Delacroix’s studio, cont

30 December 2021

Delacroix’s studio, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 December 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

“Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture. (1 September 1859)” 

Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

Among so many jewels in his studio is a small watercolour, I believe it’s just entitled The Unmade Bed, but it’s something that has haunted me since forever. I’ve had a postcard of it for decades now, the same one that has somehow found a home on every piano I’ve ever owned, always stuck to the left of the sheet music where it can be seen. It is a complicated subject made from layers of linen and yet it seems so fresh that it looks like it has just blown into the bedroom like a leaf through a window. And it’s modern too, unlike most things done in 1827, France. But strangely, if I look at it in a particular way, without blinking, for instance, so that my eyes don’t focus as usual, it can remind me of a Christ figure hanging off Mary’s lap in a Pietà painted by Titian in Venice. One needs an imagination of course, but memory, too, that’s for sure. But then, this is the realm of Art where magic and mystery are twins, . What is important in this regard is always deeply personal, for this private memory cannot ever be transferred to anyone else except abstractly through the alchemy of Art. Marcel Proust, among others, taught me that.

Then again,  I have a big imagination and I do see ‘things’ ‘everywhere’. My brother Mark has always confirmed this to me when I tend to forget it. For instance, driving to the beach to paint not 10 minutes away from home in the late afternoon, I take a small stretch of the highway, and for the past month I’ve seen a dead dog on the left shoulder. Every afternoon I swore to myself that I would come back with my truck to remove it and place it in a gentle resting spot on our 100 acres. Every day I forgot, until last week, when one evening I wrote a note to myself and put it next to the coffee grinder which simply noted in magic marker: “today! DeaD doG.”

So the next morning after a coffee I put a tarp in the cab along with some gloves and drove to take care of the ‘dead dog’ on the highway. As I slowed down to approach it I pulled into the shoulder lane and stopped abruptly in front of a faded black tire on its side with a small thin bit extending from the left side. (!)  So, anyway, I still take the highway most afternoons, and in my ‘mind’s eye’ I still do see the DeaD doG laying there.

These two studies are from the other day. They sort of remind me of watercolours, perhaps even modern ones yet done nonetheless in the spirit of the late 19th century. And yet they ‘seem modern’ only perhaps because of their composition, unlike anything that would have ever been conceived back in that period. They certainly could easily resemble ‘cropped details’, perhaps taken from larger pictures that wouldn’t have otherwise made a painting complete back when they needed more story content in a painting in those days. Yet I like the light in them and the colours too, but there’s also a freedom in them that wants me to buck the restraint imposed by the composition. In the end though, they do actually make me think of the watercolours of Eugene Delacroix in a certain way.

It was Boxing Day here in Australia, a holiday so there were still lots of people on the beach when I arrived. I had it in my mind to try something completely different that evening. I wanted to just treat the motif with as little referential description as possible; not clouds, but maybe just large irreverent shapes that could rub up against each other on the picture plane. Yes, I’ve done this before, but this night I wanted to see them as large puzzling shapes that might naturally provoke more ambiguity. In the end I didn’t really succeed because the one on the previous page feels like it’s trying to be a landscape. I also dropped it in the sand when leaving so it’ll now be scarred for life, like having a limp. But this one to the right, appears so airy that it hardly feels like an oil painting at all, but what I really like is the pale green sea, so filled with a soft light, because it is so rare that it appears in the late afternoon when I’m there. 

These two images are so abbreviated they might appear fragile but they're certainly not. They're just delicate and they live from sheer luck that I didn’t screw them up while painting them because unlike composing music or writing stories, one cannot erase or crumple a piece of paper to begin all over again. Like paper, canvas too, is capricious, especially so with an unforgiving oil paint over it. The mistakes are permanent. 

Although they can be painted over, either corrected or manhandled into something new and different, but in my own short time frame at the beach it's not easy and I rarely up for the task. In the studio work, yes all the time, in fact that's all I seem to do. But happily, here at the beach, it's extremely rare that I've needed to perform these surgeries.

At the beach, all these ‘mistakes’ and 'corrections' simply become ‘issues of style’ so when they don’t work, they’ll just fail even more visibly. But when they are lucky to survive post-op surgery they can be surprising. Painting any kind of picture is to take a journey, even as a tourist, there's always work to do, lost and shlepping one's luggage around foreign streets in search of a soft bed.

And like tourism, if a painting doesn’t take me somewhere interesting then I'm less interested with result. The more successful the transcendence of the experience, the more successful the Art work. 

 

Delacroix’s studio

30 December 2021

Delacroix’s studio

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 December 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

“Draftsmen may be made, but colourists are born.” Eugène Delacroix, from his diary

I used to visit Eugene Delacroix’s studio whenever I was in Paris. It became a ritual for me in the olden days when it had been a small museum run by the city of Paris and when it functioned in its own quirky way. But sometime in the 1990’s it was pulled into the Réseau des Musées which now includes 1,220 museums all over France, a system basically designed to facilitate the smooth operation between all the museums and to allow for national funding from Paris. It was also a clever way to pillage certain smaller museums of works which it wanted for the larger ones in Paris. But hey! 

The building in those days had a worn feeling as did many of the buildings in Paris in the 1970’s, indeed, the patina in Paris even had its own patina! But I liked it infinitely more than the contemporary museum of today which can sometimes feel like a sleek airport terminal. But frankly, all of Paris in the 1970’s looked a tad gloomy, the ornate buildings had not yet been pressure-cleaned so there was a brackish-looking shadow everywhere even on sunny days. Paris still looked like the city I imagine it might have right after the war, but the grit to it really came afterward from the coal-fired plants surrounding it. Buildings in New York too, where I grew up in the fifties and sixties, also wore a veil of darkness around their own edgy eaves. Venice too, had a feel of distant seraphic neglect which gave it a lugubrious mystery in the foggy dusk light. But, I liked all three cities even in their states of natural decline, as it were. Is this because they were part of my youthful memories which many of us either love or come to hate? 

In any event, today, their bridges and palaces have been polished up to welcome the modern tourist who brings in s decent revenue, and why not? Cruising the Seine on a Bateau Mouches at twilight, which I did a few years back, was magical and Paris never looked more enchanting. 

But Delacroix’s museum in the small chic Place Von Furstemburg, a cute compact square behind Le Cafe des Deux Magots where the Americans go to sit on the sunny terrace in contrast to most Parisians, who only go to Cafe Flore just a block West on Blvd St. Germain. When I first discovered the studio back then, all of Paris ressembled those faded black and white postcards from an even older verson of itself. Entering the shabby anodyne lobby one would note only the small sign indicating the Atelier Delacroix in deep blue ink attached to the side of the door. It was a discreet entrance so much like the man himself. Once inside the entrance, the aroma of Sauerkraut or Potato Onion Soup hit you immediately and it would quickly guide you up to the 1st floor landing after climbing the stairway in a circular fashion. One stepped out onto the second floor landing where a woman, the concierge, sold the visitor a small ticket with an orange stripe at one end from an old-styled ticket stall of yesteryear like at a carnival. Behind her was the Potato Onion soup, or something similar, cooking on a stove in an even tinier space. Like most places in those days, it closed during lunch hours but the aromas persisted all day long and wandered evenly throughout the small building.

Aside from a new coat paint and a general swished-up feeling to it, it hasn’t really changed much on the inside. The wooden floors still creak like thay always have. One went through part of the house, then to an outdoor walkway into the studio and down a stairway. But what a treat when one arrived; this fellow lived well after all! The studio space was sumptuous, and painted a deep flat red and full of the artist’s paraphernalia. Everything one might imagine in a Parisian studio was there: paints and palettes in glass cabinets, assorted drawings, watercolours, and paintings from his voyages hung randomly around the walls, glass-lockers that housed drawing pads and miscellenious materials, inks, brushes, etc, etc. For a young student of art from America, it was like Alibaba’s cave. And for some reason I usually found myself there at mid-morning in order to enjoy it before it closed at noon. For a time, I went through a period of extreme obsession with Delacroix. I read his diary twice through and searched him out in every museum I could, I even followed him to North Africa, though Matisse and Marquet, by then had also played a large part in this travel bug. His discreet bachelorhood in Paris I’m sure even had an influence upon my own inchoate solitary lifestyle already back then.

It was irrational, now that I look back on that part of my life. But don’t we all look back on`our early life with a raised eyebrow? My peers in the Art world of that period were all out either in LA carving up cars and making sculptures from them or were downtown in New York where Punk prowled around each night and where painters worked in sombre-lit lofts with layers of dark paint, preparing for the boom of the 1980’s. But there I was in France in the 1970’s, and being both a social and cultural orphan, I easily dove into life there like it was a swimming pool full of red wine.

Delacroix’s studio overlooked a large garden which was accessed by a stairway off to the side of the studio. Once down there, one could stand admiringly for hours in any season. Now, one can sit and gaze admirably in any season because a few benches have been added. It is a very contemporary space now, clean and sober, and very different of course to what it was in the 70’s. I read in John Rewald’s wonderful History of Impressionism that both Renoir and Monet would climb up the wall from the neighbour’s place next door to watch Delacroix work through the huge window. He was a giant to this young generation of nascent young painters who would soon become Impressionists and giants themselves, with even larger shadows. All this, one can still dream about while sitting on a bench in this small garden on any day of the week. 

Giotto’s sky

5 December 2021

Giotto’s sky

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 December 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

A wonderful sky the other evening.

I’ve been looking at a book on Giotto this week and I continually marvel at his pictorial genius. His plain, concrete, no-nonsense notion of forms that feature distinctly in our natural world of trees and stone, donkeys and sheep, palaces and rocky hills with adjacent flora and fauna that enliven his austere-looking world. It’s a world filled with fantastic-looking angels that people his biblical stories, all so unlike anything that came before him, or afterward for that matter. His ‘plastic’ rendering of Nature feels super-charged as if bouncing right out of the flat Byzantine landscape on a Pirelli trampoline. When looking through my father’s book about him, I still remember the fright I felt when looking at the tortured looks of anguish on the angels. These angels looked nothing like the saccharine statues I saw in church on Sundays in New Jersey.

Years ago, I was friends with a painter in France, Christian Martel, who died two years ago, and with whom I argued incessantly. What drove me crazy was his inability to even look at Giotto or any painter who depicted even a hint of anything religious. I drove him crazy with my own pompous confidence. For me, it seemed a great shame, and especially so for a painter. If a painting depicted anything that smelled of the Church he wouldn’t look at it. My problem was that I wished to share so much art and speak about with him. I used to joke with him that he was a kind of vampire who would turn away from the sign of the cross. 

Having lived in France for a long time I could understand his mindset up to a certain point but as a painter to ‘write off’ the riches of the Renaissance and the many Gothic and Romanesque churches that surrounded was beyond me. He seemed allerigic to anything ‘Divine’, but obviously we had had different educations. France is very particular about its secular tradition that allows one the freedom ‘from religion’ unlike America, where one is alowed the freedom ‘to exercise’ a religion of their choosing. Understandably, Europe has a dark and complicated history concerning this subject, yet all the same, I was sorry I couldn’t share my love of Giotto and so many other painters with the artist who lived inside of Christian. 

Recently, I’ve been looking through a thick but compact book on Giotto lying my overly large ‘coffee’ table. While perusing it I came across his frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and it occurred to me that many of those images share the same light as my own from the beach here in Australia. Despite all the clarity and incontrovertible construction of elements, all so solid in Giotto’s world but in direct contradiction to my own work, the light appears remarkably similar. 

This study from the other evening is an example. I wonder if it could be because it has a translucent aspect to it reminding me of a fresco? And yet, my study appears so fluid, ambiguous and so very unlike the dense durability of a Giotto sky. Maybe I feel all this because my sky in this picture reminds me of an Umbrian sky in the dead of the August. Going further, I reasoned that maybe this fluidity is of a modern era, another sensibility, one built upon a Post-Modern uncertainty unlike one constructed with the firm conviction of the 14th century Church.

Long before Photography came into view and changed everything, the Arts of yesteryear were the sole items on the menu by which stories, biblical, and otherwise, could be told. Thus the magnificance of my favorite trio; Giotto, Paolo Ucello and Piero della Francesca, whose paintings, all of which were so wildy different from one another. But the camera changed everything and since its invention, visual artists have been liberated from everything, even craft. 

Today, Conceptual Art has swallowed up reality and it has eclipsed the Painting craft by making a bee-line straight through to ideas alone. But hey! It’s a big tent and I’m cool with all of it, even if I stick close to the craft of Painting, albeit loyal in a 14th century sort of way. What else can I do? I am a sensualist at heart, an old-fashioned guy in all things, an analog guy, who still listens to Jerome Kern. Like a four year old, I still also love the gooey feeling of mixing pigments of colour around a palette. But happily I’m not alone, for there are painters everywhere who all still struggle with how to render an idea through paint alone. 

As I look at my own study here, I notice that the elements, though distinct, are barely recognisable as objects in themselves in such great contrast to an artist like Giotto, who explicitly clarified everything in his own meticulous way. This small picture from the other night possesses an almost flagrant disregard for the anatomy of the parts of the paintings; the nomenclature that was so vital to Italian Painting of the 14th and 15th century. And yet again, I can still see similarites with Giotto.

Christian and myself both shared a love for the sensuousness of pictures, and maybe that was what kept our friendship alive in the end. I learned about graphic 

unity from the three Renaissance painters previously mentioned. This is something I tried to convey to him but with no success. It was so frustrating for me because he too, was a great lover of a graphic image as well as the sensuous surface of a painting. And yet, I still couldn’t share my joys and amazement with him for any of these painters. I realise now, that I had wanted to express just how contemporary their work still appears today but I didn’t articulate that because I hadn’t understood it for myself at that time. How, after all, did these painters manage to subordinate all the elements of a picture plane by condensing its graphic unity into a singular image way back in the 14th century, while painting for the Pope? I wanted to all share this and so much more. 

This was the last of three studies from a hot muggy afternoon. The sky had mellowed out by the end of the session and I was ready to jump into the sea. As I described it previously, it has a hazy, ephemeral quality due to the humidity and thus it lent itself easily to this delicate surface. It’s certainly the best from the other evening and I enjoyed painting it, so maybe it's for that reason I like it. 

Horses, of courses

30 December 2024

Horses, of courses

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 December 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“He stepped down, trying not to look at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking”. Anna Karenina 

OK, I love this Painting, and unabashedly so. I don’t love all my paintings, far from it, and I’m not showing all the failures I’ve made that have far out-numbered my successes. 

Over the fifty years I’ve looked at tons of painting, and the really good ones remain glued to me and stored in my memory. They live in a kind of i-cloud inside me and can be called up quickly for review like the National Guard when needed in a pinch. So I usually know when I’m on to something, and when I’m not. And this study that already appears to be in my i-cloud, is also an alias holding a place for it in my future work. So when it came out of a session the other day it was both familiar, but also a surprise for me. So while I’m painting over the long haul, I’m also awaiting an image like this to show up to help guide me further along my path. 

Like Tolstoy’s image of his character perceiving Anna Karenina as a presence, like the sun, images will also sometimes appear to me without looking at them, like knowing someone so well that loving them comes naturally. 

Most paintings over time (if they’re good), will eventually reveal their qualities at some point, sometimes quickly, but suddenly too, like walking into a room, and out of all the people present, one sees the most dazzling person standing there right in the middle, as if lit up by invisble rays of loveliness. More often though, paintings for some viewers, will blossom over time and they’ll come up slowly like old polaroids. But this is not a concern for the painter, for what really matters is that their qualities do eventually shine for the whole world to see, even if it’s just a few people at a time. 

Some pictures need more time to be fully seen and appreciated because their beauty opens up slowly like a person who is shy. The same goes for paintings of poor quality that will also reveal their defects either suddenly or slowly, after long scrutiny. In some strange ways, pictures are a lot like people. 

But, if a painter continues to grow into this Painting life with patience, they’ll develop a deepening critical sense, hopefully steeped in patience. If not, what’s the point of learning such an unusual craft?

Just like some pieces of music, certain paintings, can drive even the most cynical amongst us mad, as they succumb to the divinity of art. And just like the glamorous beauty of very fortunate-looking people, a painting too, can drive another to suicide, so I‘ve heard anyway. But also art is a big business, so lets face it, some people don’t care what painting looks like, they just want to make a buck.

I was talking to a friend recently who is completely mad about horses. She knows everything about them, always has. I bring her up because the passion and knowledge she has for horses is omnipresent in every part of her personality. She knows horses inside and out, she’s the real deal. I’ve watched her size up a horse and render an opinion about it fairly quickly. She told me that seeing a horse at first sight is important but obviously not everything. She walks around it while assessing every minute detail of it before she gets a sense of its attributes and its flaws. She is an expert in this domain and it’s based upon a complete love for the subject which in this case, is horses. This is not unlike a guy like jay Leno whose collection of cars is is total passion.

Speaking of love, when one approaches a work of art it’s not dissimilar to one’s first sight of another person. The initial impression is important and maybe even overwelming in certain cases, but this sensation can be superficial and often fleeting. For like my horse-loving friend, a full appraisal is necessary to make a wise evaluatation of everything especially future partners. 

Lets face it, some people don’t love painting, they just want to make a buck.

Unlike a painting, beauty in human terms is constructed from the interior of a person and has the magic of radiating outward into the creation of physical beauty for just the right person, like they say, beauty is in the ey of the beholder. So like my horse-loving friend, the viewer may need time for this alchemy to be accomplished. Indeed, in human terms, some spouses will tell you that it’s ongoing, either an endless adventure or a nightmare. 

A painting on the other hand, reveals it’s entire physical nature on its surface, and the first impression, or first glance can seduce or repel us. But like any love affair, if it possesses both truth and beauty, it pleasure will last a life time. So with paintings and love affairs, and like for almost everything else in life, higher quality pictures will usually rise in one’s esteem while weaker ones will fall over time.

This painting here from the other evening is a somewhat of sketch only because I stopped so early at a place that really pleased me. I then went on to make two others that I pushed much further with the sensual luxury of more creamy paint. But like a face with too much make-up, it doesn’t mean more beauty, just means more make-up. 

So this picture speaks to me today. Why? I’m not sure. But sometimes pictures act like oracles that tell us about our future, so if it’s true, it will certainly be beautiful in one way or another. I’ll know in a time but at least it’s lodged already in my i-cloud like a random encounter one has with another human being whom we find rather special. Meanwhile, the weather has been hot and without a breeze so the sea was teeming with bathers when I arrived. When I packed up to leave many were still there.

Emily on Christmas Eve, cont

24 December 2024

Emily on Christmas Eve, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 December 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I guess I've wanted to speak about how Aborigial Painting has helped me to open up. Though so many of my own pictures that comprise this diary might appear ‘European’, there has always been a thirst to break through the walls of this tradition. The only way I know how to do this is through the ‘making and the doing’ of the work, not by ‘the thinking about it’. 

Most importantly, I’ve learned to let this land lead me to the pictures like one does with a horse to water. As a dear friend once advised me a long time ago, it’s better to act your way into right-thinking, than to think your way into right-action. In the world of creativity, this has come in handy at times when I found myself wanting to run away from the work at hand for whatever reason. Like they say, showing up is 95% of the task, and for a procrastinator like me, I had to get to the root of the problem; my perfectionism. 

Prior to coming to this investigation, I had always tried to think my way into solutions, but not just in painting but pretty much everything in my life that posed me difficulties. In this Painting series though, it was the work itself that led me to answers and it altered the way my mind functioned. This seems to have taken me forever to understand. Most of my life I had faced Painting as a foe, an adversary that wanted me to lose, so whenever I achieved anything of value I assumed it was by accident, maybe even something I had cheated in order to gain. Strange, and sad even, now when I think of this, but it was as if I chose to live in the shadows of my own light. 

Showing up at the beach at a certain hour of the day with my painting gear and getting into it was my redemption. I began to paint my way into a whole new mind-set. As I’ve already said ad nauseam, in this diary, painting the sea and the sky here on the Pacific Ocean has transformed me. This ritual of which I’ve so often spoken in these pages has connected me with this Australian continent and subsequently, in a round about way, to the work of all Aboriginal artists who have been visually connecting with ‘The Bush’, for thousands of years. 

What is that connection then? I wouldn’t be bold enough to declare that it's a spiritual one, but I might say that I’ve certainly connected to Nature in a new way over these past few years. Anyone, anywhere in the world, who uses Nature creatively, can access this space because it’s freely available when one pauses long enough to work from it. That I was ready to plunge into it here in Australia, is personally satisfying because in fact, it could only have happened here and at this time in my life. 

I am secular, but I do believe in connections wherever they exist, that this understanding came to me here on this marvelous continent is providential. And yet, I still feel like a foreigner here despite everything. I’m a European at heart, and vaguely a bit American too, but like a seed blown in from afar, I was destined to come here to blossom. This I know.

So though I cannot fully understand Aboriginal Art, I am curious about it. That said, like in all traditions, no matter what they are, the art forms can grow stale after so many long generations operating off the radar like in Australia. The risk for us all is that when originality declines, it is too often  replaced by a style which is no longer authentic. Look what happened to French Impressionism and American Expressionism, two transformative waves that changed the course of modern Art. Although they are not the only ones, they follow the same patterns that have ruled art history since forever, because when the innovators are long gone and their fires have died out, who will rise up to re-invent their traditions with a new form? 

These are hard truths that keep the arm-chair specialists busy, but meanwhile, the dutiful artists just keep patiently digging in the dark until they stumble upon a new vein of silver hitherto undiscovered and awaiting the next lucky explorer. 

Despite the community and no matter the ‘school’ or ‘style’, it’s always the painters, as individuals, who continually shift Painting into a new form of expression. In the Aboriginal tradition I hope the next generation of young artists find the authentic means with which to transport ‘their elders’ further along into a new territory of connection with their land into this 21st century. I also hope that they are images that go beyond just political slogans or re-hashed motifs from the distant past.

So this picture here, the third one from the same evening, follows the curve of colour further into the twilight. Whereas the first one appears almost like an apparition, an ephemeral iridescence, this third painting seems to embody the physcal earthiness after the dusk has strangled the delicate light out of the first picture. Ironically, it also reminds me of the Aboriginal flag. 

It possesses a feeling that only the French word ‘charnel’ seems to work for me in to describing it; ‘Material and fleshy, as opposed to the spirit', says the english translation from the dictionary. And so in direct contrast to the first image of the evening that embodies the substance of a pale apparition, this solid image 

curiously contains a feeling of the Australian earth. What strikes me as remarkable is that they are separated by just twenty minutes of time yet by made by the same mind and hand. 

Sometimes, I wonder if my own evolution throughout these pictures has mirrored Darwin’s theory of evolution. In this case; butterflies. 

My images have changed over the past seven years by steadily evolving into newer and varied forms of colours, shapes and patterns. That they exist at all, that they even took form, they must therefore have a purpose in this world.