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.   

 

Intimacy

20 June 2017

Intimacy

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 June 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From the other night came this strange image that I really hated when I packed up to leave the beach as it had seemed such a failure that I hardly took it seriously. But the next day I got it out of the boot of the car and brought it inside to take a photo of it. I suddenly had a change of heart and began to see it differently, and this can happen a lot fortunately. Sometimes, even after just seeing it in new way, like on my phone, it can remove a filter of habitual self-criticism. So today, at least, it appears isolated in the safe zone of the digital world. 

Surprisingly, the sea stands up! It rises vertically like a stiff piece of cardboard. But as the sea, it works well in a primal sort of careless and casual way. A child might understand it quicker than an adult, but without any context, it could also be seen equally as a non-figurative picture too.

And what a weird colour harmony! The violet sky, constructed from the tattered ends of a witch’s broom overlaps a pink layer lying beneath it. I like it, maybe even because it’s so very unusual. It’s an unusual seascape taken directly from the motif out on the dunes with not but a few meters of elevation and overlooking a wide brown sea. Who would guess? It was the last of three from the evening and I barely remember making it.

I would love to see it scaled up in size, maybe to 200 X 250 cm. Would it make more sense perhaps if it were bigger? Might it be more commercially appetizing for an audience that today seems to prefer larger non-figurative paintings? Regardless, I like it in this small state because for me, there is a special quality in small oil paintings that beg its viewers to draw closer to it, inviting intimacy.

Happy and Healthy New Year for 2026!

 

  Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 December 2025, 30 x 25 cm

Be creative, no matter what!

Man-Cold

14 January 2022

Man-Cold

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 January 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I admit that I wasn’t crazy about this when I pulled it from the boot of the car the other morning, but, as it can happen from time to time, pictures either improve or fall apart quickly in a just a few day’s time. I actually wouldn’t even say I like it necessassily, but there is something in it that functions well despite its bland and benign colour harmony. Like a young woman at a Ball who’s yet been asked to dance, its diffident nature might hide its acuity, and it even be too embarressed by its own discreet but shy self-esteem.

It had been sunny all day with a big wind from the south that had cooled the afternoon by the time I arrived. This was the last of three studies that actually all felt wrong and left me feeling awful. But today, I feel differently possibly because this last study seems to possess some truth in it despite my misgivings because everything appears to be in the right place. I hardly even noticed the batch of light blue clouds the other day. They surprise me now because they're so broken that they could appear just grey if isolated on their own. This a remarkable lesson in the way colours work. For me, they spring to life when placed against a sky of warm violets and orange. I certainly could not have been aware of this happening while I worked. This is due to the magic from working quickly outdoors. The otherwise dull muted blue is only heightened by its proximity to the warm sky around it. These small gifts are the by-product of allowing my eyes to guide the session. How else to describe it? 

On the other hand it’s on the sketchy side which doesn’t please me too much. A session like this can bring those age-old doubts about Painting to eye-level. It’s true that even after decades I can easily succumb to feelings of ineptitude even after a long life invested in Art.

But just to let the civilians in on a big secret, most creative people face terrible uncertainty much of the time. It’s a curse that infects them when they don’t feel like they know what they are doing. It can be for lots of reasons; fearful of destroying what might be a lucky start, or maybe just feeling clueless about how to proceed, or how to finish a project. How to put an end to it all for God’s sake! This is how some of us feel late at night when the house is dark and silent.

But thankfully, speaking for myself, these episodes seem to come and go like the occasional flu. They've actually come on less frequently as I’ve matured because I’m no longer like a kid getting sick. I am just a grown up after all, having a Man-Cold.

But doubts of all kinds are important, they keep me in check. The best remedy is to get into the next picture quickly because like the Wise Guys in the East say, “one cannot think one’s way into right action but can act one’s way into right thinking”. 

Feeling anxiety, whatever the cause, used to disturb me so much that it prevented me from ever taking the next right action. I was continually freezing up, indeed my whole childhood was like the ice age. But I wised up. I learned that freezing up was a result of anxiety and depression that can come up for any number of reasons. When I finally addressed it, I felt like an East German when the wall came down.

Depression is like alcoholism because it's subtle and comes on slowly, it often takes over before its victim even realises it. But like a dictatorship too, it will also install its own cronies to work against the host body through disinformation, then bingo the host believes it! Before one knows it, a new software implants itself into one’s mind. 

Myself, I’ve learned to regularly update a firewall against this operation so that whatever goes on in my life, the answer is always to move quickly on to the next creative project, whatever it be. If only I had learned all this when I was a child, I can still even muse today.

Past and future

9 February 2022

Past and future

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This will sound banal but, as a painter, I’ve come to understand that each instant has its own a picture in it. My experience has been that painting the sea in the late afternoon has made it easy to witness the natural changes that go on imperceptively during the daylight. I imagine that working in the desert would be quite different and it would certainly change my visual response to how an empty dry landscape would hold and difuse the light during the day. But here at the beach, the light is very much conditioned by the sea.

This study was one of two the other evening. It had been a hot humid summer day and puffy low cumulus clouds were drifting in with a lazy onshore breeze. It can sometimes happen when the conditions are just right that these small balls of cloud catch the last rays of the setting sun and turn bright orange. Above them, at the same time, a hazy dim cloudbase of broken violets remains in retreat like a theatre decor on stage. Luckily, this happened the other night, and I was there to catch it. 

I love this effect and I also understand that it might even reveal to me something from my future. It can happen in a session, or on a particular picture, that I’ll suddenly find myself in the right elevator that goes straight up to a future version of myself. Somedays, it only goes to the second floor, but on others, it may take me all the way up to the top penthouse with a great open view of myself.

How does a painter’s path work in life anyway? Nobody can know but the Muses themselves. Usually, one’s very earliest work will already manifest in the soul of a painter in tandem with their mastery of the craft. But at times, it’s the opposite, like when the young painter appears early on in a messy tangle of inchoate form. Everyone comes to their calling differently.

There is a slab of marble not forty centimeters high that Michelangelo carved an Annunciation into when he was just 17 years old at the Casa Buanaroti in Florence, The Mary mother is in profile, and over her shoulder is a figure of her son carrying the cross in bas relief. Not only does it reveal the greatness of the sculptor Michelangelo to come, but the future of his vision as well. I saw it many years ago at the Casa Buanaroti and it made a huge impression upon me. The bas relif is no more than a centimeter in depth.

Curiously, on a program on France Musique the other day, there was a sublime piece by Shubert being played, and just afterward, the conducter, who was being interviewed, simply said about it, “it was religious without god”. When an artwork hits the mark, don’t we all seem to know what it is, whatever it is?

So, though I don’t think I spent more than twenty minutes on this small picture here, I like the feeling in it. Without it being too obvious, I think I caught it as it was in just an instant, not too early nor too late. I can also already see in it, a picture from my future, one that’s reshaping my intuition. I guess this why we improve with time if we stick with it. 

Dinner party with Marguerite Matisse

 

9 December 2021

Dinner party with Marguerite Matisse

Marguerite Matisse painted by Henri Matisse, circa 1906-7

A few years ago I read the wonderful biography of Henri Matisse in two volumes by Hillary Spurling, Matisse the Unknown, and Matisse the Master. In these generous books she opens up the stately doors of a conservative 19th century France allowing us to freely meander throughout its transition into a modern age where Art played a pivotal role back at the turn of the 20th century.

People forget how mocked and disparaged Matisse was for much of his early career. But two other great painters who suffered the same fate were Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Cezanne, who had heard about the Dutch painter working in nearby Arles via their mutual friend Emile Bernard. He thought Vincent was ‘crazy’, “Il est fou!”... declared Cezanne, but honestly, I’ve never been sure how Cezanne could have seen Vincent’s work in the first place. Did Emile Bernard bring a few paintings all rolled up to show him in Aix or did he just show him photos from his i-phone? 

Regardless, painters were, and still are, often misunderstood due to an unfortunate reputation, and so whenever I wanted to throw a bomb into a quiet dinner party in France I would announce:

“Let’s face it, you French, you hate painting!” I exclaimed it usually with a delicate force as if I had said “J’accuse!” My point, though not always immediately understood, nor possibly even true, was always about how cerebral the French are as a cultural whole and that Painting was way too emotional for them to appreciate. At that point, the table would go silent and I knew I had put my foot into the apple tarte. I would then invariably develop my argument by proving it with examples. Essentially, I’d propose that “you French, love ideas way too much to appreciate an art form like Painting.” I’d plunge my sword further into the startled dinner party and exclaim, “but the British, now, these are people who truly love Painting because despite their squeamish attention to manners and social protocol, they are truly eccentric enough to possess a non-conformist streak unlike you, the French!" I would usually go further pontificating that "....the Brits are sufficiently odd enough to appreciate the softened sensuality of the messy nature of Painting. They love Painting as do the Dutch and the Danes, but the Belgians and Italians too, yet remarkably at the same time they're all just as equally mad about Conceptual Art as you people are because they can all chew gum and drink beer at the same time."

I would soften slightly by admitting that ..."you are wonderful people you French, you're so are mad about Literature and Poetry, and you adore contemporary Architecture and cool Opera, but more than anything, you worship the brilliance of conversation. Your passion is really for ideas and razor sharp intelligence, so naturally you are more comfortable with Conceptual Art than with mere visual imagery of the kind that might rip through your clever discourses like a table saw. The fact is, you're more comfortable with Robert Wilson than Robert Johnson." 

I would finish across the slippery slope with an apologetic tone, then the debate around the table would heat up. This, along with desert, was the best part of the evening.  Of course, I loved almost everything about France and the French on the whole. My earliest teacher was Cyrano de Bergerac whom I read about in school at the impressionable age of fourteen. And I loved him for all the very same qualities with which I chose to insult my dinner companions.  

Like all nations the French are full of pride. If you were to say to a French person; “France is a wonderful country, I love it, I adore everything about it!” They might first look hard at you, then respond by complaining about all that's wrong with it, “voyons, les impots, les greves...etc, etc...” But on another day or week, if you were to tell that same person that France was a mess because of the taxes and all the strikes, etc, etc... they would almost certainly raise themselves up a little and tell you about the best wines, cheeses, and education, etc, etc.... 

But these bombs were always fun to throw onto the dinner table in intimate gatherings. My success rate was often contingent upon how much, or how little wine I had consumed during the meal. And to be fair, these were my friends for the most part, so they were quite used to my antics. Being an American gave me certain advantages and a wide birth in most situations. I was looked at with amazement and great amusement.

Despite the light-hearted deliveries at these dinners, the core of these bombs were nonetheless somewhat real in a comic book kind of way. I still believe, even today, so many years later, that the Painting medium can rarely tolerate with much conviction, or success, an overload of too many concepts and ideas. 

Unlike Americans, the French, even though they are eloquent speakers, are just never comfortable expressing feelings about themselves (except in Art in all its forms of course, French cinema, theatre, books and poetry). Their passion hides behind their reserve. ‘La pudeur’ is a fine and sophisticated quality which the French possess in boatloads (ditto for the Japanese) unlike us Americans who barge into rooms uninvited and always say the wrong things at the wrong moments, and then, when leaving, we'll leave the lights on and the doors ajar with no apology.

The French, whom we know and sometimes resent, have a profound passion for both ideals and ideas, and for that, we love them, and fear them, but we also cherish them, all the more for it. 

Hard-working Americans as the old cliché goes, were people of action, doers not thinkers and dreamers. They look down upon the French for inventing sex in the afternoon and writing long books about little. But this is fallacy, for the French are great doers. It’s just that they're also poets and dreamers too, and it's this fact that drives Americans crazy with envy.

One of my favourite Matisse portraits is this one he painted of his daughter Marguerite. This one is in Paris at the Musée Picasso, although I could swear that I’ve seen it at the Musée de Grenoble too. It is dated between 1906-7, and it is so simply painted that my heart skips a beat just seeing it. Its austere demeanour houses just enough quiet feeling to keep me transfixed. It’s created with an almost primitive form of expression as if it were painted on a farm somewhere in rural France by an amateur. This is perhaps why I like it so much; there is a complete lack of any pretension, technical, or otherwise within it. For me, when Matisse was at his best, it was always without pretence.  

This loving father always painted his daughter with a ribbon or scarf around her neck to hide the scar from a tracheotomy she had endured early in childhood. Later on, Marguerite was in the Resistance during the war and was captured and tortured by the Gestapo. She was very lucky to have lived through it. And testament to her father’s adoration, we have many, many portraits of her today. 

As a painter, it reminds me of how uncomplicated Painting can be when a painter keeps it simple. I think that a primal image like this is born at an early stage in a painter’s life. It grows patiently within, almost unbeknownst to the painter himself. It has always been there, gestating, and waiting for an occasion to surface. One cannot set out to make a picture like this. An image like this seems to blossom naturally like an awkward young girl of 13, who, on the cusp of womanhood, becomes suddenly aware of her new form.

Of all his portraits of Marguerite, this is my preferred, and I love it the way an old Zen Master cherishes his favourite tea cup.