Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

22 April 2018

 Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been tormented and bursting with water over the past few months giving me some wild paintings. Here are two real curiosites from the same afternoon last week. This one, to be fair is bit of wreck if one judges it through a sanitary lens. Like many of things I’m doing these days, it’s messy and far from conventional in every way. But it does somehow convey a feeling of stormy clouds over a dark mysterious sea. It’s the kind of sky that is generally impossible to capture and condense quickly, so maybe this is why I see something special in it. But, I admit that it’s also a tormented and brooding image that is perhaps difficult. 

For the longest time I couldn’t pull this the picture together until, out of frustration, I took a larger brush and began sweeping it with circles as if I were using a small broom like in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To my surprise it worked, so I stopped in just time to let it be. What holds this picture together are the small pink bits of open sky in both the right and left hand corners. Like fingers, these fragments of pink space grasp the whole form and appear to hold everything firmly in place. I like that it’s so full of colour because at the twilight hour the sky is usually brimming with luminous pinks and violets. 

It’s a scruffy-looking picture as if it had been kicked around like a ball on the beach but personally, I kind of like all these spontaneous bits of slap-dash marks made naturally during its creation. These impromtu scars remind me of how animals, both in the wild and in the deep sea, can appear in old age after a lifetime of survival. Importantly, though for me, this ‘mark-making, as it’s now called, is but a by-product of painting from a motif and never the destination itself. These wounds sometimes skulk around in many of my landscapes. One either likes them or not.

But what I really like in this image is the way that both the sea and sky seem to be glued onto the same plane, flattened as if like dried flowers, compressed into a book of fairy tales by a young girl who locked them into a coffin between two pages of her diary. These flat massive and menacing clouds have been pressed into time immobile, yet still full of ruptured energy.

Honestly, when it comes to a certain emotion I’ve been looking for, I think it is one of the more successful things I’ve made in this series so far. Although it wouldn’t perhaps appeal to a large public, some painters might see something in it. I secretly wish I had the formula to make others as good as this today because I still feel like a beginner all over again each time I go out there to work, but it’s a better gig than that of poor Sisyphus.

Another thing I like is that the effect of the picture is immediate and in your face whether you like it or not. It might even appear ‘ugly’ at first glance but as Baudelaire reminds me in front of such images, “All truly original paintings often appear ugly at first”. F.Y.I. He doesn’t say ‘great paintings’, just original ones.

And yet Baudelaire was also not only speaking of Van Gogh and Igor Stravinsky, but of so many others too, professional and amateurs alike, who linger in the shadows of Art’s long wide road. I feel confident, even arrogant enough, that he may have also been speaking about an image like this one, one hundred and fifity years before it’s creation. 

It’s always been in me, this desire wanted to create pictures as things, ‘alive’, almost as if breathing fire if need be. In front of such a picture, I wonder if I don’t simply desire to feel that ‘poof’ of a feeling like at the optometrist when given the glaucoma test. In a fraction of a second the machine punches out air at high speed at your vulnerable eyeball, testing it for pressure on the cornea. In this painting I want that visceral sensation thrown out at the viewer in the same way.; ‘Poof’, either one gets it or not. If one doesn’t get it, then either the picture doesn’t work.

To me it also reveals an unusual aspect of Nature, one from a very particular perspective; close up, and cropped. It doesn’t manifest a concept nor a conventional viewpoint, yet it derives naturally from Nature. It’s a set of clouds mushrooming over a sea at dusk in almost miniature scale as if selected by a 75mm telephoto lens. It evokes for me, Thelonious Monk; off kilter and in your face, primitive and primeval, sloppy even, but maybe in all the right places, ones where Monk’s genius is camuflaged as an autistic child. My brother, who is a pianist thinks that Monk’s penchant for uneven time and off-key broken chords came about through playing so many out of tune pianos when he was young.

An architect says

 

10 March 2021

An architect says

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What motivates me is work on disappearance, on the limits between a presence and an absence of the architecture. 

Dominique Perrault (1953- )

This morning I was able to get into town for some errands. Everything still a mess and most shops are closed while people still clean mud from everywhere. Mullumbimby, was already a quiet town, but today it had an unnaturally eerie and sad air about it. Piles of soggy furniture and rugs lined the streets everywhere, whole families were still out cleaning up. It’s awfull. I spent yesterday helping a friend mop up his house. The weather has been unstable since the floods, but got out the other day. Yesterday looked been blocked up in the West but clear to the East so I took a chance. 

I like this quote from the French architect Dominiquue Perrault, in a concise little book entitled The Architect Says, which according to the editor, is full of “quotes, quips, and wisdom”, as advertised on its front cover. It’s one of those diary-styled books of easy consumption and comprised of one quote per page. It’s the kind of book one keeps on the bedside. I keep mine on a low oversized, coffee table from Bali, a gift from my sister-law. They are the go-to lounge tables here in Byron Bay where traffic is heavy between the two places. 

I like this quote especially in regards to this picture from the other day, although I’m not certain to be sure to get his cryptic meaning. I only understand it metaphysically. I wasn’t familiar with him so I went on online to forage. His most famous work (among so much) is The Bibliothèque National de France, and from that I deduced that he was speaking of empty space and its rapport to the material substance of a solid building structure. So then, I wonder, is he talking about relationships of spaces like we do in paintings? Not sure, but somehow, I can equate it to this picture from the other evening. 

Architects appear to me like one very large family wherein its members possess all sorts of secret histories and intimately nuanced understandings that are communicated silently through some private channel configured only among themselves. They even appear to use an arcane and singular language all their own; a vocabulary of proportion and mass, one that’s privy to themselves, and guarded by an aesthetic status to the exclusion of everyone else. Actually, I will confess that I‘ve always felt excluded from this cryptic circle, and I’m full of envy when in their presence.  

Their grammar speaks of space, light, and volume, I think maybe in the same way that some painters still do. But their concerns are bigger and bolder, more important, than just flat surfaces with colour imposed upon them. They appear more concerned with grand schemes and seem to worry about how we humans, writ large, cohabitate amongst ourselves, in rural settings or in cities. If judged by Art Fairs today, my mild regret, or rebuke, would be that painters on the whole, seem somehow less serious than architects, certainly more insignificant. They even seem more frivolously, narcissitic and irreverent (except Pierre Soulages) than the serious and consequential gang that both house and home us all. 

So being a painter I must now wade into this discussion and either put up or shut up. I was thinking of this picture from the other evening to illustrate my thoughts about Monsieur Perrault’s quote. For me, it reveals a delicate range of light, one that permeates a surface of the image with the barest hint of matter.

This notion of ‘presence and disappearance’ is what really appealed to me in his quote. In painterly terms, it’s an attempt to capture something as fine as light itself, so fragile it could shatter just looking at it.

In contrast to that, the sea is solid like a building, a deep dark violet mass that contrasts sharply with the light airy sky overhead. There is an Emerald green strip at the very forefront that acts like a doorstep in the first plane of the picture and it allows the viewer to peek into the image like it’s a room. It helps to create a chilly distance all the way up to the horizon line. 

It’s a cool picture with little warmth, save from a hint of the pale pink of the clouds which are in fact, just bits of the white canvas board showing. And this is a great example of how our eyes always will compensate for a missing colour hue. They appear pink to us due to the cool complimentary colours around them. 

Though the sky appears almost empty like a vacant lot between buildings, it’s still space, but it’s made of air and water vapour. It’s an atmosphere composed of diaphanous clouds that stream across it like loose ribbons, they’re so pale and translucent, one could easily misread just what is cloud, or what is sky. That effect is what made me think of this architect’s description of presence and absence even if I’m not completely sure of his own meaning. 

Dreamers

2 July 2024

Dreamers

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 June 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In paintings, my taste will habitually move towards the sensual, though admittedly, my idea of sensuality might not be yours. In music, I also love many of the European Romantic composers of the 19th and early 20th century where there is a great infusion of emotion. Much of it came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when at its height, gave the world some of its finest artistic contributions ever to humankind. And yet, sadly, all that great feeling and intelligence still couldn’t prevent two world wars which also destroyed so much of everything including our faith in humankind. One should ask God: (if they were a believer) how was it possible that in spite of all of our problems in life, that world peace didn't persist after Brahms wrote back the Three Intermezzi for piano, Opus 117 back in 1892? God might, I suppose, throw his hands in the air and rightly answer that Art’s beauty and truth is no match for mankind’s cruel and greedy heart. And let’s face it, it was mostly the men who warred and whored, not the women. All this terrible violence is always hardest on the sensitive soul, those might, against all reason, somehow believe that Art could be a shield against all this human brutality in the world. 

I’ll be honest I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in angels. And Brahms was one of so many who lived by art. He described these three Intermezzi written towards the very end of his life as his "three lullabies of my grief".  

Brahms reminds me that it's OK to be a dreamer and a romantic. Although they are not vocations, they are apt descriptions for most lovers of art in all its forms. Being both a romantic and dreamer myself, I've come believe in Art. But I admit there's a downside, for it might be like an alcoholic living on a street corner who is certain that a bottle of Montepuliano will fly them away to Tuscany for the evening. Trust, but verify, I say.  

Dreamers and romantics of all kinds, seem to be guided along in life by a compass heading that points always somewhere between fiction and truth. And if you are creative, that can certainly work for you, but if you're not, you're in trouble. The beancounters would throw you out of their sleek offices in a flash because  they can smell a dreamer from down the corridor. But no matter, a life of fiction might not be so bad for any of us after all. There are dangers to both alcoholics and romantics, I know, for I was both. I was a drunken Noah who listen to Brahms late at night. 

So, I will always be aligned with those of great feeling in all things artistic. A Robert Wilson fan, never,,, but Mahler, yes,,, forever. That’s the way I am, and the proof is in these pictures, for they too, are not just exercises in pure unabashed romantic sensuality, but they're dreams come true.  

Ever since I was a kid I only ever wanted to play with anything that made slurpy marks, ,,,, the gravy and mash potatoes on my plate, deep mud puddles on the way to grammar school, and then finger-painting. Working in oil paint came much later and became the stepping stone to what I thought of as ‘real Painting'. This also connected me to the long and wide avenue back into the Renaissance books of my father.

Yet, like so many other dreamers, the obsessive question for me has always remained the same: How do I convey my deepest feelings through an act like painting to another person? Isn't that one of the main functions of art? I admit that I secretly want to express emotions in the same way that I feel when listening to music that moves me. And because I’m a Romantic at heart, I ask myself that if I am not trying to express a feeling, then just what the heck I am doing any of this for? OK, sure, painting is fun for me, but what about about the viewers? Am I not a viewer too when I look at a picture? Am I not at a recital to feel what moves an artist like Neil Young or Cecilia Bartoli?

So for me, like a writer or musician, these studies of mine act like bridges which I first need to cross in order to figure out what it was  that I was feeling at the beach. Only after completing them do I discover what they were and might then be conveyed to others. But importantly in this wide circle of emotions, I’m only interested in feelings not sentimentality. 

Of course, so many different Abstract schools are also motivated by what might be called ‘pure feeling’, Cy Twombly and Basquat come to mind, but not Keith Herring, whose work I like, but which might be better described as ‘ironic graphic-pedestrian’. I remember the first time I saw a small white dog of his drawn on the lip of a sidewalk on Bleecker Street in 1979, I think.

I was thunderstruck. But many of the American Abstract Expressionists, like Pollack among many, also sought to ‘express’ unknowably dark emotions hurled right out of can of paint. Though he isn’t a favourite of mine, he did bring speed to the Painting act and this is something I really appreciate about his work.

But that said, I’m not after a dreamy airy-fairy head-space in which to work, I’d like my own work to embody an emotional quality only as a by-product, not as the principle idea of the work. The painting has to have four strong legs to stand on its own, I think.

But all this is a difficult discourse, and the artists and the public all bring such different points of view and feelings to a work of Art these days. Social Media has changed the way people not only see themselves and everyone else, but Art too. Creative culture today, is a brave new world of A. I, and it’s a fast lane where ‘digital creators’ seem to cruise along the center lane of our current zeitgeist with solipsistic abandon. It might be a world where Art, as we know it, could disappear sooner than Science Fiction had planned.

But I persist no matter, come rain or high water, like these Romantics whom I adore, Brahms, Fauré, Mahler, even Satie, through all his layers of poison ivy, I’ll continue in this vein because it’s in me, and to do otherwise would be inauthentic. I’m an old guy, an analog guy, one who doesn’t trust Siri or A.I, though I do use spellcheck and stream music. I like friends in my life but I don’t look for followers, I’m basically someone unprepared for this new age of digital popularity. Unlike many apparently, I’m someone who has chosen a life in the shadows though my work like to shine in the sun.

This picture done a few nights ago came out of a beautiful winter bloom. It was one of two painted on a chilly clear evening when the sky held the colours tightly in its fist until dusk. It’s an unusual picture, perhaps due to the crisp warmth in the winter sky that had dropped so comfortably into the sea. I like that I wasn’t shy about using so much crimson red. I would have made one more study but I had run out of canvas boards, and also I was freezing, so I stopped and went home happy.

Cinderella, answers and prayers

4 May 2017

Cinderella, answers and prayers

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 April 2017, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It amazes me after such a long hiatus that I’m back to working from the motif most nights here at the beach. Nice! And what an adventure, it’s not only one of my favourite places, but I’m exercising a noble craft, and it’s worthy of my time and despite my own doubts and no matter what others may think. 

The feeling in this study is a little like something I came across the other night while reading How to Write a Sentence, by Stanley Fish, a thin but rich book about the art of writing from the inside out and starting with the nuts and bolts of a sentence. This is about the very basics of writing, no airy fairyness about emotions or some divine purpose; just nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and how they hinge thoughts together with periods and commas. 

He mentions Walter Pater, whom I never studied but only know about through random bits of epicurean wisdom that surface periodically in other books I’ve read. Apparently, he professed lots of ideas about beauty and art, writing back in the 19th century. As Stanley Fish relates it, Pater sought in art, a brilliant intensity that promised “nothing but the highest quality to one’s moments as they pass, and simply for those moment’s sake”.  

Amen, I would add that whether one is painting a picture (or just taking in one), it seems spot on for me in this harried world of smart phones. But even in his rarified world of 19th century London, reading a book was hardly a pastime readily available to many people due to a still widespread illiteracy despite the prevalence of schools. Ditto for museums and concert halls, but I love his sentiment all the same. 

So, my task here as a painter is to find a solution for this otherwise ordinary and banal view of the sea. It’s one, which when lit up by the early twilight, is transfigured into Cinderella at the ball. 

This is a scratchy, Expressionist sort of study from a few evenings ago that bristles with subtle colour even though it may not please many people. There is no doubt it is rough and crude in a shocking way, but I find some truth in it nonetheless. It had been a sky full of fire with clouds crossing over it from the South. My criticism of it might be that it feels like a fragment, a mere cut-out from a larger picture and an excuse that lazy painters exercise in desperation. I confess that I’ve done it from time to time but never with any success. That said, I still find within this picture a visual life that hopefully with time can solidify into  a more formal image. In this state it feels like the rough cut of a diamond that needs to be polished. But nevertheless I’m encouraged by these sessions which auger well because I’m using my eyes again, and I have to believe in them. They have opened up after a long sleep it seems.

Even just after a few months at this twilight beach I am beginning to see colour harmonies anew, ones that make me feel like I’ve been colour blind all this time. When I paint, I see better, it’s a simple fact. To see colours is already a remarkable feat, but to paint them is like being rocketed into the fourth dimension. 

So I begin to understand that these small inconsequential studies at the beach are my questions and answers out here at the twilight hour. But they are also my prayers and meditations.

Death in Venice

30 November 2017

Death in Venice

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From the other evening came this small study that appeals to me tonight than more than just a few days earlier when I packed it up at the beach. It came late, after a larger picture had gone awry. It was turning dark, I could barely make out the palette. The sticky dusk descended too fast even for me who works at the speed of light. The sea went inky black, and its uneven texture helped create a distance up to the horizon line. I like this black because it's not from a tube, it's been made from Prussian Blue, Alizarin Crimson and a few pinches of lemon yellow. These three colours help to harmonise the picture because they're already in the sky above. 

Dusk was falling quickly but the sky's light was still colourful just not as bright, as if God had turned down the dimmer attached to it. It's not perfect, but I can see my future in it because obviously I’m learning with each new painting, and the variety of ideas mean that nothing is stagnant. This is a good thing, it keeps me on my toes.

As I work more and more I begin to feel less afraid of failure in front of these intimidating skies, but at the same time I’m also more comfortable with their familiarity. Actually, I wonder if haven’t started to get that feeling one gets when they fall in love with an old friend. I think it would be a gradual feeling at first that builds up slowly over time until one’s defences break down and suddenly one looks at the familiar with a great new sense of wonder, but desire too. 

To be honest, I’ve never fallen in love with an old friend but I feel it’s possible. Perhaps even, it's a sane way of falling beginning a love affair. With a tiny painting full of delicate nuances like this, I might imagine what love could be like with an old friend. Not a hasty affair, full of lust that burns before the night is out and the date of expiration already printed on the heart, but a sticky thing that glues the limbs together and oozes slowly like Mahler’s poco adagio from his 4th symphony. 

A close friend of mine once confided to me that he had such a hard crush on a woman at work that he was beside himself for nearly a year. She was married, he had understood, so there was little to do about it except feel himself turn cold implode whenever near her. After hearing his sorrowful laments for months I came up with an idea for him. I suggested that he should find, or fashion himself, a small wooden chest inlaid with red silk. With great care he should then carefully place his ‘crush’ inside the small shrine and close the chest, then finally, he should place it into his heart for safe-keeping. A tall task, a physically impossible one, but as I explained to him, this wasn’t a carnal deal, just a mental obsession. And though I felt like a witch doctor with all these instructions I was certain it would work. So, he obediently followed my advice to the tee, and to my complete surprise, he was healed almost instantly of his torment. Of course, he still had a crush on her but it was completely absorbed by some new mysterious compassion inside him and he felt mysteriously freed of its tyranny over him. About a year later he told me he was getting married to someone new.

So this business of loving and longing looms large over us all whether it’s consumated or not. Who can say when we shall be plucked out of a large crowd and find our lives ruined or redeemed by love? But speaking of love, I recently saw Death in Venice again last week which invited Gustave Mahler inside me and he stayed for a whole week. Nice!

All this leads me to wonder if this emotional turmoil that irredeemably swamps so many of us with longing can also be captured in a picture? Of course it can, because a few painters have pulled it off from Goya to Picasso. In Music? That's, for sure. Poetry and literature? Yes, of course, that’s what it’s all about! But could an oil painting or sculpture convey such fireworks of suffering seems to me less obvious. Not easily I think, but in theory, yes. Painting is such an abstract and plastic animal, singular as a form, and so apart from the other arts that few have have succeeded.  

Marquet and Matisse forever

22 October 2023

Marquet and Matisse forever

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Weather has finally cleared after a week of rain and I was able to get out two nights ago to make this painting. It so reminds me of Albert Marquet, a painter I’ve always loved. Once in a while I come up with images that strangely feel directly inspired by him even if he wasn’t remotely on my mind. What was it, I wondered, that felt so familiar in this picture? How do I define it? Looking at it this morning I perceived that it was really just a feeling, and I like that. If I paint a picture wherein craft and spontaneous inspiration can take charge of my usually undisciplined self to make something interesting then I'm happy. I really love the feeling in this, and I'm surprised that I was the one who was actually lucky enough to have created it. How, I have no idea. Is it grace?

Sometimes, pictures whatever their size or importance, elicit artistic familiarity through any number of ways. Technically, I could note that he used a lot of white paint which he mixed into all his colours giving his pictures a feeling of a soft overall harmony. Here in this painting of mine, it’s through a gentle sense of light that permeates this simple image. For me personally, it also shares with Marquet a sensual fabric embedded throughout the surface that reveals an overwhelming emotional complicity with his entire oeuvre.

So to say that I am a huge fan of Albert Marquet would be redundant at this point. He was an unabashed sensualist, with whom no doubt, I identified so ardently as a child. I was drawn in quickly as a humming bird to honeysuckle.

Indeed, in my opinion, he was far more of a sensualist than his close and dear friend, Henri Matisse, who achieved superstar status late in his career principally because he was far more of an adventurer than Marquet. Matisse, like an inveterate scientist ventured into newer and heretofore unexplored regions of Painting. 

To be sure, Marquet was more comfortable within the confines of traditional painting motifs, and because of this, he took less chances. He was a ‘steadier’ painter than Matisse but one who perhaps reached less heights because of that. What I mean is that his brilliance is even-handed. Perhaps I could explain this in tennis terms, if there are any old timers out there; Marquet was to Matisse as was Björn Borg to Jon McEnroe back in the comfortable world of base line tennis. Like McEnroe, who expanded the game of serve and volley, Matisse ventured far out of his comfort zone (and our own) but could sometimes miss the mark. When he is on, he is the best, so don’t get me wrong, I love Matisse, but because he was so willing to experiment, he naturally failed more, often producing stilted and somewhat academic work. Marquet, despite his traditional craft, was never an academic. unlike his good friend Matisse, he was tethered to older, more traditional means of expression. He was a true Romantic unlike Matisse, I think.

I became aware of Marquet’s painting in my father’s books when I was still a child with no understanding of painting. I was just naturally drawn to a feeling in his work. Why is that? Why is someone drawn to certain pictures or even certain painters? Whatever it is, isn’t it grand? Isn’t it what keeps art alive and going full steam ahead in this weird cultural world of ours? 

Much later in life, I fell in love with his drawings which really got me out into the streets where (and when) I finally realised just how much I had always despised drawing from both the model and the still life indoors. Marquet’s spontaneous drawings, along with those of Léo Marchutz, were to become my biggest influences later in life when I found my own assurance with crayon and paper. The most coveted book in my library is a thick catalogue full of Marquet's ink drawings from an exhibition I once saw. In these drawings I sense that he is a far superior draftsman than Matisse when using brush and ink, although I would decidedly be in the minority on this judgement. Where Marquet is fluid and spontaneous, and in a certain ‘Japanese Zen’ sort of spirit, Matisse feels to me stilted and dry, as if were still trying to please his staid professors at The Beaux Arts in Paris. Though later on in his life, I think when Matisse began painting more fluidly, he did open up to a more spontaneous way of drawing. His simple pencil line drawings are really wonderful an accomplished.

Anyway, as always, there is so much to say about all of this,,,,,,  It’s true that at times, I can be harsh with regard to Matisse, but hey! I'll admit that my ideas have disturbed not just a few friends over observations like this. After all, Henri Matisse is a kind God even to the Post-Modernists out there who grudgingly give him a pass despite his need to express all the figurative beauty of the world through the craft of painting. Isn't it for this very reason that so many painters and a giant public, really adore and appreciate his devotion to art? Is it not for this love of colourful joy that makes him so popular? 

As a painter, my affection for a particular picture isn't always because it looks good or even because it answers something deep inside me. Although these are valid reasons, important ones for sure, mais non! It's really because the artist in me admires the wild solutions that always need to be solved within the complex parameters of each picture by the painter. And is it not like that for any vocation which is practiced with diligent care?

Addendum:

Matisse and Marquet were very close friends throughout their lives. They wrote each other continously for decades. I’ve read their correspondence in two small books published in France, and they are the kind of small books that gives one hope for, not just Art History, but also humanity and the fraternal necessity of community.