Wild horses

March 26 2018

Wild horses

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, March 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Autumn rain has arrived and it’ll be on and off again for another month or so. Meanwhile I jump into the sea most nights before working. Nice! 

It was a beautiful evening for this strange picture, the sky was full of giant, dark, elephantine clouds that seemed to rise up out of the sea like monsters from a Greek myth. There was a small moon overhead which allowed me to work later into the evening. On lovely evenings like this I always seem to think to myself, “these are wonderful moments in life, and I’m just smart enough to know it, right here, right now”.

Though this is a messy and frightful-looking thing, I find it compelling and exotic. But best of all: it’s flat, and this compression is something I really like.This is definitely not a picture for a pedestrians. Looking at it now, I see an impatient painter who cannot seem to get it all down fast enough. Yes, it’s scratched and a bit sloppy, but I love all this stilted imperfection of haste, it’s a map of battle scars, bitten by the wind out on the sand dunes like an older Great White Pointer one sees in undersea photos. I admit that it’s not for everyone who expects from Nature, elements more refined, more reassuring, and easier to digest, but what can you do?

I can’t help it, this is what comes up and out of me in front of such a sky. Like most painters I’m intuitively searching for solutions to the endless problems of painting each time I work. It can only really come to me while I paint, not while I’m comfortably thinking about it elsewhere although this can be part of the process. Once one has sorted out the problems of colour and drawing in one’s life, next, it’s how to bring order to chaos. But of course, there many others who delight in throwing order out the window just because they can, Art is a big tent, after all, and it has its own order of democracy, but Form appears to be my steady white whale.

In this picture I’m walking a knife-edge because this could appear too wildly eccentric to be a seascape, something so awkward that it’s either really good, or just a big flop. The sky appears to be pressed and pasted to the canvas board, and the sea stands up flat, almost rigid like a defiant ridge that one still needs to traverse. Personally, I love seeing oceans that stand up vertically because they remind me of old Chinese ink drawings of cliffs that tower over the sea.

So this was painted with sloppy haste like an Expressionist, but my aim like for all these things, was to grab hold of this motif like it was a wild horse, tame it, then make it my own. This is the kind of image that a painter like Philip Guston might have liked. But any self-expression or mark-making within it was merely a by-product of the process, not the means to the end like the current trend of mark-making that is so popular thses days. So on this particular path I’ve chosen, there seems to be a way forward even if I can’t take anyone else with me, life-vest or not.

Hiatus

 

8 February 2017

Hiatus

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 February 2017, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I seem to be back working from Nature again and I’m so grateful because it feels like hooking up with an old friend after a long while and one remembers just how much the relationship has been missed. And being at the beach, specifically at dusk under this immense sky is wildly comforting in its own strange but familiar way. But at the same time I’m again facing my old fears around perfectionism in front of such an wild motif. But it’s also like hooking up with a new painter inside of me which makes me feel special again, like an actor returning to his favorite stage. 

One could say that this motif is a cliche of beauty, a photo for a tourist calender, the mundane postcard of a beach and sky that encircles all of Australia. It is this of course, but I’m sure I can make something new and different with it. I have a strange and perhaps unreal belief that I can. At the dusk hour when the colours of the sky are unleashed upon the sea it is so pictorially intoxicating that I’m reminded of my early school days in front of a messy blackboard when I felt mesmerized by the cryptic beauty of algebra class. But in this case, it’s in technicolour.

I am careful when using the word beauty because it is such an emotionally charged idea these days. Like God it can put many people into a tizzy of 

discord. However hesitant I am in public, with close friends I use it freely. As an adjective, beautiful is even trickier. But I think beauty is still a deeply personal idea despite how John Keats equates it with Truth as if they are brother and sister in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn. But, like we say these days in popular films; it’s complicated. But it’s nuanced too, because Post Modernism is still like a spy hiding behind every grammatical slip.

Beauty certainly projects an idea even more personal than other highly over-hyped words like, genius or love, for instance. Obviously, being a Romantic in the historical sense, I’ll stick with John Keats on this even if am considered old-fashioned,,,, but Hey! 

Essentially, I’m a simple painter who is grateful to be part of a vocation that is one of the oldest of humankind. I desire is always to convey a visual idea to someone through the craft of painting. But this isn’t the reason why I paint. I paint because, in this crazy world, it’s one thing that grounds me and makes my life more fulfilling and consequently I can live with more hope.

It’s been about a month since I began a series of small studies done just as the sun has dropped down into the West and behind me. Being on the eastern side of Australia, I’m naturally facing the East. This is that time of day when most things in Nature prepare for sleep and the shades are drawn. Dusk and twilight, both equally sensual in meaning can still be altered with a slight twist of a sentence. For me personally, it’s always been the time of day when I’m happiest. The French call it ‘l’heure entre le chien et le loup’, but we know it as just ‘The hour of the wolf’. But for me, being like a vampire, it’s when I awaken.

Anyway, what really interests me what happens before twilight, dusk, however I refer to it. It’s really the prequel, when with delicious speed, the sky prepares the world for death like a nurse putting a patient to sleep. It can often feel like a primeval rite, one shared by millions of beachcombers each afternoon all over the world.

Facing the sea, with my back to the setting sun I can watch every colour of the sky interact chromatically with those upon the sea below. It’s more an 

exercise of the eyes than of the mind. The eyes see it all before the mind can arrange it. And because one has such a small window within which to 

operate, one must be quick and fearless at the same time. Unlike my usual state of daydreams, here at the beach at dusk, my whole attention is focussed on the small painting on the easel but at the same time as all the hell breaking loose in the sky out front. I’m the guy on the bow of the ship like 

Odysseus, who had himself tied to the mast during a storm in order to hear the song of the Sirens. Turner, too, in fact, had himself tied up to the mast of a ship during a storm so he could also feel it. I love that, something about these acts strike me as the same kind of eccentric passion that pushed Vincent Van Gogh to put lit candles on his straw hat so he could see his palette while painting at night in Arles. I love these guys.

This strange study of the other night bothers me. It feels too crude and poorly designed as a picture and yet there is something in it that when seen at a distance might work. My new resolve, a promise to myself, is not to destroy anything just because I don’t like it. I want to develop patience and this will be an exercise so thus, I will keep them at least for now because Time is also Truth in the world of Painting, like Truth is Beauty according to Keats.

In any case, at the end of a long day, painting these small things is becoming a friendly habit again in my life. Nice! 

Past and future

9 February 2022

Past and future

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This will sound banal on the surface, but as a painter, I’ve come to understand that each instant has its own picture embedded in it. My experience reveals that painting the sea in the late afternoon has made it easier to witness the  incremental changes that go on imperceptibly during each moment of the day. And within these moments are pictures available for anyone who is there willing to capture them. I imagine that working in the desert would be a different visual experience by altering my responses to a dry landscape that holds and diffuses light. But here at the beach, the light is very much conditioned by the sea. A painter only seizes those fragile instants that are available to him or her, in a specific condition. If one follows what Nature offers up in those moments there is a window, one only offered to each artist. Of course, this is an obvious observation, but because I'm feeling nerdy today I'll point it out. 

This study was one of two the other evening. It had been a hot humid summer day and puffy low cumulus clouds were drifting in with a lazy onshore breeze. It can sometimes happen when the conditions are just right that these small balls of cloud catch the last rays of the setting sun and turning them bright orange. They appear so low you can imagine just picking them like oranges right from the sky. Behind them, at the same time, a hazy dim cloud base of broken violets remains in retreat like a theatre decor on stage. I love it when these elements line up to materialise all at once. Luckily, this happened the other night and I was there to catch it. 

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

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

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

Curiously, on a program on France Musique the other day, there was a sublime piece by Shubert being played. Just afterward, the conductor, who was being interviewed, simply said about it, 

“It is religious without god”. 

So, though I don’t think I spent more than twenty minutes on this small picture here, I like the feeling in it. And without it being too obvious, I think I caught it as it was, plainly visible in just an instant, not too early nor too late. I can also already see in it, a picture from my future, one that's always still reshaping my intuition despite my longer shadow I cast in this lifetime. I guess this why we improve with time if we stick with our chosen craft. 

That being said

4 October 2021

That being said

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Most of my life, I think I have only ever been drawn to the misty, shrouded fog. I think it goes back to childhood when I somehow I felt more protected under the rainy shadows of clouds than under the happy, naked and expansive empty sky. I’ve always loved the uncertainty of transitional atmospheres, the nuances of everything in life from the weather into art and language. It’s strange that it took me so long to see this fact about myself when today it appears so clearly evident. 

I found this old entry in a diary from a painting trip in Italy. It’s from one I was transcribing last year. I have been trying to get a page or two into the laptop daily but it’s Herculean task. Suddenly, I was surprised at how this image correlated with an entry from tonight.

Venice, 18 September, 1986

“My spirits are lifting day by day but I have no idea why. These studies don’t come out the way I want and yet I still feel hope, like a climber making his way slowly up the backside of the mountain while the summit remains still hidden from view. 

However, I am finding my way very slowly each day, the images come up for me more easily despite my hiccups. This morning, I found my way into a rather curious vision of San Giorgio at sunrise. Half-hidden in a shroud of purple/orange fog, San Giorgio looms out over a green orange sea. Needless to say, I enjoyed the haziness because maybe it’s what I really want in the end. And immediatley as I write this, it makes me think of Monet, Turner and Whistler, who all also adored these obscure visual sentiments while making so much from Venice. I shall not be afraid of these influences. But increasingly over the past five days, I have been wondering to myself what it is that I really want to do here? I am certainly not at all interested in replicating the physical charm which Venice presents to the world… these wonderful and unique details of windows, balconies, bridges etc, etc, etc,,, It’s all been done a million times before by far more competent painters than myself. One really has to know what they want to do in a place like Venice or they’re wasting their time. What I begin to see are images that lurk between the off-hours of twilight and daybreak, images born from the misty boundaries between sea and stone. These are fog-filled days when nothing is what it seems and in these small moments when there is a of a sliver of sunlight, it is bliss for me.”

So thirty odd years later it should makes perfect sense that I found my way into a series of twilight studies here at Brunswick Heads, N.S.W. Australia. It’s like someone at the Sunday tennis crew who kindly said to me; “What took you so long?” when I showed up to play one day. I smiled and jumped on one of the courts. What I didn’t tell him was that I had felt too inferior to their game, but since I’ve improved I stepped up. The one thing you don’t ever want to be for a casual afternoon of doubles is the worst player. I made sure to bring new balls each time as if to pay-to-play, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, as Uncle Boris in the Bronx used to say. It’s an easy crew of nice guys who take over several courts on Sundays for whoever shows up to play. Basically I wouldn’t have joined it unless I could carry a good rally for a while, it’s all about just getting the ball back over the net no matter what. That’s at the very minimum and I can handle that. Like any sport one loves practicing, the better the opponent, the better one becomes oneself. So, I finally got on the tennis court with some strong players far better than myself and they haven’t yet thrown me out so I keep going back each week with new balls. 

So every step up in life is always a challenge like this colourful sky which for years kept me away out of fear of failure. One day I just stepped up and began working. 

This dark picture from the other night came out of a dreary evening full of clouds and truthfully, from the start, I was depressed at the thought having to make anything from it. I think I even resented it like running into someone on the street whom I don’t really like. But that said, I threw myself into it and eventually managed to find a few glimmers of light in the clouds which I then used as handrails to climb into the painting. Some evenings are like that, you've just got to get a rally going and see where it goes.

"Oh"

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 October 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Sometimes one paints something that gets right by them, and only later do they take a double take and think to themselves; "Oh.... did I do that?" 

It's a funny but nice feeling, and one to cherish for sure, but of course it was painted back in October so it's easy to forget about. But it surprises me especially because it looks like a painting that was done while facing the Western sky with the sun just hidden behind the horizontal cloud. But it was actually painted, like all of these pictures, facing the East with the sunset behind me. If I were a viewer and didn't know this fact, I might easily assume that it was painted of the setting sun in the West. Maybe this is too trivial a detail for anyone to get excited about, but for me, it reveals something about these paintings of which I might take for granted.  It has to do with the light, because I always seem to anchor into a light source no matter how much luminosity is actually present in the sky. Am I improvising it? It's possible, because each of these pictures are improvised. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, a light source in the motif is found and I exploit it for all I'm worth. But in any event, I am surprised by this picture from last October and I'm happy that I was able to paint it because it looks above my pay grade somehow. This is why I can say: "Oh"... did I do that?".

In this image I also really like the black sea even though I don't use black paint. It was made from Prussian Blue, a deep red, and a bit of yellow. And like a chef preparing soup, there's a dash of witchcraft. But I also love nothing more than a variety of pinks smooching up against a discreet black. It's my Art-Deco fetish.

I'm always amazed when I come across older pictures which I had forgotten. If there are really good like this one, they remind me when I awaken each morning that I'm worth more than how I feel in those first ten minutes of my day.

    

The funeral home

11 August 2021

The funeral home

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 August 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here is something from a few days ago. A strange dark thing. It was the third and last one of the day and so different from the other two which were bright and airy. A storm had gradually arrived after approaching from the North East and it was already getting a bit dark for this picture. I like the sudden feeling in it; lonesome and forlorn after a day of sunshine.

I put it up on Instagram and was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception. It’s a funny thing about Instagram, everybody criticises it and dumps on the the stupidity of so much narcissism present, but after living in a void for most of my life, I like it. I use it only for work, nothing more personal that because basically I don’t have much of a life with much pizzaz that would interest others. Like so many painters and creators of a certain generation, I’ve lived and worked in isolation because that was what life was like before the smart phone. After all, I did come from an era when a telegram arrived to inform me to come home quickly if I wanted to see my father before he died, which I did.

I spent twenty years in the Aix countryside with no means of getting my work out nor to communicate so freely about it. I was part of a whole generation of creative solitaires. Although cities were hubs where one mingled within the exchange of cosmopolitan ideas and friendship, many artists still lived in isolation from a viewing public even in cities. So now that we can publish an image instantly around the globe it's really magical. I still scracth my head over this fact. Imagine Paul Gauguin file sharing paintings of Brittany with Vincent in Arles?

But today, back here on the Pacific Coast of Australia, these small pictures are diffused around the globe with ease and much gratitude for I am no luddite. This study from two evenings ago is somewhat different vis-a-vis so many others in the series. It’s simple in the extreme, and is it because I seem to have several different painters inside me? 

Actually, I think I should just be grateful for the large closet of sartorial style within me. These painterly peregrinations lead me all over the shop and they remind me of that good advice from writers who ask themselves in mid-paragraph; Is this what I really want to say? Like them, I’m just painting what is present right in the moment and what appears real, but looking at this image now it makes me think of a funeral home. 

I believe this is as important for a painter as it is for a writer, though to be honest (and I’ve shared this a lot) I rarely think much when I am in the middle of a small study. Writers have all the time in the world to think and to fantasise while leisurely smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. The way I work makes any of this impossible, but anyway, what would children think if they saw a painter at the beach next to a bottle of wine planted in the sand?

But as long as I keep working, keep seeing, keep feeling, I cannot complain. It would be horrible to be stuck. Believe me, I know, because I have often been stuck for long periods at a time throughout my life. I think the one good thing about aging is that one seems to care less about all that stuff that previously consumed all my attention. I think artists and writers love what is real at the moment no matter what they are doing or wherever they’re doing it. We’re all like golfers who need to concentrate in the moment while trying to avoid the yips. 

As this stormy sky the other night was about to bring sheets of rain I wanted to finish up quickly and beat it out of there in a hurry. Yes,,,, I almost hate to admit it but sometimes a picture looks a certain way just because the painter was in a hurry.

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint, #2

30 July 2021

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint, #2

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

So I had a dream the other night wherein I was walking through the forest behind the Chateaunoir but as an adult, and remembering my way around like it was fifty years earlier. I think it came because for the past few days I’ve been looking through a small book I’ve had of the last flower portraits by Edouard Manet. Like I’ve intimated, though I admired him I was never a huge fan of his despite his giant and well-earned reputation, but that said, I really love these small intimate pictures I discovered so much later. Of course, I had seen his large things as a child and was amazed by the verisimilitude of his craft of which he was certainly a master. When I became a painter myself though he kind of slipped away from my circle of heroes. 

In my early years I was beginning to learn about how a picture is organically formed from its very inception instead of just being pieced together one element after the next, then added to create a kind of collage of form. The French say ‘Bricolage’ for such things that are randomly assembled (any which way) when put together one piece at a time. Some of it can be wonderful and there is a grand history of this kind of Painting to be sure. But at this time, Léo was already teaching me about something else, about how a picture could also spring to life from a vision as a unified whole. Consequently, this changed forever the way I would not only look at Painting, but all art. I decidely had an unusual art education unlike anything in America or even Europe as far as I knew. This was the reason I stayed in France throughout the 1970’s, and then later too.

So if I wasn’t crazy about Manet, why do I love these late flowers done right before his death? Though he is known for his early and famously large  pictures made for the Salon like Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, it was the intimacy of these small flower portraits which snared me. He had been chasing fame most of his career with large pictures, and though well painted, his work was shocking to a conventional public with no appetite for irony. Though much celebrated at the very end of his life, an illness slowed him down to working alone in his studio in front of small vases of flowers. It was a simple motif and lacking any presumption. They certainly fall into a genre of work that goes back centuries in Europe, but the manner in which he created them was Modernist I think. He asked us to look at Springtime through its children, its lilacs and roses, poppies and peonies, irises and wisteria. They appear so modest and lacking any pretention that one could almost walk right by them. There is none of the artifice I’ve seen in his large celebrated things. They possess for me that straight-forward ‘no-nonsense’ style that one can sometimes feel in the presence of such subdued elegance.

They are smallish works, certainly no bigger than perhaps 40 X 30 cm. They were executed without a lot of correction or fiddling about, and apparently executed in few brief sessions at most. It was under the guidance of his two young admirers, Monet and Renoir, who both pushed Manet to work directly in front of Nature, ignoring his predilection for a clean finish and to abandon himself to the pleasures of spontaneity and an undisciplined approach to a painting session. At the end of his life, these last pictures seem to say: Forget about the public, just enjoy the pleasures of a few small flowers in a vase and just the paint itself. Unfortunately, his health was declining and he was sequestered at home with a nurse. These small studies are fitting farewells to a creative life during a most remarkable era in French Painting. 

I first saw them in Paris where many of them all lived together in the comfort of the cluttered Jeu de Palme Museum. Now I think they live in the Musee d’Orsay, but wherever, they feel just right, expressing enough, but no more. These are creatures that hide their creator and they seem to live on beyond his death in their own oxygen tent.

I think they are beautifully painted though today, many young people may find them ‘too 19th century’, but I still like them very much. They appear modern to me, timeless even. I use the word ‘beautifully’ in defiance of the large dark shadow of Post-Modernist orthodoxy, a shade under which we are all now subjected to live, but hey! 

When one looks at the lives of great giants in every creative domain, the instinct for the student/admirer is to follow their paths. One does it for a while yet at a certain point sometimes it’s best to jump ship and go find your own even if you fall down for a while. We’ve all been there, failing is the greatest part of a painter’s training. 

Finding one’s own vocation in the arts is but the first step. Failure is the second, and it can hit one like sledge hammer, but it can also teach a young student more than when they do eventually succeed. If one is committed, their success will usually arrive in drips and drabs but may not be recognised by the lucky recipient until much later in their lives. I’m not referring to a bright worldly commercial success but an artistic one, more like Manet at the end of his brilliant and successful career, when he settled into a simple routine in front of a vase of lilies.   

This second painting from the same night really reveals what the winter sky down here is capable of doing. The sky went crimson red then dropped into the sea which it will often do with skies like this. It always translates into various shapes of deep warm violets that take over the water. It doesn’t last long but I’ve learned to wait for it then pounce at the right instant. 

Like a true narcissist, it exhibits just the right amount of emotional melodrama to seduce a needy painter.