Edward Hopper and Louis Kahn by the sea!

 

Rooms by the Sea, Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1951 

Although I have a great affection for Edward Hopper, he is far from being an artist who has ever cast a spell over me. 

I think any painter, writer, musician, architect, what-have-you, should be able to articulate the early influences whom previous artists have had over them. Who has lit the rapture in inside them and helped shape their formation into the solid craft of their choosing? 

Although I saw his pictures when I was a child they didn't speak to me the way that many others did. To be fair, I was pretty fascinated with most paintings when I was as a young kid, as I didn't have any way to discern them as either 'liable or not'.

My father had covered his bathroom walls with copies of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and I forget whom else. They were lifted from the many books on Italian Art which he collected. For sure, he had a thing about Italian Painting, but he really had a thing about Italy, in all its forms. He devoured everything Italian. 

My father, being a Catholic child, and brought up in a somewhat strict tradition in Providence, Rhode Island of the 1920's wanted nothing more than to escape it all, which he did when he joined naval officer training for World War Two. 

But from what I understood, he excelled in Latin, so that certain languages came easy for him. He learned enough Italian to get around, some French too and he taught me an invaluable lesson when we were in Florence in 1956 when I was four. While walking around town, he would randomly stop people in the streets and in shops to ask directions that invariably led to innocuous questions that initiated conversation. This was an Italy, not far from the war, where people were just so happy to be out in the prospect of a sunnier future themselves and their families. America had helped to save them from a Fascistic chaos after all, and so the attention of a charismatic American with floppy colourful clothes who posed an incessant stream of questions about their lives, about the war, about art, was extremely seductive. He had a kind, friendly manner that drew people into him easily so consequently everything about him was an invitation to be equally open and friendly. He stopped the Carabinieri often for directions and once got us both a ride on a giant Moto Guzzi, me scrunched in between him and my father in the middle of Florence. The priests in their long black robes were always good for a 'stop and chat' as Larry David, of Seinfeld fame calls it. Taking me by the hand after each of these encounters he would quietly explaim that he had just had an Italian Lesson. Later on, when I went to live France years later, I employed the same tactics and it worked just as well. 

Could he have been an artist? Should have been a painter? Who knows? But he loved it and he painted periodically. It's hard to become a painter unless it's almost full time I think from experience.

He painted the picture below back in the 1960's, in Providence, Rhode Island, where he regularly returned to visit his sister, my aunt Maddie. His father had emigrated in the late 19th century from Ireland as a boy of fifteen. He was the eldest of eight or nine children who arrived by boat. It was a tough time.

I think he must have been influenced by Edward Hopper to make such an picture like this. It has a decidedly 'cool' Northern Light to it, very New England, I think. It's an efficient picture, which is to say that it visually works well, where everything is in the right place. I have never really warmed up to it despite the fact that it was painted by my father. This is strange because I have so little left of his and I've always felt a little guilty about this. And yet, it has beautiful parts in it, nice abstract resolutions, especially in the foreground, both on the right and left sides. 

Thomas A Coffey, Smith Street, Providence Rhode Island, circa 1960, oil on canvas, 60 X 50 cm

The Edward Hopper painting (top), is a curious image unlike anything I've ever seen of his. At times his pictures possessed a solid kind chunk of Americana; lighthouses, New England farmlands, roof tops, American streets of large empty-looking homes. These are not pictures by Monet or Pissarro, and peopled with figures hurrying along streets or holding their hats and bracing the wind. No, Hopper's paintings are devoid of humanity in a weird way, almost as if after a plague had removed everyone.

But his famous urban pictures are those inversely peopled with solitary lives. The 'Night Hawk' the corner cafe at night with a few lone figures in it. There are lots of women too, alone, looking out windows from their beds or cafes sitting in silence like mannequins. He tapped into the quiet, dark, and restless soul of America at about the same time as did also many American writers like Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright.    

His dystopian imagination led him to paint these bleak American pictures but not without a sense of humour. This painting (top) is unusually Surrealist in spirit, and I like it for that. A door opens up on the sea outside with no explanation. 

I also love the colours and the way it's been constructed, its strong natural light pours into an interior like it's a still-life. It's a hard Northern white light that gives it the feel of a film set. It's a strange and beguiling picture, one I would easily live with here in my small home. It makes me think of what the architect Louis Kahn once said about Light. "A room doesn't know itself until light enters it." 

Here, below, is another kind of light, one from the Southern Hemisphere. There is little reference except a sea and a sky at dusk.

Evening Prayer, Brunswick Heads, 21 January 2025, oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

EO, and the state of humanity

A few weeks back I watched an extraordinary film entitled simply EO, (2022) by Polish Director Jerzy Skolimowski. Disclaimer, it's a very difficult film, one which may not reach many people because it lacks all the shiny action-packed violence and gentrified beauty that attracts most people, but hey! 

This is a film unlike any I've ever seen seen. Its star is a donkey and the film follows it through its odyssey to re-unite with a young woman in a circus. We know nothing of their lives before they were separated but we follow the donkey's search for her. This takes it through several chapters (and countries) throughout the film. 

It is a remarkable film but not an easy one. It will speak to animal lovers and maybe leave them indelibly scarred, I will say no more.  

Vanessa Bell and Gabriel Yared

The Pond at Charleston, 1916

This quiet and unexciting landscape was painted by the Bloomsbury icon Vanessa Bell, and after some twenty years of looking at it, it still drives a painter like me, crazy. It's an image one could aimlessly walk right by in a museum because its discreet sophistication is hidden behind such subtle simplicity. It's from photo of an old postcard that I've had tacked up behind my stove for years, a little beat-up, but it's something one can ponder when boiling water.

Looking at it now I suddenly realise just how Cubist it appears to me. I had never actually put that together in my mind. I also hadn't recognised that it was painted in 1916 at the very height of Cubism in Paris. Vanessa Bell and her painter-husband, Duncan Grant, being the jet setting  bohemians they were for the day, would have been very aware of the going-ons just across the Channel in Paris. It was after all, a close, cultured world of literati and erudite amateur artists. From their cozy farmhouse, Charleston in West Sussex, they might have even been able to watch bathers on the beaches of Dieppe had they had a high-powered pair of binoculars. But what I like about the idea behind the image, is that this was a Cubist picture painted from a motif outdoors where Vanessa Bell both lived and worked.

She and Duncan had several children yet they both led a very creative and fruitful life while at the same time churning out work incessantly. I've always remembered something she had once remarked to a journalist about her painting life. She said that with so much to do around their farm, she generally managed to get three hours of painting done each day, then adding that one could still get a lot of work done as artist with a family life too, one day at a time.

Here, below is an 'abstract' picture which she painted just two years earlier in 1914. This leads me to believe that she worked in several different 'styles' concurrently. She and her husband Duncan Grant made lots of designs for their own home; tables, chairs, lamps, screens, rugs, etc, etc... because they were a very creative couple. Almost every surface of Charleston vertically, horizontally, and otherwise, was decorated with lots of paint and love, it seems. 

`

1914

I've come appreciate that artists work in vastly different mediums and 'styles', as if to say to the world: "I will not be pigeon-holed into just one idea or another. I can actually walk and chew gum at the same time. That said, I can also love entirely different artists like Giorgio Morandi, who strayed very little from his small orphaned family of bottles. He did make many very beautiful landscapes around his family home in Bologna, Italy, too. 

But these days, the creative crowd work in many different fields simultaneously because this is the turbo-charged age of both multitasking and money-making, one where only the 9-5 workers seem to need a rest. 

All this reminds me of an interview with a French Soprano whom I heard about ten years ago on France Musique. I cannot recall her name but I remember that she was originally from Marseille. (I've looked in vain on the net but no luck finding her name, so far). She had worked with with Gabriel Yared, a celebrated composer of films (The talented Mister Ripley, The English Patient, etc, etc,) among so many others. His 'style' is particular, and at once recognisable through his abundant use of minor keys. I 'knew' his music through my memory senses from all his film inimitable scores, but I knew nothing about him before this interview. Now, I listen often to all his scores through Apple Music. When I'm writing comfortably at home, he is my go-to mood swinger, and I can listen to the same film scores over and over again. It's as if they've fused with the DNA of each sentence I write.

But what I wanted to really express, was someone that this soprano, this lovely young woman had evoked about her life. It had been one of the those relaxed interviews that they are so clever of doing on France Musique. She had spoken about her work with Gabriel Yared on a project but then she began talking about what Singing, as a metier, was like for her and her contemporaries in today's ever changing digital world of music.

Being a soprano had brought her in touch with many different kinds of music, but as well, a great variety of musicians and lots of different kinds of music from Renaissance, Baroque, Mozart, Puccini, Webern, Jazz, etc etc,, She also sings 'scat' (an Improvised version of mimicking Jazz riffs at high speed with wordless syllables). 'Scatting' is a club of great musicians; Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O'Day, and Louis Armstrong, who is acknowledged as being the guy who began doing it on stage and consequently popularised it so many years ago. 

I understood that in the old days, opera singers were always just opera singers. They may have indeed sang dirty ditties in the bathtub for their lovers, but essentially Opera was Opera; and Jazz was Jazz. Men were of just men, even if they were closet gays; and women were women, (ditto for being secret lesbians) A mere eighty years ago it would have been unheard of for an opera singer to sing Jazz or anything of a popular nature. The Western world of yesterday appeared to be an uptight world where segregation and control acted as unwritten rules that coded everyone's colour, sex and work.   

Fortunately, our contemporary life today has freed most of us all up in a messy but creative way (and also freaked out all those leftovers of yesteryear who cannot handle it). We have been released from the rigid labels and categories that had frozen us into statues of both high and low culture. 

So, not only did I hear about Gabriel Yared for the first time, but I also heard something important about myself, a truth heretofore hidden to me and walled off by my fear of the unknown. It was a truth hiding in plain sight, for my own painting (and my own thinking), had already bifurcated into different ways of working almost unconsciously.  

It had never really occurred to me that I could work with such 'seemingly' different notions about making pictures. In essence, I didn't believe that I could actually walk and chew gum at the same time in this Painting life that I was leading. And yet, I there it was, I was doing it nonetheless. It felt to me as if I had been happily married for most of my life despite secretly carrying on an affair for years.

So, this interview had apparently really gotten inside me and I began to finally accept that such different parts of my own 'painting mind' could all live comfortably together inside me simultaneously. It was a revelation to see that I wasn't mad, I was just being creative.

Then I saw that what links both these worlds together both one of Non-Figuration and one taken from a motif out in Nature, was light light itself. If a light was unified in either case, a picture could always work aesthetically. Naturally some would work better than others depending on other factors.  
      

So for example, like Vanessa Bell, I can paint the following picture as easily as I can paint the one below it. They reside in my painter's mind yet they both express different parts of it.

Elephant, February 2018, Myocum, oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

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

 

Colourman, the tinny tubes and walls of colour, and grandma Moses too

Here is but another universe of creativity of which I've been oblivious all these years. While researching Colourman recently into  the origins of the first 'tinny' oil tubes for my book project, I erroneously came across this small paint company in London until only just a few weeks because after forty years of producing colours, it closed shop. They fabricated ready-made cans of colour for decorators of all kinds. Just from looking at the instagram account which is still up, these colours look sumptuously scrumptious for any hungry painter. What a shame it no longer exists. 

But as I said, I was led down a path into a world of which I had never ventured; wall murals and hand-painted wall paper. And I know why I didn't know of it. It's because I've seen so much mural-painting both inside and outdoors, that didn't appeal to me over the years, that it kind of turned me off the whole thing. I really hate bad painting no matter where, or by whom. 

But what I didn't know was that there was a whole world of wonderful artists (mostly women, it seems) who painted really fabulously original work and much of it fanciful in that truly British tradition of eccentric beauty that many of us artists (world-wide) adore. 

For instance, except for pockets of the very absurd within France, the French generally just don't possess an eccentric gene. Neither do the Americans, and ditto for the Germans, nor the Scandinavians (I think). But yes, I think the Japanese definitely do in a wildly clever infantile way. 

 

FYI, the tin tube of oil paints that set off my side trip into this world, was invented by an American portrait painter, John Goffe Rand back in 1841 in London where he had installed himself looking for work. He came up with the idea, copyrighted it, then made a small fortune which he then lost investing in a novel new idea for an 'Aeolian' piano (don't ask me what it was supposed to be). But having lost everything, he returned to America and continued his portrait-painting business with no regrets. Personally, I love that about Americans, those adventurous ones of yesteryear who dared to take risks and when it didn't work out they just keep plugging away at life with little resentment so unlike the current guy in the White House, hmmm...

But anyway, Winsor Newton bought the copyright and the rest, as they say, was history. FYI, before 1841, painters who went out into Nature to work (like Turner), used pig bladders which were stitched together. Yuck.

But my real point was to showcase this wonderful world of wall painting hitherto unbeknownst to me. I love these things, really great stuff, and typical British. I confess that I plucked many of these images from the internet and they don't have the proper acknowledgement. But, anyway, here are some of my favourite things. 

lamp shades too

                           Melissa White

I've been to Charleston (West Sussex) several times over the years. It's the cottage where the Bloomsbury crowd crowed together to make hay and a bit of scandal back in the day. Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, et all, etc.. etc... Every surface of the house was painted, happily but happily they had pretty good taste. 

And finally, If you have ever wondered if Grandma Moses was ever a real person or not, she was! Read about it below. 

Judith Scott at Rolland Garros

This is a re-post from 2014. I stumbled upon it today and thought to celebrate this last day of the 31st of May, 2025, a day soon to be lost forever. It a reminder that flies by, and when a day whisks by us, no matter what we thought of us, whether it was a 'good' or 'difficult' one, it was a day rich with possibilities. 

This also reminds me that 'Art', in all its forms, is still one of the greatest obsessions to possess. Unlike Sports, another wonderful obsession, it is not constrained by one's age nor one's physical condition. It's an endless voyage of self-discovery that offers the adherent profound pleasure. 

Just a reminder of how Art and Culture take the back seat to the world consumerism, I was watching a brief Court-side interview with the winner of a match at Rolland Garros tonight when the winner of the match (an American) was asked by a French man, no less, if she would go shopping in Paris on her days off from the tournament? She replied, "Yes, of course I will go shopping in Paris".

There you have it ladies and gentlemen. 

In Paris, the capital of culture with more museums and exhibits than almost anywhere else in the world, the guy doesn't ask what museums she might visit while here for a few days off?  

Alas, the life of human beings has been reduced to going shopping instead of visiting a museum. I understand it, but it's an awful damn shame, as we used to say back in Kentucky.      

But anyway, here is the 'produce' of such an adventurer in the world of art.  

I had never heard of this incredible story of woman who died a few years ago. Her acceptance and success in the Art world asks many to think hard about what it means to 'be an artist' or 'to live creatively'. I haven't a clue, but I love that she made these strange and personal pieces, and I am moved by her. There is so much 'Art' made by so many 'overly-educated' yet, under-cultured and eager people wishing either to make a buck or find meaning for themselves in a complicated world. Judith was shielded by all those complications.

Robert Motherwell,,,, oh well....

I cannot even remember how I came across this painting by Robert Motherwell but it has found a discreet place on my desktop and there it has lain like an old flag for months now and has continually drawn my attention.

I am surprised by my own attraction to this picture to be very honest. But I am. There is something that pierces through all my ideas about what I think defines a painting and it goes straight into my taste buds. Maybe it proves that I really shouldn't have any bright ideas about what defines a painting in the first place. But hey! Everyone else has ideas about painting; the artists, the critics, the galleries (though it's purely about bling), the public, the everyday Joe at home with a few pictures hanging about on the walls of his home. Art engenders ideas in fact, and isn't that cool enough? But it also shocks and enrages, as well as it reassures, especially those lucky ones who own expensive pieces hanging on walls in large homes around the world.

So, what is it with this picture? And why does it have a hold over me? Am I superficial enough to just like it because of its Ultramarine blue, a colour of which I am extremely partial? I have only a slight idea of what the context is around this picture from looking through the Google's collection of Robert Motherwell. He appears to have made numerous works that vaguely resemble boats and sails so it seems likely that this is one of those. 

Honestly, any frequent reader in these pages will recognise that I have pretty discerning taste when it comes to looking at Art, so they wouldn't be surprised that I'm not crazy about the oeuvre of Robert Motherwell. He was an early Non-Figurative American Expressionist who had big ideas about a lot of big things just like so many of us arty types. They say he was an intellectual and wrote a great deal.

He was an experimenter, like all from the American Expressionist School, because they were up to something pretty novel in a way. They wanted to explore non-figuration as an art form. I call their attempt 'pretty novel' because they were bucking several thousand years of artistic traditions concerning Form and Content. But hey! Why not? This was the Post-Freudian world of analysis after all. It was an epoch that  put everything up on the chopping block for both investigation and self-examination.   

But like we see in this the current political upheaval in America, if you want to break things of value, it behooves you to have a replacement for it because as we all know, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I know it's not fashionable to harbour this idea but honestly, I'm not really convinced that the American Expressionist school left much of a legible legacy for those of us who came afterward to surf the next set of waves.

Judging from what I saw on Google I found Robert Motherwell's legacy to be untidy, unspooled, arbitrary, and lacking in much cohesion. 

Sooooo, why am I crazy about this picture above? I am happy to say that I learned a long time ago to judge the artwork, not the artist. Picasso, for instance, made lots of junk over his lifetime and he squandered his enormous talents by making kitsch. Yet nonetheless, he painted Guernica, an iconic masterpiece. I'll take back for saying this but only  5% of his oeuvre was truly great. So, when someone asks me "what do you think of so and so, I'll respond; What work are you specifically asking about?"

This is how I've come to navigate the tricky pathway into art criticism. This is just my own way, one that suits my own intellectual and aesthetic disposition.

In the end, all painters make duds here and there. I've made many but like Tennis, it's all about the statistics; the more matches one wins, the better one's ranking but that doesn't mean that the thousands of magnificent points over a career, now long forgotten, were not magnificent on their own. 

 

So, I haven't even answered my own question about why I feel something so intimately strong about Motherwell's picture. Maybe next time.

 

Thomas J Price and his lovely-looking black woman in Times Square

The City of New York, through the Times Square Alliance, regularly presents contemporary artists an opportunity to present their work. This 12 foot tall sculpture by the British artist Thomas J. Price was recently installed in April and will remain till June 17th.

These photos are from the NYT and for further info one might go directly to they story printed March 18th 2025.

I haven't seen a photo of Thomas J Price but I would eat my hat if he weren't a black artist. His premise is certainly a contemporary one and is that we are not used to seeing black figures of historical consequence exhibited in public spaces. it's that simple, and he's right. 

As Art now generally does, it asks us, the public, to engage with it. It wants and needs a response. This is the essence of Contemporary Art since Surrealism back in France in the fist half of the 20th century when a page of history was turned, and a new chapter of interactive Art was born. 

That said, this 12 foot sculpture of an Afro-American woman standing the middle of Times Square has drawn fierce blowback from the American Right Wing.  

An outspoken Fox television personality, a perfidious  creature whose name I won't mention, said of it; “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” “It’s a D.E.I. statue.”

The Federalist, an ultra-conservative political organisation also described the work as “leftist cultural warfare.”

But equally, there are also admirers of the piece. (from NYT) 

"Elma Blint, a jewelry designer from Brooklyn, who visited the work on Friday, offered an opposing view, saying the figure looked like every Black woman in my family” and suggesting its detractors were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black woman taking up space."

Another woman pointed out that the arts have been progressively fazed out of curriculums in both in High School and in Universities, so because of this, young people don't really know how to look at art these days. Fair point.

But for me, I really like it, and I find it an extremely moving sculpture. For me, her expression seems to convey a sense of quiet discretion, perhaps due to an old fearful feeling of speaking out. I think it even speaks for all of us in America at this moment when racism has erupted like a volcano from old violent fractures embedded deeply with our country. 

That this sculpture has created so much animosity among so many should be a surprise to anybody. Would be easy to point fingers. I cannot even blame Trump either because he is but fissure that was opened up by this giant already damaged landscape. In this small space, I will give the last word to an Atlanta-based TK Smith.

“He definitely struck a vein,...we are dealing with wounds that are not healed. And we can’t heal them if they’re not spoken about.” 

Just last year in Times Square another pair of artists presented a giant hotdog as a work of art which spewed confetti out one end. It was a big hit and very popular with the public. This makes me wonder if we Americans haven't just turned into cultural idiots that prefer Wrestling to Art? 

Airplane! The hit comedy!

So, Trump wants a new aeroplane! As everyone around the world has now heard it would be a gift from the Qatari royal family. It has been dubbed 'the Palace in the Sky' and indeed, photos of its sumptuous interior reveal a suite that easily rivals a penthouse at Caesars palace in Las Vegas. "It's exceptionally Gold", as quoted by a Trump staffer. And of course this excites our own wannabe King Chump. 

So apparently, as the story goes, he was offered a tour of its interior at Palm Beach airport back in January of this year and he was immediately smitten.  So now, he refers to Air Force One as '.. a flying shit box..', according to reports from insiders. Ha Ha. Poor guy! Isn't it tough always trying to keep up with the Jones?

I will not comment on all the moral or legal outrage over it but because I'm an aesthetic in all things, what interests me is just how beautiful this plane looks from the outside.

If I had another career in me I think it might be as a design consultant for aviation companies. I've always been sensitive to the way jets have been painted. I'm almost always disappointed when I look out at the planes on the tarmac or overhead. American carriers are often the worst-looking planes with some of the ugliest designs in the world. But hey!   

But here is a svelte and aerodynamic design to the problem of the 747 because its hump at the front half of the fuselage has always been a bit wonky-looking. Though we've all grown to love it, it's still kind of awkward.  Most designs have rarely found a solution to it.

 

But here is an aeroplane that really works eye-pleasingly well! It's those air-streamed stripes that resemble air vortices that divert the eye quickly towards the rear tail rudder of fluid design pushes everything out the back of the plane at 500 MPH. Nice!  

Below, below, are ideas that Pan Am worked through. The first one (the earliest design back in the 1970's)  used a small font logo that gave the 747 a large balloon like feeling of friendliness, hence the nickname Jumbo Jet. The second one with extra extra large blue font takes our attention away from the hump. Nice solution!

Starry night revisited

 

Every few so often the New York Times presents to its viewers this 10-Minute Challenge to spend a few valued moments in front of a work of Art. The other day they proposed Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. Here (below) are a few details I liked. Little to say about it except that in this crazy news cycle it's a 10 minute oasis of calm.

If you are not a subscriber to the NYT they generally allow one or two free peeks at articles during a month. If you are a subscriber then it's just a quick click into a wonderful image that b.t.w. was completely invented by the artist while living in the asylum his small room in the asylum in Saint-Rémy. And b.t.w. (encore) When I visited the asylum back in the early 1970's, I managed to find my way into his old run-down room which was not at all difficult nor even forbidden. It was a run-down building at that point in time and watched over by a friendly guard, long before the commercial renaissance of Vincent Van Gogh. I remember the bars on the windows and the view of the field below, Les Alpilles beyond. 

Unlike so many of his large late pictures which were almost always finished quickly in one or two sessions, this was laboured and one can see the dry thick paint underneath later layers. I wonder if it's because when he was in front of Nature on the motif he 'saw' everything he needed at that moment to complete his vision? But without the motif at hand, he struggled to get everything 'right', thus the subsequent layers?