Museum shelves

29 May 2023

Museum shelves

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It’s the late Fall here, and yesterday, though not too cool as I was putting the laundry on the line, I heard the faint drone of the cicadas telling me that summer is almost gone. But in this Painting game that occupies my mind, each season offers up its own varied response to the angle of the sun.

The other evening was magnificent with such rich possibilities that I was able to made six smaller studies. This was the fourth one after the sun had buried itself behind me in the West. By the end of the session, the sky had looked like an inferno for the my picture, a hot spicy set of clouds that left wide scarves of pink and purple overhead. Below it, the sea glowed like embers in a fireplace. 

When I took the studies from the boot of the car the next morning to shoot them with my old i-phone 7, I suddenly had the feeling that I’d really like to see them all lined up around several long walls in a white gallery space in a renovated ‘Hotel de Ville’ somewhere in France. In these lovely old places there is an unusually large respect for how artworks are spaced around white walls of different sizes and configurations. They are often broken up discreetly by misshapen walls and indentations from the many broken centuries long ago. Marble fireplaces stand their ground in the grander rooms which are usually connected throughout by either six-sided tile floors in the South, or worn, creaky wood floors up North. I've known such places in cities and towns around France, and I still dream about them. 

Of course, these are just dreams and mostly desires which live on the highest shelf of my own personal bucket-list, because they always appear just out of reach. I’m sure that everyone has these dreams too, ones which they secretly yearn for but appear unattainable. Would they be for a better home or to be a nicer neighbourhood? Would they be for a loving partner? A family? Or just for a lover, a cat or a new car? Maybe it’s just a pile of money in a big bank account somewhere in the Caiman islands. There’s enough room for everyone up there in dreamland on the top shelf. I'm sure of it, because somewhere, in all of us, is a Don Quixote. I do believe that in everyone’s head there are bucket lists also that live on several shelves. Some are high up and maybe out of reach to most of us, but lower down there are others accessible with a stepladder, but only those well balanced and poised. Still others are easily at hand and achievable like just reaching for a pair of socks to wear. Can anyone of us be patient enough to obtain of any of them? But what then? What would we actually do with our dreams and desires once they are within reach?

Today, in this chapter of my own life, I would for reach an exhibition space large enough for one hundred, no,,, lets go with one hundred and fifty, small pictures that fill an entire 'Hotel de Ville' somewhere in France. 

I must be really old-school and/or somewhat traditional because I hate these shows where all the works are coupled together on a large wall and where it's impossible to see any of them individually. Of course, the whole point of this type of hanging is to obfuscate each independent work but impress us by the giant assemblage of all the work. I much prefer a linear approach, one by one for a measured meeting with an oeuvre. If I really like it I can pause and linger in its aura of truth and beauty sort of like old school Speed Dating or the new equivalent of Swiping a potential date to the right and out of my life in an instant.

In the culinary world of restauration I’d be a chef advocate for Slow Food. When I digest a picture in a show or museum, I like a space in which to appreciate what it is I am taking in. It’s also in this space of time I reserve to contemplate something with an unhurried star of mind. 

But it’s also the space between pictures in which I can breathe easily as I move along a wall full of images, each one just out of reach. I only need to put my attention upon the painting in front of me, not on the next one further down the wall nor in the next room. In this impatient digital world, where do I ever have this opportunity to just be slow and present in front of something? Luckily, for those with access to a park or forest, nature certainly does the trick for a lot of people, but then so does art. I really love museum exhibitions in France where they take all this stuff very seriously. Museums there, are like churches where everything is rather sacred and people speak in hushed tones in front of pictures. 

Normally, I’m not someone too constrained by time like so many people today, but when I go to see a big popular exhibition and I'm running a little late, my habit is to enter into show but quickly zip right up to the end of it in order to size it up and see what's in it. I need to know how many rooms there are, and what’s at the end, so I don't miss anything I know I’d like to spend time with for there is nothing worse than finding diamonds at the end of a show when the guards are pushing you out the door. So thus, I have a system that returns me to the very beginning of the show where and I begin again, and it works. If it’s crowded I cruise leisurely into the slip stream of the crowd while hunting for open spaces and works that catch my eye. I’m not such a linear or chronological kind of guy when it comes to many things in life, but like I said, when it comes to art, I’ll take space anytime.

Oh, the sunny dry days!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

These are not set out in chronological order but are rather all thrown together like wild flowers one has collected in a single afternoon because these skies here on a mundane beach are as varied as the British countryside in June.

After months of rainy skies we've been blessed recently with a string of dry sunny weeks and because I had not been out so regularly I'm super grateful to rediscover the ritual of steady work  from the variety of these Autumn skies. And although I'm a lazy gardener, I imagine it's not unlike the bliss one would feel picking fresh veggies from a generous garden in which their hands have been working the earthy soil each afternoon. A ritual of work when it's practiced steadily is a happy and lucky gift. I'm continually impressed by myriad of ideas that come into fruition when a daily ritual is established. It's almost easy to forget this vital link in the creative process. 

I've chosen these images randomly out of a large batch of work and I'm not even sure that many of them merit to be shown, but hey! 

In this seasonal moment the 'blooms' are short-lived most days but they are certainly interesting, and full of colour. There are also days when I'm pretty happy with what I'm up to but then, there are also days when I think I've exhausted the motif. But I know these are just feelings, so they pass. By the next day, I'm looking at the horizon line with a cautious optimism. Already today, the afternoon looks to be good, so I'll be on my way.  

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

 

The chariot of the Goddess Selene

30 November 2020

The chariot of the Goddess Selene

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This week I was looking at photos and videos from visits to London and I came across many from the British Museum where I used to draw from the marble reliefs, especially the famous horse’s head at the Parthenon Sculptures. 

When in London I usually make a beeline to the National Gallery where I visit with Piero della Francesca and Paulo Uccello. The next day it’s to the British Museum where like many tourists I’m haunted by the head of the horse on the far right display of the Parthenan. It’s one of the exhausted horses that draws the chariot of the moon goddess Selene throughout the night until dawn. If not sculpled by the master Phidias himself, it was at least drawn by him and executed by ones of his assistants in the 5th century. There are two heads which bookend the immense display of the Parthenon pediment. There are two other horses and Selene’s torso in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Originally, on the left corner of this pediment the chariot of Helios, the Sun God, rose from the sea at dawn to ride across the sky until dusk when the chariot of Selene the Goddess of the Moon took over riding the night until dawn when her chariot sinks into the sea again. At the right end of the pediment is what is left of the head of one of the stoic horses exhausted from fatigue.

 

Though it’s hyperbolic to admit, these works are at the height of technical perfection while at the same time, synchronised with an intuitive feeling of pathos unique to rare artists and artisans in throughout history. Like so much that came from the Mediterranean basin these works seem to be infused with a feeling of profound tragedy, so naturally a guy like me is quickly drawn to them. Like Netflix, which has a category entitled, “Movies to see in your lifetime”, these antique reliefs and sculptures that make up the Parthenon in the great hall of British Museum, are also things to be seen by everyone at least once in a lifetime. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

As we know, both dawn and dusk have been celebrated for thousands of years on earth. So though I detest the hour dawn, I do celebrate dusk in my own way here at a beach on the North Coast of New South Wales where like so many other places in my painting life I’ve also been drawn to the twilight hour like a wolf. Unlike most beach lovers, as I said, I shrink from the arrival of the dawn light like a vampire when the intense blazing light rips me away from all I cherish in the shaded nuances of night. But full disclosure; I came into this world at 8 AM and I think I hated to being pulled from the comforts of a womb entombed in dark and ignorant bliss. Was it was the bright light of the delivery room at New York Hospital that marked me forever with this distress? Could be, all I know is that though the dawn heralds great promise for most, it’s a huge let-down for me and it fills me with a general unease that’s impossible to understand. There! I've admitted it finally, and accepted it wholly; I’m a nocturnal creature who is roused from the torpid sunlight facing the bright day with 'my gloom-pleased eyes', as John Keats wrote in Ode To Sleep. But at twilight when Selene arrives driving her black hearse I'm again freed and liberated from my sunny woe. Sometimes she sees me and waves glumly and I wave back with good cheer at the night ahead. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So naturally, I perform better as the sun loses its grip over the vivid landscape when twilight sinks into the earth like a shower of fine fairy dust. These four pictures were all made under such an uncertain light. They were painted recently over the past few weeks and they appear to express perhaps my own regret at tragedy of perhaps being born. This made me think of the horse's head on the right end of the Parthenon pediment. It's amazing what comes out of both a painting session, but a writing one too. 

Many pictures done here at the end of the day are bright and colourful because they exude the optimism at the start of a session. On the other hand, these four, like cabooses, arrived at the end of each session when dusk dies and yields to darkness. 

They speak to the night that arrives by its on own volition no matter what the day has wrought. Weddings or funerals, love discovered, or just discarded, a child is born or dies, but both the terrible and joyful events of any day consistently will comes to an end. 

So again, compared with so many other paintings in this series that so often appear to exude a kind of beaming but quiet hope, these possess a gentle gloom. I like that they are so vastly different from day to day. I also like their casual finish, for they look a bit scratchy and beat up, insouciant even. My diary tells me that I was reasonably happy with them but not much more. 

As we approach the summer months the days seem to yearn for humid heat which brings a haze to the late afternoons that I can already see in these pictures. Like the brushstrokes themselves, they speak to the transitions that also go on underneath the surface of our lives life at every moment. These are simple studies and they could be like frames taken from a film of each evening’s descent into the darkness. They seem fleeting even, more there than here. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So yes, it’s true that I’ve always had this melancholia deep within, but better to finally accept it than pretend otherwise with a faint false smile. In truth, all the paintings from this series reveal the many different parts of me. Isn’t that the point of becoming any kind of artist in the first place? If it isn’t about self-discovery, why do it? And how could it be otherwise than for me to shine in such divine darkness?

Like the tired horse, yes me, the rueful unrequited lover, still entangles myself with this twilight motif on most evenings in order to foolishly behold all her beauty from afar. Sometimes, after a painting session I’ll even languish a while and await the first few stars to come out. It’s a resplendent moment and without any artifice or human input, just the night falling in silence, and it still always brings me pleasure.

Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

22 April 2018

 Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 April 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been tormented and bursting with water over the past few months giving me some wild paintings. Here are two real curiosites from the same afternoon last week. This one, to be fair, is bit of wreck if one judges it through a sanitary lens. Like many of the things I’m doing these days it’s messy and far from conventional in every way. It does however convey a feeling of storm clouds over a dark mysterious sea. It’s the sort of sky that's generally impossible for me to capture and condense quickly, so maybe this is why I see something special in it. But I admit that it’s also a tormented, and it's a brooding image that might not be easy many viewers.

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

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

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

I think it manifests a certain feeling I’ve been aware of within me when working here at the beach under such skies. Although it wouldn’t perhaps appeal to a large public, some painters might see something in it. I secretly wish I had the formula to paint others as easily as I painted this one today. I can still feel like a beginner all over again each time I go out there to work, but it’s a better gig than that of poor Sisyphus.

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

But Baudelaire was not only speaking of great artists like Van Gogh and Igor Stravinsky, but of so many others too, professional and amateur alike, who all linger like me, in the shadows of Art’s long and wiggly road. I feel confident, even arrogant enough, that he may have also been speaking about an image like this, one hundred and fifty years before its creation. 

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

To me it also reveals an unusual aspect of Nature, one from a very particular perspective; close up, and cropped. It doesn’t display a concept or a conventional viewpoint, it derives naturally from a wild Nature. It’s a set of clouds mushrooming over a sea at dusk in almost miniature scale as if selected by a 75mm telephoto lens. It evokes for me, a Thelonious Monk, off kilter and in your face, a sloppy primitive voice in all the right places, where Monk’s genius is camouflaged as an autistic child. 

An architect says

 

10 March 2021

An architect says

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

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

Dominique Perrault (1953- )

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

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

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

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

Their grammar speaks of space, light, and volume, I think maybe in the same way that some painters still do. But their concerns are bigger and bolder, more important than just flat surfaces with colour imposed upon them. They appear more concerned with grand schemes and seem to worry about how we as humans, writ large, cohabitate amongst ourselves in rural settings or in cities. If judged by Art Fairs today, my mild regret, or rebuke, would be that painters on the whole, seem less serious than architects, certainly more insignificant. They even seem more frivolously narcissitic and irreverent than the serious and consequential gang that both house and home us all. I’ve come to see painters like poets, important, but left behind the real art form of the 20th century; films. Alas, mostly what we do, when we do it poorly, is solipsitic and without meaning. But when it’s sublime, it’s divine. Painting today, is what so many of us creative types do to dig deep into ours souls, exploring the hidden parts of us that we don’t really need to explain to anyone else. So it has a purpose, still. But it’s not part of the zieguist that it maybe once was a few hundred years ago. Some painters crossed over to make films like Julian Schnabel who has made two careers for himself. But the art world is so vast that honestly the only people who seem to make a regular income from it are the galleries. It reminds me a bit of the records labels that sprang up in the 20th century that spread popular music around the world and made oodles of money. Unless they hit it big, the musicins scraped by are like the painters. But hey!

So being a painter, I must now wade back into this discussion and either put up or shut up. I was thinking of this picture from the other evening to illustrate my thoughts about Monsieur Perrault’s quote. For me, this painting reveals a delicate range of light, one that permeates a surface of the image with the barest hint of matter. This notion of ‘presence and disappearance’ is what really appealed to me about this quote. In painterly terms, it’s an attempt to capture something as fine as light itself, so fragile it could shatter just by staring at it too sternly.

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

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

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