El Greco and me

Unfortunately I don't remember who I gave this to many years ago. If i did I'd send them an insulting letter about why they would try to sell it at auction which is where I found it online. 

I guess it rubs me because I mostly gave thing away to friends and I cannot imagine why anyone would a gift. For for how much? Peanuts I'm sure from the look of the Online Auction House. 

Well, what are you going to do,,, as my aunt Molly from Glasgow used to say. I remember it as being one of the very first dry-points I ever made in France perhaps 45 years ago. I immediately fell in love with the process working on copper plates but only made a few because I wasn't set up. I think it was a couple whom I knew who had invited me to come into their engraving studio in Aix to try it out. 

It was a 'copy' of an El Greco reproduction I had in those days. A self-portrait he painted in 1584, so Google informs me. But because I was making was a dry-point, the image is reversed and thus the face is backwards so the expression turns to the left instead to the right.

Of course it looks a bit wonky because I didn't know what I was doing, I negligently didn't finish it by ignoring many of the details. The copper plate was the size of a matchbook and I remember being unable to manipulate it in my hand left hand I was also new to gauging into this soft metal. 

But those are excuses! The truth, is that I find it full of life today and I'm grateful to see it again after all these years. 

About 25 years ago I tried again to make dry-points but this time by using plastic postcards....! Go figure!... (I cannot remember why I didn't again use copper plates which make a real dry-point) 

Sometimes, I don't even understand my own thinking...!

But anyway, I fell in love with this El Greco self-portrait that I saw in my early years in France.

El Greco, (The Greek) was born on Crete in 1541, His real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, but only after his death did historians call him 'El Greco'. Why 'El Greco' when Crete was ruled by Venetians? It is Spanish because he spent so much of his life working there.

Enjoy!

Addendum- I was telling this story to an artist friend David the other night who wisely suggested another scenario for me. Perhaps the auction was part of deceased estate sale and whomever I had given the print had died? A mystery.

    

         El Greco, 1584 Self Portrait, oil on treated burlap  

Paintings as postcards and ready for the fridge door

Anyone familiar with my facebook or Instagram accounts would see these recent photos I've put up. I just started doing it for fun but I've also now realised that there was a reason of which I wasn't aware when I began. I see now that it was because I've always seen these studies as small souvenirs in an unpretentious  way that has been difficult articulate. By putting them in these little 'mise-en-scenes', I am declaring to the world that they are just 'part of the woodwork' of everyday life as it were. 

They are 'nothing special', an apt title of a favourite book of mine by Charlotte Jono Beck because they are really just reminders that the ocean is ever-present, no matter where one lives, even Utah. They are postcards, souvenirs of a particular instant in time reminding us of this moment. 

They repose standing up in the kitchen as well as on the bookshelves, and once in place, they are domesticated and at home, like small sleeping dogs in one's living room.

Enjoy!

 

 

Hiatus, and Uncle Boris.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 September 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

After a long hiatus I got back to the dunes at the beach last week. I was nervous, and I had to push myself out of the house in order to get back into the routine. 

This top one came from the first session wherein I made four studies somewhat quickly. The skies weren't brilliant on either days but luckily I'm seem to able to pull something out of even the worst skies. 

I wasn't thrilled by any of them, but dutifully, I put them in the boot of my small Toyota. There were done on different nights. The next mornings when I pulled them out to take photos I was pleasantly surprised by these two in particular.

Towards the end of a 'bloom', I've always had a problem dealing with the thick stripe of colour that hovers over the sea as it steadily grows taller to eventually meld into nightfall. 

In the top study, the stripe arose from a somewhat dull-looking sky, its broken tint of purple appeared almost solid as it expanded upward. In the study below it, two evenings later, the sky had been a little brighter and thus the stripe appears brighter, though a little faded with more light Prussian Blue in it. 

It's strange zone, this thick stripe that widens gradually as the colourful 'Bloom' fades away and the sky returns to a more conventionally local colour before dusk. It can be any variance of violet as it rises into the evening. It's rarely the same hue of purple on any given night. It's confounding and troublesome. 

It's an androgynous sort of colour that befits our nuanced, gender-bending moment we all live in today. It can feel robustly masculine on some days and yet, (as in this first top study) it carries a feminine scent like an airy perfume on others. But I've come to appreciate this problematic space, one so delicate and nuanced, and one that survives the turmoil of a sunset that already presents me with such agony. Like a lynchpin it holds everything together, and I have so little time to see it, then find a solution for it. 

Maybe, for a civilian, it's too difficult to explain properly. But as my uncle Boris, back in the Bronx used to say when I was still a virgin: 

"Hey kid, you gotta do it to understand it,,,ya got it?" 

Anyway, Thank God for Uncle Boris, who also taught me how to stick with something until I finally understood it. And this motif always seems to open up new problems, (but solutions too) invisible to me when I started out just a few years back. 

Rain is scheduled for the next few days. 

 

Titian's daughter, Lavinia and other things

This photo is of Titian's daughter, Lavinia, who was his model for many of his pictures. It is but a headshot of a half-figure portrait. I saw it in Napoli at the Capodimonte Museum many years ago. I was staying on Capri in a funky old hotel in the unglamorous port side of the island. I used to take the ferry across to Napoli to visit this incredible museum. 

This photo, which I took of this portrait, I've had ever since and is currently affixed to an IKEA cabinet in the kitchen. Before that it lived in a Filofax agenda that I carried around for years before the arrival of the i-phone.

This portrait stops me in my tracks sometimes between tasks while preparing dinner. In fact, she has never been far from me. Butt she's not the only one. I have various other small 'crushes' scattered about my home. Marguerite Matisse is another one. Her father also used her as a model often but always as his daughter.

Titian painted Lavinia in various roles and many poses in so many different pictures. Though it's not officially noted I'm sure that the famous Venus of Urbino is Lavinia. But there are many others to spread out in grand museums all over the world. 

Upon walking into a palatial room at the top of the museum, the bay of Naples spread out through the large windows,  I saw her and was smitten immediately. It's complicated to explain because I loved her for the way she looked, but I also loved her for the way he painted her. Full disclosure: I have also fallen in love with other women simply by seeing their portraits. Goya made at least one, but there are others too. What does it mean to fall in love with a painted portrait? Is that so crazy? I mean, people today fall in love with photographs of their objects of desire, non? 

Another one was Titian's St Margaret, in the Prado, and may have also been one of Lavinia's  modelling jobs. I saw this large picture during my first year in France when I visited Madrid at the beginning of my studies in art. To be really honest, I had such a visceral sensation upon seeing this giant portrait that I was disturbed for weeks afterward. It was not by the picture nor the talents of Titian, but from my erotic attraction to the model in the painting. Whether or not it was Lavinia doesn't matter, though it might have been. I was just overwelmed by the emotion in her face and her voluptuously imposing body, because at 21, I was quite impressed by certain kinds of women, either painted or in the flesh. Indeed, it was considered at the time a risqué picture for Titian revealed her long naked leg which would have driven those priests mad. 

St Margaret, Titian, The Prado museum

According to legend, St Margaret of Antioch (4th century Turkey) was expelled from home by her pagan father priest when she was converted to Christianity by a local midwife. She then vowed to be virgin but her beauty was such that she bewitched a local Roman Governor whose advances she had spurned. He had her imprisoned and tortured, but while in prison she met the devil who took the form of a dragon. He then tried to eat her but the cross she held in her hand so irritated the dragon that he disgorged her. She  survived subsequent attempts by fire and drowning until she was finally beheaded. 

Being the Middle Ages, of course, there were spectators for each assassination attempt and the more she survived the bigger the crowds. She ended up converting thousands to Christianity after witnessing her ordeal, but alas, they too were put to death. She became a saint one thousand years later, hmmm. What is it with all these Men who want to hurt women, then years later venerate them? 

But anyway, she became a great fixation for me and I not only fell for her but for Titian too.

One anecdote about Titian I really love, because the Renaissance was not only time of greatness (for some) but a wonderful time to be a painter, (great or crappy). Like today, where families are held in high regard if there is a lawyer or or accountant in their brood, during the 15th and 16th centuries, a family would equally be celebrated for having a painter or two in their midst. Painters were revered everywhere in Italy. 

So the story goes that when Titian was painting Pope Paul III, he dropped a paint brush during the session and then waited for the Pope to get off his chair and bend over to pick it up for him. How times have changed.

      Pope Paul III, Titian, 1543, Capodimonte Museum, Napoli
 

 

  

Legoland

I really don't know what to say about this apartment building complex except that it looks so remarkable. I can't believe that I didn't know them while living in France. I had seen La Grand Motte from the autoroute many times from a distance and though it looked like just a large area full of 1960's apartments never did I imagine that it housed such imaginative architecture.

These images are taken from an article in the New York Times from last week. If you can get by their paywall, try to get in because it's a great article. I tried to see them via Google Earth but whole areas in La Grand Motte are fuzzed out for some reason, probably due to some military zoning. But what i could see showed many other apartment buildings laid out in symmetrical shapes as if designed from outer space.

Copacabana, Rio 

These buildings remind me of some many wonderful things I saw (in print) out of Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil. But in Rio, where I did once go years many ago, I saw that same playfulness everywhere in all sorts of small details around the city. Even seeing the mosaic patterns of the Copacabana from a hotel room high up, was a great surprise for me. It spoke to me of visual pleasure, and yes, a child-like visionary joy of urban living.

I haven't a clue what these apartments are like on the inside or what they are like to live in but imagine the pleasure it might be to just to come home after shopping at Carrefour to an apartment in one of these?

 

Arthur Boyd and the black sheep of Australia

These are wild images from the Australian artist Arthur Boyd which I believe were painted at the end of his life. I will let interested parties google him if their interest is piqued by these things. John MacDonald, the critic for the Sydney Morning Herald who has an astute eye and a rich cultured mind wrote a recent piece about him, also for the curious-minded.

I like very much the image above while I find everything else fascinating but maybe less engaging, personally speaking. 

I've always found that Australian artists back in the early part of the 20th century were on the whole, a determined lot of eccentric and original artists, and Boyd was no exception. 

In this wild continent so far removed from Europe they found themselves out of the loop and on their own. This was a good thing I believe, because it protected them from the conventional conformity of 'Modern Art' that raged through the capitals of Europe and America. There was a kind of proud defiance, a renegade streak, among many of these Australian artists.

Now, of course, in Australia, like most other countries around this shrinking cultural globe, Post-Modernist theory has infected all the art schools. This has sadly created an environment of pretty universally bland and conventional art despite possessing that kind of sizzle that appeals to Contemporary galleries and cool curators who themselves are also artists. This has created it own 'closed loop' of a system. Whoa!.... But,... tut tut, I'm being severe!... yet maybe you get my point.

So one could say that there have been two kinds of art in Australia since the Europeans arrived. One, authentically rooted in the ancestral coding of the land. The other (and newer one) was imported by the British settlers. 

The former is a large network of indigenous artists from all over this gigantic continent. I don't want to simplify a complicated idea, but their work, like all indigenous cultures around the world, spring up from their authentic experiences of living from this earth.

But the second art of Australia was a white art, not less valid, just foreign, and imported, its roots are colonial nonetheless. Again this is a subject I'm less equipped to pontificate upon, at least now anyway. As we say in the Bronx, "it's complicated".

Gradually, this early European tradition of painting evolved, and after a few centuries, it joined the global rush towards an 'expression of originality'.

But despite catching up with the arty trends of the rest of the world (and its mother ship Britain), Australian art of the 20th century maintained its own wild and rebellious defiance. 

I think it came into its own when it finally accepted Britain's snobbery towards Australia by owning it's reputation a bit like Queer became a defiantly proud slogan of the LGBQ community. Australian artists embrace their unique identity  in their unique land Down-Under. They said to Britain; Yes, OK, we're the smelly black sheep, and we're proud of it,,, so 'Sod Off' Pommies! 

Of course, all this is quite fanciful on my part but there might be a sliver of truth to it nonetheless.  

After all, Australia had been conceived as a penitentiary and established to receive its previous black sheep, the Irish, and the rest of poor unfortunates that Britain had wished to dispose of without having to execute them all. Australia would always be considered to the poor relation.  

But that was then, and now is now. These Australian artists of the 20th century have forged diverse paths as if slashing their way through the rough landscape of this rugged country with a machete. 

So, Arthur Boyd began like a European, but ended up as a wildly original visionary. Nice!

   

 

Disclaimer!

Disclaimer! Once in a blue moon I re-post older things when it suits me so just for fun, here is one from two years ago.

I find it fascinating because isn't always interesting to see another dimension to one's own work?

I confess that I am almost tempted to propose a show of these small intimate images in this vertical state because people might find them more interesting presented in this format. 

It's true, fewer people these days are interested in reality than ever before, and this of course, raises a lot of questions to explore for another time. Enjoy! 

,

09 October 2022

a pot pourri of the painter's psyche.

These Evening Prayers were all painted over the past few months, randomly chosen for their stronger contrasts perhaps, but quite simply, I just wanted to see how these paintings would look vertically, just for fun,,,, why else? It was easily done and they were rotated to the right or left without too much thought. 

They are interesting because quite suddenly, they seem foreign to me, standing up tall like gangly teenagers, while me, the middle-aged parent gawks with surprise.

Except one, are all rotated just one turn, but this image, upside down, feels more like something from an amusement park. 

 

By playing with all these images in this way, I was allowed to experience not only the light differently, but the colour too, notably, the way colours interact with each other so differently in a vertical format.

Also, the gravitational aspect of them pulls the eye a little bit towards one lateral side or the other and makes them feel a bit wonky, and this is also destabilising in a weirdly positive way for me.

This was an experiment solely for pleasure as I said because I wanted to experience these images in a new way and indeed, it seems apparent there are lots of stripes in this painter's psyche.

Gauguin, blue dreams

 

         Blue Trees, 1888, Ordrupgaard Collection, Denmark.

I have had this on my desktop for a while now and it seems to always pull my eyes over to it. I don't really have much to say about it except that I'm just in awe of his sense of colour.  

Remarkably, one might think upon seeing it, that it was from Martinique or Tahiti, but curiously its's from the small time when lived with Vincent in Arles in 1888. 

Unlike Van Gogh who needed a 'motif' in front of him to kick off his vibrant imagination, Gauguin infamously worked almost entirely from his imagination. 

These different ways of painting reveal something about their connection but also their strong differences. They were almost like two opposing sides of an AA battery, one so positive while the other so negative.

Gauguin 'invented' this landscape while painting next Van Gogh in Arles. The small figures near the foreground are Breton. Was it an homage to a place that got him into this 'Painting Racket' in the first place? Or souvenir painted out due to homesickness? Either way, like the Instagram Influencers of today, both painters were motivators for each other's work during this period together. 

Even their colours during this period seemed to accentuate each of their palettes in a similar fashion. Their Chrome Yellows and deep Ultramarines appears to clash like ancient warriors upon their canvas's. And as we know from their correspondence afterward, their particular personalities also crashed into one another almost daily. 

But, in this picture of the 'Blue Trees' above, I personally marvel at the pictorial intelligence in it, of its colour and its drawing and invention. It has mysterious and abstract hold over me as I wander about around its surface. It's an endless lesson for painters of any moment, anytime.  

Art, a wall or a window?

Anyone who reads this Blog would understand that I absolutely despise Graffiti but being human I can also make grand dictums replete with caveats. 

Generally, I will give a pass to Banksy, but a few other artists too,  who have something artistically interesting to express. For me, Art in all its forms, is a window not a wall, something transcendent not myopic.

Most graffiti is self-indulgent and juvenile, narcissist, and basically just a visual nuisance for the rest of us. And most murals are usually pretty dreadful too. Where I live in Australia, I would bet a million dollars that there are more blue jumbo dolphins splashing about on buildings than anywhere else in the world.

Et portent, and yet..., this enormous mural caught my eye and surprised me with great pleasure, even causing me consternation. I wish I could remember who is the  artist and where it is located, my apologies.

It's not that I even like its drawing or colour harmony but there is something in its 'colourful design' that I find so well unified, puzzling and audacious, so much so, that I actually really like it. It has a vaguely figurative aspect to it as if it's maybe channeling Salvador Dali? But as a critical matter, is any good? Does it succeed? 

Because giant wall murals are in a class of their own, I personally don't really have the critical wherewithal to judge them as artwork. That may sound like a lame way of fobbing off the important question, but hey! I'm only human. I can only judge it by the same criteria that I use everywhere else in my peregrinations around the world. 

It is a public work, and ultimately it must also be judged with an acutely critical eye, like for everything else in this realm of aesthetics. And yet I still myself suddenly feeling a little self-conscious in this world. This is the world of the delightful and surprising jumbo-polished steel blob by Anish Kapoor, that occupies an large open space in Chicago. But it's also part of the muscular and (sometimes almost fascist) work of Richerd Serra. Hmmmm. But too, an unlikely hero in the world of Public Art is Jeff Koons, who created several versions of the oversized 'Puppy', made of flora and flowers, a piece that brings universal joy to almost everyone.  

So regarding this ten or twelve story high mural, I have no irrational way to explain why it does bring me such puzzled joy. But hey! We all need lots of joy today, puzzled or otherwise.

But I like to imagine myself stumbling upon this gigantic wall in an open space somewhere downtown somewhere, and I believe it would be as surprising as finding a field of red poppies growing out of one's own bathtub.

For myself, it's a rare thing to be pleasantly surprised in this contemporary life, urban ironic, or otherwise.  

 

something different, a changing guard

It's rare but not uncommon that states in America re-design their flags to update their image, but Maine has done just that. They have selected a new design out of more than 400 submissions.

The winning flag design came from Adam Lemire, an architect from Gardiner, a town of roughly 6,000 residents in Kennebec County. His minimalist design shows an eastern white pine and a blue North Star against an off-white background.

I really love the way older institutions can sometimes re-invent themselves with an artistically appropriate design. Maine had the wherewithal to re-imagine itself as a new and different place. Out the window goes an old, staid, and conventional design, in comes something modern, both clear and striking. Nice!

Now, if each generation could ditch their older  ways of thinking and doing things by up-dating their ideas, it would be an even more perfect world.

                2024
 

                             old as the hills