It demands a lot of time. Maybe one can have a separate life from art but I think its hard, it’s sort of like trying to keep a lover separate from one’s wife and family. It quickly gets too sticky, and it never ends well except in French films, naturally.

But my father did paint wonderful life-like portraits which adorned all the walls of his large bathroom with oil paint. Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Masaccio, were among his favorites. From the bathroom walls all these Italian noblemen looked into the intimacies of the 20th century toilet room. It was wild, and I was amazed that he was allowed to paint so freely all over the walls, but then, my parents each had separate bathrooms and unbeknowst to me at the time, they would also soon have separate addresses.

So, in a picture like this and done so far away from Bologna, I guess I still see the calm serenity of Georgio Morandi. I admit it might not be appreciated due to its unfinished look, but personally, it’s a picture I like for my own reasons even though they may change in time. But unlike his pictures of bottles and jars and cups that live in a macro-world like looking through a telescope at the protected and confined environment of his mind, my own are done out by the open sea and under an endlessly expansive sky. The connection for me today, is through the soft light and sensual lens of Morandi.

Waves and Waves of familiarity

19 September 2019

Waves and waves of familiarity

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

As always, when I venture out to my motif most afternoons I’m never sure what I will paint. All I know is that by the time I’ve prepared my palette, it will always be the motif that itself that will guide me to a visual solution. Without it, I would be a lost tourist in Kyoto without a map. After 2 1/2 years of this very ‘site specific’ work, as my Contemporary Collegues might call it, not only I have I come to trust this motif, but the motif has come to trust me like a dog to its owner. 

I’ve started reading a small book on Rothko’s notes lately, and he said something which I underlined this week because I found something in it that startled me. Writing about Romantics, he wrote:

“They failed to realise that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything unfamiliar is transcendental.”

I’ve read this sentence over and over again, but honestly, it still rather confuses me. What does he mean by the ‘strange and unfamiliar’? What he says appears to contradict how I understand the paintings of some of my favorite heros like Monet and Turner who both repeatedly worked on motifs under all sorts of weather conditions. The routine of painting from the same motifs in Nature appeared to have allowed Monet access into new windows in himself. If I understand transcendance, I believe this is an example. To switch the metaphor slightly, Monet in his painting, walked through the Doors of Perception. 

Ditto for Turner whose watercolour sunrises in Venice are achingly sparse, and yet they’re small precient windows into what was to later arrive in 20th century Painting. An artist like Turner comes along rarely. His watercolours alone opened up a skylight into Modern Art that helped to transform the arc of Painting, even if few at the time understood them.

His spontaneous impressions done from his direct contact with Nature (including both sunrises and sunsets) among so many other motifs he relied upon, display an obvious counter argument to Rothko. But I wonder if this has to do with the fact that Rothko made many of his paintings in a New York studio without the benefit of experiencing Nature in the wild? 

So, for me, it’s in the repeated access to the familiar that Nature has always openned up her wings to me and allowed the ‘strange and unfamiliar’ to manifest. And so it is for me that a horizon line dividing the sea and sky has given birth to an endless flow of images, as many in fact, as there are waves rolling over the sea. This creative activity is certainly a trancendental experience for me at least. For others I cannot say, but I thing it has to do with how we approach the work. 

Like the story of the Zen master who chides his guest, a visiting learned academic who fills his tea cup too full, exhorting him. “Like your teacup, your mind is too full, you cannot learn anymore.” So too in creativity, as in spiritual matters, if I’m like an empty cup I’ll be like an open and empty mind able to receive the motif at the beach, but if, and when, I approach a motif with a concept in mind I might find myself closed off from the evening session. 

I generally never take academics or professors seriously. And I generally try to steer clear of too many heady ideas in this Painting Racket when they don’t have direct contact with the craft of Painting. But that said, it that doesn’t mean out of curiosity, I don’t investigate them. Because Rothko intrigues me, I read about him like I would any artist. In this creative gig, I think all artists are searching out meaningful regions where we alone can reign because in this creative world, all roads actually lead away from Rome.  

So this study from the other night is so simple it could be mistaken for a shower curtain. on its side. How’s that for art criticism? This amuses me because I’m not against shower curtains, nor do I take all these studies too seriously. They are just quick colourful ideas that at times work wonderfully while at others, just give me great pleasure to both to make and look at. Worse case scenario they’e just tiny pebbles marking a small trail leading me like a map to somewhere open and with a better view.

It was a brisk cool Spring afternoon (DownUnder). The beach was practically empty with only a few ardent runners and dreamy beachwalkers following the shoreline. It wasn’t a great bloom but I made two studies of which this was the first. I was happy to be out there because I had been so cold at home that I almost wimped out and stayed reading on my sofa. Sacre Bleu! But shower curtain aside, this image ressembles that flat simple archetype that has been marinating inside me for some time now. Comprised of but four thick stripes of colour it gives a pretty straight-forward idea of what the beach resembles at a certain hour in a certain season. Looking at it now the colours feel quite ‘dirty’ or broken more than usual, but they work. Come to think of it, it appears less like a used shower curtain, maybe more like a weather-beaten flag, one that’s been flying on this beach for a few year’s now and staking out my place on this beach.

Curve

 

14 July 2019

Curve

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 July 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

This was the third study from the other night and it portrays a fairly typical winter sky at dusk when the afternoon has polished it clean. I like it. Like lots of places near the sea, winter skies here can be pretty wild and this captured the intense luminosity from the other evening. It's such a surreal interpretation that only a painter like myself could do it so spontaneously. No hubris, just a fact. It took me maybe ten minutes.

It may seem to silly to admit, but I realised that if I hadn't been there to paint it, no one else would have ever known about it. Oh sure, a few beach walkers and a couple of surfers might have seen something like it but not this particular image because it has more truth in it than anyone's memory, or photograph for that matter. There would be no record of it. Although we can all be witnesses to it, it needed a painter to capture it, for otherwise, it may have been lost forever and still bounding out into the immense memory of the universe. 

I think this is the extraordinary thing about all art, whether it's a poem to mark the occasion of a first kiss, or a short story about the first kiss, or indeed a picture of two lovers ready to kiss. It's through art that we can awaken to reality at every instant.

So, the other evening, it had been quite chilly and for some reason or other, I felt rushed. This was a tiny canvas board because I had run out of the larger ones. But I like it for both its small size and its simplicity. There is no grand idea within this image, nothing earth-shattering, just a simple thing which was truthful and executed at great speed. It could be faulted for its wonky-looking horizon line which has a slight curve to it. But hey! Who doesn’t love a curve? Isn’t it Nature’s way of making us all smile? 

And curves are everywhere, in every form and function, from Oscar Niemeyer's Brasília to Zaha Hadid’s magnificent Aquatic Center in London, designed for the 2012 Olympics. To be perfectly honest, I was actually never really a curvy kind of guy when it came to Art, I’ve always revered the crisp honesty of both the square and rectangle, man-made inventions, and ripe for a clean and uniquely adulterated expression. But to be really, really frank, I’ll also admit that I'm actually a square. For most of my life I’ve been a really uptight guy who needed control, something to hang onto even when there was nothing to hang onto. I needed anything to kill the insecurity living deep down within me like a jelly fish. But if there is one thing that cannot be controlled, it’s the cool curve. In Nature, it rules. It follows no one’s advice, it's original, and let's face it, it's a chip off the old block, our planet Earth. 

But there’s another reason I’ve always been suspicious of Nature’s curve in all creative things. It’s because I’ve always been uncomfortable with the copy-cat mentality of trying to imitate Nature’s squirrelly designs out in the architectural and commercial worlds. I never liked those tree-trunk bedside table lamps or the Steiner-inspired homes with wonky-shaped windows and curved roof lines that have inspired hippies the world over to recreate mushroom-shaped abodes. Honestly, if I wanted to live like a hobbit I’d just go to New Zealand. But hey! That’s just me.

But there’s no reason to hold all this against the curve just because of my own prejudice and dislike of an overzealous global craft business. 

The curve is quite cool and I've warmed up to it over time. Somewhere in France, I recently saw a city library where millions of books were displayed in large free-standing curved walls that weaved around the room.

And I was at a dinner a few months ago where the wavy outdoor table curved around dinner conversations providing intimacy for a dozen people. In fact to my happy disbelief, the world is full of cool curves, and it’s reassuring for me to release my old, stubborn bias.

Even in this small abbreviated study, its form only hints at the suggestion of a curve, like it's really a mistake of Nature's and not mine own. 

The thing is, everyone must paint the way their emotional needs require them to in the moment even if they are bound by prejudices that also bind them. I’m reminded of this bit of criticism that Picasso once voiced about Pierre Bonnard. In it, I recognise my biases.

“He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it’s a little pink too, so there’s no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision. If he looks long enough, he winds up adding a little yellow, instead of making up his mind about what colour the sky really ought to be. Painting can’t be done that way. Painting isn’t a question of sensibility: it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice”

There is a lot in here to unpack as they say these days, though I agree with him that in (Painting) “..it’s a matter of seizing power, taking over from nature...” But for me, “seizing power”, or “being supplied with information and good visual advice from nature...” are not mutually exclusive. Both are viable componants of the Painting process. But of course, I would disagree with everything else he says about Bonnard’s own very personal process of painting. In fact, Picasso's rather bitter critique actually describes exactly why many of us love Pierre Bonnard’s whole oeuvre in the very first place. 

Picasso, like his reputation that proceeded him, was a very assertive painter, a bully with a brush at times, with a big appetite and macho approach to everything according to his biographers, friends and lovers. Why not? After all, life was (and still is), a big crazy brutal and difficult place that too often demands a muscular approach to survive and thrive. But Art isn't really all about that. It's about listening, then hearing. And most importantly for us, painting is about looking, then seeing.

And anyway, every painter will always work at their own rhythm and in their own fashioned way regardless of what others think or feel about it. For me anyway, it's only the end result which counts because, contrary to popular sentiment, a painter's worth isn't based upon an artist's reputation or they sartorial flair. Nor is it based upon their media persona online, it's their work alone that determines their worth. 

So I find Picasso's criticism unsound and silly. I even wonder if he was’t a little jealous of Bonnard’s oeuvre in the same way that he was of Giacometti's? Their temperaments were as different as night and day, one worked patiently the other, impatiently. One luxuriated in the quiet and reflective space while the other seemed to push his way right through it. What’s the big deal? Both are valid if the work comes out well and works. 

Picasso appeared voraciously restless, like a fish that had to keep moving continually ahead, any which way. The upside is that he was curious and constantly trying out new styles and new media. Though really brilliant at times, sadly, he churned out a lot of awful pictures. I think he wasted his great artistic genius on too much mediocrity. On the other hand, Bonnard seemed to just plod gently along his own quiet path to great glory.

Disclaimer: my own way of working is certainly closer to that of Picasso, swift like a snake bite. It's my nature, but oh my,,,, I’ll get in trouble for saying all this. But what the hell, it’s Bastille day in France, vive la Revolution, the personal and the collective.

Doubt and discipline

 

12 December 2020

 Doubt and discipline

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 December 2020, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

This was one of three from the other night. They were a little different, brighter and lighter in every way but I liked this one best. It was an unusual sea, super flat, very light, and silver blue. A difficult kind of sea to paint, so smooth it made me think of a glass slipper. But I appreciate the vast varieties of weather conditions that oblige me to adapt by finding solutions for such different colours and forms  each day. 

Last night a fellow painter friend of mine complained to me that she felt that although she has been at working as an artist for some 40 years now, she still feels that she doesn’t know what she is doing. Curious, because in my mind, she has always been a tireless worker, always at it, day and night, and yet like for so many artists, a rich and successful career has eluded her. Nonetheless, I was surprised to hear all this. I had always also marvelled at her discipline because next to her, I’m a bit of a slouch and a sloth. 

But I laughed gently, because I had heard this from her many, many times before over the years. I replied that most artists, writers, musicians, etc, etc, who cannot make this confession, may have more gumption than integrity. I went on to add that having a great career is not the same thing as having possession a great craft or vision.

But maybe I was being a little generous. What I had meant to say was that an artist (unless they are Picasso), who never question themselves, and who appear to know nothing of the gnawing doubt deep inside one’s creative skin, must surely make insipid Art. So thus I pontificated to allay her fears. I'm harsh, but there must be truth in it because nearly every great artist, writer, musician, in history have themselves confessed to all that.

I added that I think just to face all this emotional insecurity is the first step to seeing it more clearly. Then, it's just a matter falling in love with one's work again because actually, all this confusion is really just a lapse of love. The way out of it is to jump back into the work, the craft; the nuts and bolts of art, not the airy fairy feelings around it. 

This doubt can be the key to a happy daily routine in most cases, irregardless of the work produced. I also reminded her of Sisiphus too.

Somehow, I think, even after the usual route of going to Art schools, many of us still manage to hide our deepest insecurities as we venture out into the world of studios and galleries (and no need to dwell upon the cocktail parties, receptions, and exhibition openings that await the luckier ones amongst us). What little I have come to understand as an ‘unsuccessful’ painter (and college drop out) is that Art doesn’t generally come out of the class rooms, but out of the recess periods, like as kids and when we were always at play. And besides, (full disclaimer: I’m not really a believer in Art Schools anyway) but that said, I don’t discount the fact that Art schools are still great for networking and getting laid a lot. 

But in truth, I used to feel that by slogging it out on my own it would make me a better painter and that eventually I would get somewhere, but in the end, it just made me lonelier. Then I gradually accepted that I was kind of a loner anyway despite being someone who is generally pretty sociable and likes people. And of course, I had chosen to stay in France to study with Leo Marchutz who became my teacher in the end. 

But back to my friend; what I didn’t tell her was that I used to actually feel that there was some wisdom in this idea that the greater the doubt, the greater the artist. But now I'm less sure of it because sometimes creative people are just so overwhelmed with lack of confidence that they are terminally irresolute. They may never seem to find a way out of their own foxholes. But anyway, I shouldn't be making such broad pronouncements either way. Life is a hard slog for us all no matter what our professions, either chosen or imposed upon us. Maybe one just has to work hard, but also look equally hard at great Art. Like Henry James once said:

"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."

I also told her that I have read of a few great painters who’ve claimed that only in their twilight years did they finally began to understand what Painting was all about; when their teeth and their hair were falling out, as both Delacroix and Goya had attested. 

All fine authentic artists have certainly said similar things I’m sure. But to contradict myself ever so slightly, I might note that one could say that humility isn’t always the litmus test of an artist’s quality. If one looks at Picasso, whose ego was as great as his very best things, but yet, overall, his greatness was still but a fraction of his giant ego. With more humility he might have continues making really innovative works, as great as Guernica, for example.

Titian, on the other hand, had both hubris and genius. It is said that he dropped a paintbrush while at work on one of his portraits of Pope Paul III in Venice, he stopped and he waited impatiently for the Pope to get off his chair to pick it up for him before resuming his work.

Doubt can be a healthy thing for everyone no matter what their vocations. The thing for me is that while I am working here at the beach, doubt is rarely present. This is always the proof that the routine is everything. For me, anyway, the routine has created the craft, and the craft has created confidence.