James Salter’s time stamp (part one)

19 September 2021

James Salter’s time stamp (part one)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Clear and chilly for this picture from the other night. The beach was practically deserted but for a few hardy runners and dreamy beach walkers. And me too, there, like the nut on the dunes because for sure I’m known as that.

It had been clear all day and I was hopeful for a colourful sky. This one above, was done first, and is my preferred because maybe it feels less structured or less rehearsed than the second one below. Looking at these two images, I'm suddenly taken back in time to visits I used to make to the rear galleries of the Mesopotamian Wing in the Louvre. In long dusty glass cabinets in the Louvre reside lots of small clay figurines that disclosed both male and female forms, and these small things fascinated me by their primal simplicity.

So for some odd reason, I think of them today while looking at my own two paintings from the other night which also feel to me like male and female forms. Brother and sister perhaps? Possibly conceived in the back room of my mind, or in the back rooms of the Louvre years ago on a beach in Australia, but born the other night? 

It may be a fanciful observation, but all sorts of allusions can be evoked easily from images in my own fertile imagination. I admit that my two austere paintings might seem uniquely spartan for the common seascape, perhaps even childish, yet for me, they both intimate a ripe and fertile nature at the height of their fecund possibilities. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The one (top), feels to be the masculine figurine, virile, more bones than flesh, maybe even more tormented than its sister below. I sense him more ill at ease, anxious, more worried with stress. She, on the other hand, is decidedly feminine, fuller, motherly even, more organised, and more at ease with herself both on this earth and the canvas board. In every way her spirit feels open to me, expansive, and somehow more forgiving in a curious way. One might find this fertile take on these things excessive, but a painter can indulge in such whimsy because after all, everything comes from his imagination. 

When I packed up to leave I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about them, but as always, I was glad to get out to the beach and work as I had been feeling cold and lazy at home. I’m forever impressed by the sovereignty of action which for me seems maybe like an older and wiser brother who kindly takes me by the hand and leads me on an adventure that I may have been unable to make on my own. In my dreamy mind, I still live with this invisible hero by my side.

Though I like them both for different reasons, I identify a little more with this one above for its anxious feeling and its repressed energy within. It also reminds me, of me, in fact. 

As a picture, it appears to teeter on a place only just fractions away from an impending creative shipwreck. As a seascape it’s hardly credible either, as I admitted, but it feels like I managed to channel something mythical from out my childhood (yet again), and I really like that. There is a naivety in it that is less defined, and with less ‘structure’ holding it all together, in contrast to the second one which in painterly terms, feels more orderly, and a much ‘safer’ avenue as if I didn’t risk as much to attain it. 

As Philip Guston once wrote,  “Where do you put form? It will move around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not be paid for, or a form that has not been lived through....”

Like Guston says, I can shuffle through all I’ve lived through in these images after years of working from this motif. And as with all these pictures, every moment begins and ends with what I can glean from the sky when its colours cycle through the chromatic changes brought on by dusk. Most evenings, I use what’s on offer so it’s all improvised by choices made on the spot at every stage of the session. And in this way, painting can get close to the art of writing, for in the end, it’s all about what one chooses to use, and what one decides to leave out. But in this case there is no editing allowed at the beach. 

Perhaps these painting sessions of mine are more similar to a comedian's set because when they’ve got their shtick and technique down, they'll step out on the stage under the bright lights and wing it by going with the flow of the audience. They either flop, or they bomb.

I’ve just finished reading a small book by James Salter, it’s a compact volume made from three talks he gave later in his life. I’ve been a big fan, and I’ve read all of his books, some of them many times over the years. The talks are filled with stories, for like many writers, he loved anecdotes and like most writers too, he was a story teller. But unlike shy writers, he really loved talking and telling stories so I’ve been told. Although I had already read in his other books many of these same sumptuous tales, they were a pleasure to hear again. He has been described as a ‘bon-vivant’, ‘a Francophone’, and ‘a gourmand’ who loved friends around the dinner table with oodles of talk and wine on hand. But again, all writers are not like this, some are listeners, as discreet as church mice and mostly somewhat invisible too. But then, I imagine he also might have been both those things on any given day depending upon his mood.

As a painter, what really stuck with me is that there are many points in this book where he reminds us, somewhat existentially, that every thought, idea, conversation, or musing, would disappear forever if not recorded, even just dashed off on a napkin in haste. He describes his own rigorous habit of noting everything down no doubt to be used at some later date, maybe even tomorrow after breakfast. I think he aptly describes the habit of all creative people. 

“....Everything not written down,” he explains, “disappears except for certain lasting moments, certain people, days. The animals die, the house is sold, the children are grown, even the couple themselves have vanished, and yet there is this poem.”

This ‘poem’ he refers to, is actually his lengthy novel ‘Light Years’, published years earlier. As I remember it, it's theme speaks to the great arc of all things in one's lifetime that shine brightly for some of us before returning back into the soil at dusk.

So, as a painter who 'records' this twilight sky at a beach in Australia, it's a confirmation that his advice is sound, practical even, and polyvalent across all the arts. And as obvious, or idiotic, as it may sound, any creative work completed in one's lifetime is already a great accomplishment. Hopefully that's secretly felt with pride by anyone who takes a chance. 

 

Je m’en fou, French cool on Mars

24 August 2021

Je m’en fou, French cool on Mars

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 August 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This study from a few evenings ago is one of two done that night and it’s rather Martian-looking, but and like all painters will try to tell you, “it really looked like this!”

I liked them and I also thought them both pretty good, but this can be a dangerous sign and might signal that they’re not good at all. This kind of self-satisfaction can bode badly for painter. But today, a few days later, I still like them even though neither photographed very well. This was the second one painted when the sky was really cooking.

This fervid warm red and violet colour harmony was an idea that gave me lots of optimism at first, but problems too as I struggled into to it. But only at the end of the session would the drawing magically melt nicely into the red surface like it was a grilled cheese. On the colour issue, I might worry that there aren’t enough sufficient cool tones to support so much red and pink. Only in the very foreground does the band of Emerald Green leave a small trace of cool green, like moss, but barely enough to offset all this wild warmth. 

This melding sky is what I seem to be looking for these days. Just as the pianist, with a head full of melodies, searches out a harmonic resolution, the painter too, seeks out a solution in colour for his drawing. There is nothing fancy about it, in it there’s no intellectual wizardry or any colourful concept that can save a painter. The drawing, like the melody, is always the King of the Court, and it reigns supreme in a picture. No excuses! 

And yet lots of us try do to cheat when we think we can get away with it, hoping no one will notice. But both melody and drawing are the twin grim reapers of Painting and Music, and no matter how hard we try to cut corners we’ll lose because Form reveals the fate of both a picture and a song over the long term. Like small children, from time to time, we’ll still try to get away with a poor melody or bad drawing while hoping that harmony or colour will cover up for their structural weaknesses, but the music suffers as does the painting. As we all know, the devil is in the details of an oeuvre. Will this small picture survive my own harsh criticism? I’ll find with time. 

For an image, this study appears somewhat ‘insouciant’, like certain people we might see at Cafe Flore in Paris whose self-assurance is expansive and relaxed, and their flaws are unrestrained and flamboyant. If this small picture had pink lips they might even curl up slightly with appropriate disdain (je m’en fous) like the truly cool French who wear their imperfections with pride and arrogance. Since I am going overboard on all this, I would add that what this picture lacks, in a certain technical prowess, it gains in authenticity, like the French through their ever sartorial surprises on the sidewalks. 

Running with Fauves

28 April 2020

Running with Fauves

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 February, 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the third out of four studies that came near the end of a session a few nights ago. It looks wild and impulsive because the sky was indeed crazy and out of control. Normally, I’m a 

restrained painter so it felt really good to get out to exploit my untamed animal at least for a short seance at the beach. The truth is that I’ve rarely been able to let go of my repressed nature and it’s an embarrassing secret, one of many. Neither have I been a rule breaker nor a bar-room brawler, or a guy with a fast car who scuffled with cops. Alas, quite the opposite, I’m the obedient, helpful, polite, and obsequious guy who was never the badass even when I knew it would get me more dates. I‘ve always followed rules and norms unlike many who seem compelled to break them. Among school mates, I wasn’t the thief but the guy from whom who they stole, but none of this doesn’t mean that I haven’t been a jerk either.

I’ve only come to discover all this rather late in life curiously enough. I figured it out gradually after digging away inside myself with miner’s hat on. Most of what I’ve pulled out is just dirt, but occasionally I’ve found a few diamonds. So basically, I’ve come to see that all this ego-restraint came to me early in life, and my fear of authority didn't just happen because I was a choir boy. This conditionned response to life and people is not unrelated to a strict Victorian upbringing right in the middle of suburban America. But hey! Everyone’s dealt a hand of cards, and those happen to be mine. 

And this is why I always identified with Alfred Hitchcock who himself, was also terrified of authority. I remember hearing him once in an interview talking about it. He recounted that anytime a police car got behind he and his wife while driving in sunny California he would find himself in a panic. He drove his poor wife crazy with his dread, but of course, subconsciously or not, he exploited it brilliantly in many of his films. Clever guy! I’m not sure I’ve yet found a creative way of putting my bogeyman to use. 

But Hitchcock was somewhat of an anomaly because most dramatic screenplays and books draw us in slowly like someone recounting a long ghost story until the surprise ending. Hitchcock's villains, on the other hand, almost always showed up early on letting us know who the killer was so that we would sit on the edges of our seats waiting for them to get caught.

And so, in the world of Painting it's not dissimilar because the artist lets us know instantaneously what's up, unlike in either music, films, or books, all of which, reel us in slowly like a calculating confidence man. 

A really, really great painting is like the perfect spouse who knocks you off your feet from the the very first instant of inspection, and from there, it’s usually a long happy marriage. Alas, poorly painted pictures are usually discarded in our mind’s eye in a flash of editorial hubris because the bad picture, like a bad date, will be soon forgotten and deleted forthwith from one’s memory and phone. Yes, it’s brutal, because it’s as rough out there in the art market as it is in the dating world.

Another sad thing about all this, is that a painter who wants nothing more than to please his public at every turn is like a co-dependant lover, full of low self-esteem and desperate for approval. This overwhelming desire to please the public, though understandable, is a deadly trait for any artist, but it's possibly even worse for the ingratiating lover.

Although this wasn't always the case, today I don’t generally worry too much about what others think of my work. What proved catastrophic for me was when I didn’t like what I had painted, and this was a consistent feature of my life. I was too easily crushed and driven to drink by my own self-diagnosed sense of failure regarding my painting. It was a creative form of OCD but with a dash of perfectionism thrown in. But like I said, that was a long time ago, and today, because of these paintings at the beach I feel cured. 

I saw the 1991 film Tous Les Matins du Monde from when it came out many years ago and it made a big impact upon me. It's the story of a master cellist who at the end of the 17th century had retreated from public life with his family to the countryside and refused to play ever again in the Court of the King. He became a recluse and practiced in a garden shed behind his home. One day, a young cellist with promise arrived at his door searching him out for lessons. Hearing the young man play he agreed. Of course, being a French film, there’s a love angle concerning both betrayal and regret, but what the master cellist confides to the young man at one point is something I’ve never forgotten all these years on. He said (as I remember it), that "he only played for the dead and for those not yet born". It’s as if his selfishness was book-marked between two generations that excluded the present moment. 

Curiously, today, I see it all so differently than I did thirty years ago when I embraced his message. At that time, I heard only what I wanted to hear, that a painter should only wish to please the great heroes of the past. I really liked this at the time, I suppose because I must have been living in a time warp where I only held respect my own heroes and none for my contemporaries. 

I've certainly changed, and I hope that this has changed too, but in my own secret dreamworld, I think I still harbour a sort of yearning for approval from certain artists of the distant past. For instance; What would Delacroix or Uccello, Giacometti or Morandi have to say about my small studies for instance? I don't think Cezanne would matter because he’d be too cranky, but Lautrec, Yes! And, yes, I know it's a silly proposition but I think all artists of every sort will at times glance over their shoulder after too much wine or whisky, to wonder.

Today, though it would seem obvious for any sane person to grasp how selfish it might be for a great, but stingy musician, to hoard his music away from the world at large, this notion didn't occur to me at that point in my life. 

After much digging into myself, I think it was because I wanted to see the artist as a kind of recluse, a creature alone, misunderstood and pure. This is a cliché, but it was also how I must have seen myself at the time.

Today, I still see the artist as potentially pure, if indeed their work is authentic. Being an artist, I think, means being strong enough to withstand not just the solitude, but the disinterest of others, because ideally he, or she, has fully accepted mortality. Time, for a painter, is a prison with lots of empty walls to fill.

So, it’s a good thing to re-examine one’s life from all its various stages, to check in and see what is real or not, from all vantage points. How emotionally sane have I actually been all this time? I wouldn't wish to divulge that to anyone. But happily for everyone around me, at least I've updated my expired data so I can better read the room today.

This small unremarkable painting, unruly as it appears, isn’t even one of my favourites, but it’s different enough to include here. I like it because I feel like I’m running with Les Fauves even if I trail behind them by a long shot. I can at least let go when I need to these days, and that’s good enough today. 

I’m not a surfer like so many around here in Australia but I feel akin to them now when I’m riding a long, smooth wave in this series of work. In my previous life of discontent, just like in a Hitchcock film, whenever I began working, I already knew at the start of the session who the murderer was, it was always me. 

Throughout life I was rarely satisfied with my paintings and this would make anyone's life almost impossible, let's face it. But because of a few seemingly magical events, the course of my life was radically altered, and I found that I was able to align myself more closely with the life of a serious painter. This was perhaps only possible because, already inside  me, lots of templates had been formed years earlier out of my many heroes in this Painting racket. So you see, in the end, a dialogue with one's heroes can be useful.

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy part three

 

6 April 2022

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy 

part three

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Because painting and music are brothers and sisters in this family of act, one could also ask if our beloved craft of Painting will be overtaken by the dark magic of A.I. as more and more students and artists find dexterity in this new means of expression. And what of our cousins in the world of Fiction?

Will writing be reduced to the input of mere ideas, then written by software? And now that the art of cinema, already a fusion of several germaine artistic skills we’ve known for the past century, will it too, be fashioned from a software with no more need of any ‘pesky craft’ or human input? 

But alas, I’m getting depressed just writing about it. I must sound like a luddite, but I pinky promise, I'm not. But it does worry me that once the derailment has begun it’ll be a tsunami flooding us all like Chinese Whispers at a drunken dinner table.

So yes, even at the pharmacy, my imagination can go wild in the vitamin aisle where I’m looking for a solution to longevity and where I’m convinced that art, like my body, is in decline and that somehow it needs to be saved like some abandoned dog in an Instagram video.

While still at the counter to wait and pay, I drift away from A.I. and into how capitalism erodes our very ideals around what is great in the arts. As I pull out my bank card, I tell myself that we must never allow ourselves to be overtaken by the bean-counters of the world because I suddenly worry that the system only makes life easier for the rich and no one else. With money, the bean counter's only tool, would they displace someone like Thomas Aquinus with a character like Donald Trump to become the sole arbiter of all things cultural and creative? It would be like Rome all over again, and I chide myself for being so melodramatic while still worrying and waiting to pay for my scripts.

I further worry to myself that we’ll forget how to read and write and lose our ability to speak our native languages. Will grammar and syntax eventually dissolve into an incoherent word salad? What happens when we no longer know how to recognize a really good book because we’ve forgotten how to read one? Then I wonder about Painting, will we have forgotten how to look and feel just because we’ve forgotten how to see? Have our art schools substituted the development of critical vision for the mere clever? Would it be only the cynic among us who asks if the Contemporary Artist has just stolen wit from the marketing gurus thinking it was the fire of Prometheus? Oh my, oh my,.... I have found myself in a sudden internal spiral whilst at the counter this morning. But somehow in the end, I managed to reflect that Painting will somehow be okay. It will always get in the last word because indeed, without it, someone like me would otherwise just be another crazy poet without any means of expression.

So, in any event, this last picture from the other evening came to me as dusk had firmly settled in and I felt like it took its rightful place. Dusk, as usual, was gradual, but then sudden, like death in a home after someone has passed after a long illness. I like what I could see of it in the failing light. Afterwards, I packed up my things in the dark and found my way on the small path back to the car in the Parking. Like this sandy path, these three studies from tonight are much like three stepping stones taking me further along my own road I thought as I got in my car for the drive home. 

So thus, this evening, without a hint of irony, I also think to myself; "Thank God I paint out there at the beach because this act of painting cleanses my mind of so much heedless thinking." 

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy part two

6 April 2022

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy

part two

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Meanwhile, the Autumn skies are upon us yet hide behind these rainy afternoons. But today anyway, this evening’s bloom was unabashedly robust, like the rosy cheek of a shy young girl in love. It opened up widely in the sky like the small fan she might have carried to an opera house centuries ago.

In this second study the bloom really kicks in and the peachy-coloured sky has dropped into the sea and illuminating the entire picture plane. The light shimmers, and right in the middle of the picture, I remember briefly musing to myself like a tourist in front of a cathedral, “Isn’t this extraordinary?” 

And speaking of cathedrals, being at this beach under certain skies like this one will often makes me feel like a child walking into a great big church for the very first time. Anyone who has entered Notre Dame or Chartres will know what I mean. Standing in that gulf under the vaulted ceilings of space, the expanse still seems to go on forever in my young imagination. These churches were designed to convey a sense of movement upward towards the heavens, and indeed, they seem to grow up and outwards quite naturally like any poinciana tree here in Australia. 

And at the beach too, that universe is only limited by the far ends of the horizon on either side. But for all this space, there are limitations, and the painter being me, must create something within the constraints of a rectangle. He must define them through the drawing and this is where one’s own sense of abstraction is so vital because it requires an original vision. A painter needs to see the sky through the lens of his or her own feeling. Anyone who watches a child of a certain age paint the sky can witness this originality at work because the child decides how big the sky is through an abstract feeling and is guided by precision.

But despite this expanse of the sky and the imagination of the painter, this ‘seascape’ genre has still been around the block too many times and it’s worn-out, like the working women on Parisian street corners portrayed in too many paintings (by men) from a bygone era of sad and rundown charm. It is a motif both used, and abused by generations of painters, and like facing an object of naked beauty, it can easily rob them of all their noble intentions just to be in front of such magnificence. And yet, like in all things concerning desire, the seascape can also also be endless too, if one were to develop devotion in their affection.

Many of my studies are not great by any means, I admit it. No worries, for I see them as studies and nothing to really get worked up about. But occasionally, they do open up with something new and surprising which speaks to any talents I might possess. It’s in these three studies I’ve gotten closer to my future, and it’s for this reason I keep coming back for more and more, always hoping for a picture that might just astonish me first and for most. And after all, as many aspiring and wise painters know in their hearts, the best pictures are always the very next ones, the ones that will be done on the following day. For the artist, like for everyone  else of every stripe, aren’t there just two basic choices we all wake up to face each day? Isn't one to be sour, the other, sweet?

But anyway, throughout this series I’ve learned that the beach is an open-ended subject with endless possibilities despite its long storied history. I’ve also discovered that there is no earthly boundary imposed upon its parameters except by the painter himself. Under this great cathedral of emptiness, am I clever enough to invent a new way to express it?

As I say a lot in these pages, I listen to France Musique thanks to the extraordinary fact of satellites cruising every which way, miles overhead and mostly unseen. Like other older folks I’m always a little amazed at this and I never take it for granted. I listen to it a lot because, frankly, I get home-sick sometimes and this soothes my anxious heart. The other day at the pharmacy counter I also got this crazy idea about what might happen if ‘Classical music’ became obsolete because nobody cared about it anymore? What would happen if music schools dwindled down to nothing but a few machines with loaded with brightly coloured buttons because nobody had the patience to learn how to play instruments anymore? As the world moves further into the demands of a quick easy production, will students of the future be just learning music through electronic consoles? Will musical instruments become relics of the past and collect dust in Natural History Museums around the globe?