Seven small syllables and seven small paintings

22 September 2022

Seven small syllables and seven small paintings

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 September 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I was watching a film the other night wherein two characters seemed interested in one another. Speaking on the telephone, split screen, the woman, at one point, says to the man, “I have been thinking of you”. Then the screen seems to fill with an empty pause full of desire.

Just seven small syllables, like a line of Haiku marking a time and place that press this moment out of all others into someone’s startled heart. This tiny set of words for any man or woman can either set them sailing or shipwreck them both. And chaste like a pearl necklace it’s the most restrained string of words in the whole, wild, world of romance.

                                                                                                            

It is a poignant place, this space, where two people meet weightless, where’s there’s no gravity nor expectations beyond their earthly hopes and dreams. 

                                                                                                                       

I began to think about the sudden desire that lives within this small set of words as if they were precious stones inlaid upon the clasp of a fragile necklace. They are uttered at the very onset of a love affair at the front door but also perhaps much later on if a couple is both lucky and thoughtful.

But in each case it’s an invitation to engage intimately, for it’s a clean and embossed calling card that needs a quick reply.

In a world of love, everyone has either received these small words or delivered them softly themselves, maybe whispered in a chapel or on a card from Paris, or maybe just from the other side of the bed.

And though we might seem to live in a world of false expectations, there is promise in every busy signal for Cupid has all our numbers.  

And like a love story at its dark end, dusk too, at the close of each day, seems to poison the light with regretful refrain. 

These seven images, all painted within months of one another, share the barest of necessities and they speak to me of those seven syllables that place an intimate bookmark of time tracing my own appearance into this fragile part of the day when I come out to paint. And like desire, they too possess an uncertainty, but not without an idea concrete enough to live within their own brushstrokes. 

And though I did not set out with an idea of making such evocative paintings, these come the closest to any love letters I’ve ever written.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 july 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 September 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 September 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 September 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Monday! a day for Piero della Francesca!

 

6 March 2021

Monday! a day for Piero della Francesca!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Monday! A sunny day for Piero della Francesca, whom I can never get enough of during these cloudy times. They say, (some idiot back in the day) that all roads lead to Rome. Well, in the world of Painting, I wonder if all roads don’t just lead us back to Arezzo and Piero della Francesca. I think somehow that there is enough in his oeuvre  to please just about everyone who loves Art, even the Post-Modernists.

Although I try not to speak with others about politics, art, or religion, I sometimes cannot help myself because in the news the other day was an article about all the idle rich people who travel around the globe looking fabulous. At the very same time I had been looking at some photo details I had taken of the Piero della Francesca’s at the National Gallery in London, and it occurred to me that no matter how rich one might be, one still has to face one’s ageing body and mind as well. But nothing, I mused, will decay a mind faster than spending all one’s time and money looking and being fabulously rich. But hey, that’s me. Besides, being glamorous is more than just looking glamorous or rich,,,, just sayin.  

There are those (usually in Europe and Asia) who can sometimes handle immense wealth that's been kicking around in the family for centuries and know how to handle great wealth. At the same time, too much money can also cast long dark shadows over any family's legacy. Like Balzac wrote, behind every great fortune lies a great crime. But it isn't it so easy to forget everything when one feels rich?

Anyway, many Americans know all about being rich, really rich sometimes, but I think only a tiny portion of them understand the cultivation of wealth. Even more importantly, it seems like a even a long lost art, this cultivation of its close cousin, culture. 

Myself, I think one's possession of culture is one of the greatest attributes of being a human. It's right up there with honesty and humility. Though many pretend otherwise, it is not strictly aligned with wealth. Nor is the possession of culture is the kind of wealth that can be stored in a vault or withdrawn from a cashier. It's a discreet currency and valued heroically by a person's understanding of history; artistic, economic, and socio-political. It may sound stupid to some, or obvious to others, but I think in the end, it’s better to be a poor but happy and cultured person than a rich unhappy and uncultured one. 

Further, I can personally affirm that being a poor but reasonably happy artist is far superior to being a rich but unhappy collector. Though obviously, I'd be in a tiny minority in this circle. So when I read about glamorous globetrotters looking fabulous, all my barbed bias flies out of my ears like asian hornets. 

But the solution to all this lowbrow inanity is for a painter to spend time with Piero della Francesca, whose light will banish any dark clouds away from anyone's tarnished soul. 

Being a painter, I'm assaulted by all kinds of questions in his presence. When in London, where I regretfully haven't been in ages, I’ve always visited him in a small room in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery. It's a small cloistered space, so discrete that I don't think I've ever shared it with another gallery visitor. In front of these pictures, I'm immediately astounded by the bright colours which appear to have been bathed and pampered in luminosity like they're newborns. 

His colourful creations must have been a great surprise to the 15th century world of Art. It was a rich period in this early Italian Renaissance which he shared with many other painters around him at the time. There were many 

painters around him who also loved rich colour, notably Masaccio in nearby Florence, who I think was his closest artistic cousin. 

But I think we had to wait until the harsh Provençial light of Cézanne before witnessing anything as effervescent, for both he and Cezanne seemed to have evoked the sheer joy of painting pure luminosity.  

I approach him not as an academic, nor even as an historian because I'm neither, I'm just a painter. His pictures cannot be understood from a book or indeed even lectured about, but to be seen and experience with shock. I confess freely, that I come to them humbled by own shortcomings as painter of the 21st century. 

Is his delicious work just a remnant of a distant past and locked away from our modern world? Or is it relevant to painters today? Naturally, I believe the latter because I see a future for Painting in his entire oeuvre. It will no doubt be a new artistic sensibility with a fresh set of eyes that's capable of finding the key to its entrance. 

Whenever I look around at what I see in the art world today I can often feel lost, so I retreat quickly back into my own small oeuvre like it's a cosy mouse hole. 

Though surely a cultural zeitgeist must exist somewhere today, it's not something that can be accurately described because I think it's but a perception framed by its own time. I also think it's unreal, a kind of unicorn, like a rainbow in the sky that everyone wants to touch and hold, get a piece of, so as to not miss out on it. In this time of digital interconnectivity it's become even more nebulous and hard to pin down especially in cultural terms. There are lots of things going on but are they real and lasting?

This idea of the zeitgeist is a conceptual container to hold everything together perhaps like a vase, but does it hold wine or water? Is it The Dark Ages or The Enlightenment. 

How do we bookend our cultural relevancy? Don't we classify everything as chapters in our past that we retroactively ascertain to be a time of some importance only from a future vantage point? 

So today, for instance, when I look around at trends in the art world I see an explosion of possibilities. Alas, much it of is dictated by the world of the money-ed and the cashed-up. They leave it to the galleries and museums who make most of the choices. They are the salespeople, who like jugglers, keep all the balls in the air at the same time. 

The cultural zeitgeist of today is still forming but when one looks back on this chapter of humanity, will they see PornHub or Parasite?

Personally, I think the future of Painting for me is mostly found somewhere in the past. When I cite the past I also mean the bits and pieces from my own work that show up at random moments when I least expect it. 

And though we all do it from to time, it’s an unhealthy pastime for artists to be looking around in the present moment for something durably original. Somehow, I think it's like those who insecure souls who are trying be glamorous at every instance. If there is a zeitgeist today, it might not be more complicated than what our Instagram influencers get up.

So what's the answer for a painter? All we can do is keep looking, keep seeing, and keep painting while hoping for the best. 

So now, after all my pontificating, I must also speak about my own humble endeavour at the beach the other evening. The clouds which were forecast to arrive in the afternoon never did so it turned into a delicious sky. This is one of two studies from the other day. It gave me that age-old feeling that I had somehow missed my vocation of being a pastry chef. It’s not brilliant or anything original but it felt really good to be out painting again on the dunes. I really liked the swab of thick peach paint that sideswiped the lemon-yellow band already encrusted and pasted over a thin sky. 

Is is it alive? Would someone who sees it today  maybe like it in one hundred year's time? It's hardly glamorous, it's just postcard after all, but one from this time precisely, because I dated it 4 March 2021. It's a window, maybe a small one like on a 747 in economy, but a window nonetheless, through which one can see the world outside.

If there had been enough light left to see my palette, I might have continued because the sky was still quivering with energy. 

Ugly Duckling.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 June 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25

A few things from the winter beach light here in Australia. The first four are from  the other night while the last one is from last month and it's the ugly duckling of the group.

These winter months provide the most sublime light here. The nights get cold but the days are generally easy between 16 - 22 degree celsius and these winter skies (and seas) can be blindingly bright compared to summer conditions. They can go from the palest Prussian Blue to Lime Green before transforming into yellow, then pink, and ultimately a deep violet. Nice!

I'm not crazy about all of these studies from the other night but I do like the top two. Like a poster of a sexy port somewhere in Italy that I might see in a Travel Agency, it reminds me of a place I'd love to soon go. Painters always see their future in drips and drabs which I guess is a good thing because in the state of the world at present, life feels weird and out of control. We all need to know that there is a future out there beyond all the nonsense of the present. I'm American, so I'm sensitive to these things in this moment.

But pictures, for a painter, will also show us what we might want to be doing in the future and not just where we might wish to be. In this top painting for instance, I can see large pictures painted with great simplicity and almost completely Non-Objective. This is my Holy Graal. 

The other studies are a little less interesting to me, perhaps they are too referential and speak too much of Nature. But hey! I'm happy and grateful for any productive session that the Gods grant me. 

It has been crumby weather all winter and full of rain and stormy clouds so whenever it looks good to work, I'm out the door. It's my only real therapy.

This last picture (at bottom) still looks like a mess to me. It was done last month under a very difficult sky. I knew it would be hard, but like I said, it's my therapy so I go out to the beach even when the sky's in a bad mood because I need these sessions. So the other evening, I was plodding through a few pictures without success when a lovely woman came up to say hello and look at what I was doing. This happens almost everyday, and honestly, if I were forty years younger and great-looking, I'd get a lot of dates. But anyway, though I normally hate painting in front of anyone, I didn't seem to  care at that point because I was so lost in that hopeless sky. So we chatted while I worked on this last picture. She liked it and even wanted to buy it so I gave her my Instagram details. She left eventually and because I still wasn't happy with it I fiddled so more with it. I knew it was a mess, and I knew she wouldn't contact me, but everything was cool. I'm used people telling me they'll buy something only to disappear. No worries, in fact, I would have given it to her just for the fun of it. This is the life of a painter. 

But despite everything, like my Uncle Boris up in the Bronx used to say, "Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes it eats you".

‘Twas beauty that killed the beast’ part 2

 

21 June 2022

‘Twas beauty that killed the beast’ part 2

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18 June 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Come to think of it, motifs also run madly through the history of Music too. One can spot them as abundantly in Debussy as in Ravel, in Mahler as in Brahms, in BB King as in Keith Richards. Great, original artists of every kind are obsessive by nature and melodic motifs and harmonies appear to be recorded in loops through their DNA.

Nonetheless, as a painter, I see now that it's not me who has tamed the beast, but the beast which has tamed me, for it's the motif that dictates my choices and shows me how to proceed. As in a Greek tale, it's  like a mythological creature that leads me safely through the twilight zone and into darkness, and having vanquished my task, it delivers me safely home each night.

Since I began this series I've struggled at various moments as I search for newer paths into how nature can guide me to solutions for this simple motif. It has also sometimes felt like I'm in possession of an ancient map, which if I followed it closely, I was told it would lead me to a great treasure.

With time, this map, although a little more tattered and frayed, is still my guide leading me to this quixotic treasure. Like maybe with other explorers, cultural and otherwise, I couldn't realise then it would be an endless adventure nor one without a big pay out at the end. I found out that this treasure would be doled out to me in small sums each afternoon. 

And this is funny because I had always secretly imagined I'd finally succeed by reaching the 'golden ring’. I thought it would deliver me ‘the great truth’ and fill in all the gaps of my ignorance and sense of insignificance. I had dreamed of that sort of magic that would finally allow me to rest on my laurels in a quiet garden with a head stone marking all my successes and none of my failures. I’d have the perfect home, the perfect partner, the great car and I will have captured the secrets of beauty forever. Henceforth, paintings would run through me like a waterfall at Mount Olympus.

Ha, ha,,, it sounds like a Broadway show from the 1930’s and written for all those poor dreamers during the Depression. But like so many other painters, I’ve finally learned the hard truth that it’s only through the tenacious search for beauty that I could wrestle with any peace at all.

Like that famous line at the end of King Kong when the poor beast has fallen 60 stories to its death, a journalist remarks, 

“Well, I guess the planes finally got him in the end!” to which the film producer who was standing nearby responds,

“Nah, it wasn’t the planes that got him, ‘twas Beauty that killed the beast”  

‘Twas beauty that killed the beast’

21 June 2022

 ‘Twas beauty that killed the beast’ part 1

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is from several nights ago. It's one of two done on the same evening on a chilly beach. I arrived to find a sublime 'bloom' about to explode. I set up in haste and luckily, it allowed me in easily like an impatient lover waiting at the front door. And for some reason, I love this one particularly. It satisfies me emotionally, which I think is a funny thing to say about a seascape. I had been home all day and nothing seemed to be going right for me. It was one of those days. So lucky me, when all else fails in my life, the beach awaits me eat dusk and sometimes with ardour. 

Both images share my proclivity for large bands of colour like those oversized ribbons used to wrap automobiles on American quiz shows in the 1960’s. 

But today, it’s the 21st of June, and being the Summer Solstice, France will celebrate the Fête de la Musique today. As its title implies, throughout the country, music festivals will explode everywhere all day and into the night.   

The idea initially come from an American musician in Paris working for France Musique who had proposed the idea for a music festival on each of the Solstices, both winter and summer. Jack Lang, the then Minister of Culture, liked the idea so he created the festival back in 1982. It became an instant success because, who doesn't like a music festival? It has since blossomed into a monster day of music and has spread throughout the world though mostly in Francophone countries. In cities, towns and villages, one can hear anything from someone playing Debussy in a tiny garden on an upright piano to a band of Gypsies driving around on an open truck. It's a cacophonous zoo that runs late into the night and also another reason to really love France. And by good fortune, Roland Garros, the French Tennis Open is in full bloom at the moment and it's screwing up my sleep cycle here in Australia. 

I’ve noticed that on the prestigious Center Court is a maxim engraved into the sliver of thin wall separating the upper and lower stands. On the West side of the stadium is written in English these words; “Victory belongs to the most tenacious” while on the opposite East side, it's in French, “La victoire appartient au plus opiniâtre”. Though I’ve never seen nor heard this word opiniatre used before, the dictionary assures me that it’s stronger than the more plebian, ‘tenace’ (tenacious) because it adds a stronger nuance as in, “he doggedly kept at it till it almost killed him’.

I recount this because every year I see it on television for two weeks on end during the tournament and it makes me think of painting. It reminds specifically me of just how much this painting motif at the beach has changed me in so many different ways over these past few years. It would be impossible to qualify or quantify it but because of it, I feel like a completely different person. Hard to imagine that just by going to a beach and painting the sky one could change so much, but it has happened to me. And I know it happens to everyone who find a vocation into which they can sink their teeth.

Personally, I think the most obvious change is that I’ve developed grit because I don’t think I’ve ever stuck with anything this long in my life except sobriety. So thus, these words engraved on Center Court at Roland Garros have stuck with me over time. It also makes me ponder so many tennis heroes; Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal, Steffi Graf, etc, etc.. who understand the grit of the fight.

But like these tennis heroes, there are surely painters out there who may also have proclaimed something similar to this about finding their own grit through painting. Though it's a different kind of fight, the grit is the same, so maybe they've turned the phrase around slightly to read;

“With time and persistance, one tames a motif”.

One could easily imagine Eugene Delacroix writing such a thing 200 years ago. But couldn’t Monet have also said this to his wife? Pierre Bonnard? Surely, Cezanne or Van Gogh in their letters, non? Perhaps it came from Matisse or Picasso, but I doubt it somehow. Was it Giorgio Morandi, whose life is inextricably linked up with his endless small studies of bottles and cups? Nonetheless, it figures deeply into the universe of painters like Morandi and Monet in particular, who both faced the same motifs over and over again.

Ironically enough, maybe it's none of the above, maybe it was just me! Me, who even decades before I fell in love with this motif had noted something to this effect in my own diary at some point. Having digested correspondence between many artists over the years, can I no longer be sure what came from whom, or when or even where? 

So after all this, it even occurs to me now that I might have all this backwards because in fact, it's the motif that's actually tamed me in the end (God Darn it). 

Back to tennis to better illustrate a great example of how a vocation can tame an artist. Before he became a champion on the Grand Slam circuit, Bjorn Borg was apparently a very tetchy player and had to deal with his impetuous rage throughout his years competing as a junior player. But he apparently learned to deal with it so successfully that he became known as the 'Ice Man' due to his cool demeanour on court.