Buckminister Fuller at IKEA

26 September 2019

Buckminister Fuller at IKEA

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 September 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“I am deeply impressed with the designer of the universe; I am confident I couldn’t have done anywhere near such a good job”   Buckminister Fuller 1895 - 1983

I put together an Ikea kitchen together two years ago and it taught me an important lesson; Ikea directions are never wrong. No matter how much I howled at the last stages of completion, if I haven’t followed everything to a dotted ‘t’, I would have to remove everything and start all over again. It reminded me of the classic Zen exercise, the one where the master orders the novice to make a long trench across the monastery grounds at two meters deep and a meter wide. When it’s done the master changes his mind and says, “..No,,,,No,,,, that is not correct, it is in the wrong place, you must fill it in and then make another one closer to the trees over there.”

So for me, I’ve also learned that painting in front of a motif is a lot like following Ikea’s directions, not exactly, but fundamentally, mostly yes. I think so because, like in this study from the other night, if the motif looks a certain way and I want to follow it into night, then I need to ‘read it’ like a kind of map with it’s own singular set of visual directions. It may sound crazy to express it this way but once I’ve strarted, a painting will always only go one way despite all the choices I may seem to have. Once I’ve seen something, I follow it around like a bloodhound even if I’m unsure of my choices, because my scent always knows where the dog bowl is hidden.

It’s an elusive track that jumps between what I see out on the motif and what the memory of it tells me what I remember of it. If I’m not plugged in I can quickly lose my way.  Though my memory is not the photo of the IKEA cabinet in the catalogue I’m trying to assemble, it is the pathway that my spontaneous volition uses to get there. So I might have a reference for it and a place from where to start but it’s my craft that takes me to the finish line. In this painting thing, it’s never the IKEA photo that I follow but the ever evolving sunset into the night.

This study is so extremely simple, it may be even boring at first glance, but for me, it does has an organic truth in it. And looking further I notice a single small cloud in the sky that I wasn’t aware of painting. Upon examining it, I realise that it had been created by leaving the canvas blank, and herein, I reveal an old habit from my early fling with Cezanne as a student. It’s a good habit that I still treasure and it proves to me that the memory of the initial IKEA photo is actually quite flexible and can always bend to my will as I paint.

It had been a lazy Spring afternoon, a little on the warm side, and this was the first of three made that afternoon. It was done very quickly, maybe in just five minutes. I was hoping the sky would warm up and broaden into a rich big bloom but it didn’t and yet I like this for its improvised and smudgy verisimilitude. The five different layers of colours are a sensual take on the flatness of a picture from last week which I liked. I love that despite the similarities between all these paintings, they all have different personalities.

At home I binged on Woody Allen this past week and saw Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. What a treat. I know, I know,,,, he has taken a lots hits over the past few years, but personally, I’m someone who judges the work of an an artist not the person even though I understand that this does not allign with the current moral zeitgeist, but hey! Like really great paintings, all three films are aesthetic gems, and each of them are far more than just the sum of their parts. Don’t all great things share this same quality? So when Buckminister Fuller praises the designer of the universe in secular terms such as this, I agree wholeheartedly. It’s proclaimed without a trace of modesty and with a dose of truth like any real American artist.

  

Fractal secrets shared in front of the hearth

26 December 2019

Fractal secrets shared in front of the hearth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 December 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 December 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 December 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here are three studies all made on the same evening, one right after the other in the order of execution. They are pretty straight forward, and though maybe not so glamorous or sexy, I think their beauty resides in their truth, simple as it may appear. While looking at the shredded quality of these clouds this morning, I suddenly 

imagined three step sisters ready for a grand ball. But my imagination is both eccentric and historic. Anyway, I like them as a trio because for a painter like me, it’s the delicacy of these clouds that excite me. 

There is a certain kind of cloud that appears in a particular sort of pale sky, usually with a bit of humidity in the air that evokes all the lacework done by millions of women all over Europe over the centuries; rich and poor women, the sisters and nieces, the hired hands and the dilettantes too, all of them sitting around the hearth and sharing of secrets.  

And these small shredded clouds, like secrets themselves, are fragments that dissolve into thin air during the tumid moments before dusk swallows them up like a giant whale in a fairy tale. On the beach at dusk it’s a marvellously gentle light and and an unassuming one too. In this gentle light ancient secrets can speak to painters and drunk poets but also small dogs and wild children too when they romp deliriously into twilight.

And these are the types of clouds which take me to Painting. For a long time I have thinking about how pieces (or planes, if you wish) of a whole picture are fastened together one to another. I realise that I’ve spoken about this before because it’s a mild obsessionof mine.

I got into a conversation with a guest at a dinner near Dieulefit with a scientist from Scotland one summer evening years ago. I was peppering her with questions about fractels and the Chaos theory for some reason. Eventually by the time the strawberry tartes appeared on the table for desert she suggested to me a book to read aptly titled ‘Chaos’ by the then NYT science editor James Gleick. When I got home I immediately ordered it then quickly devoured. 

It’s all about fractal connections (and disconnections) but measurements too, and it traces the history of this new thinking which sprang up around a few eccentric scientists working on the Atomic bomb in Los Alamos in the late 1960’s (L.S.D. was also involved). But anyway, I have always been frustrated at how mathematics rounded everything off to the nearest .09. It drove me crazy. Even as a small boy looking at the sky I had already empirically understood that infinity was ever-present all around us and that nothing could be nicely reduced down to an even and perfect equation. Like many children I used to watch clouds endlessly as they swirled across the sky, appearing and disappearing, cartwheeling and somersaulting into one another like in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Looking at clouds and  leaves in the world of plants, was the easiest ways to witness the fractal behaviours in the Universe. And so, for me, when painting certain cloud shapes in the sky, the fractal connections manifest immediately.

In painting, the importance of how planes (and shapes) connect to one another is an essential element. But also in all Art, Architecture, Music, and even as a girlfriend once advised, in love affairs too. Every painter has to deal with this whether they know it or not. And moreover I should say; whether he or she is conscious of it, or not, for I can see that lots of artists do not seem to place an importance upon it. And yet, they are still constrained by its importance nonetheless, for the successful unity of a painting is always still grounded in how the sum of its parts click into each other like Lego creating an energetic whole.

Of course the subject matter in a painting is extremely varied and uniquely different and it will be composed of materials depicting a multitude of various elements that deserve different treatments; the skin, bark, stone, wood, glass, flora, hair (human and otherwise), and the air itself, the most popular element that holds so many pictures in its light grip. In a unified painting, all these diverse elements desire to be connected to one another with great subtlety, or not purposely so. Painters of every age in history had to learn the delicate craft of bridging these often disperate elements on a picture plane. 

In the popular genre of landscape painting these variously bits of fractal foliage equally work to attach disparite elements of a picture together one to the other; the fields to the trees, the hills into soft mountains, the chimney smoke into the air overhead. In a landscape, their terrestrial logic is tactile.

But these studies are mostly concerned with painting the sky which is ephemeral. In the end, it is basically just coloured air and gaseous clouds which require a deft but patient hand.

Whether one looks at an 18th century marine-scape from Holland or an abstract 20th century work by Willem de Kooning, the unity, or lack there of, is cemented by the manner in which each brushstroke of paint, both literally and figuratively, attach to one another. 

The really, really great painters do this extremely well, whereas the lesser among us seem to limp along with uneven ambiguity. So I hope that these three studies above, whether limping, or in a ‘Gavotte’, reveal a tiny fractal system at work in some fashion or other, successful or otherwise.

The happy couple

19 November 2021

The happy couple

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 November 2021 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the first of two from the other afternoon. It had been humid all day and the salty air created a slight haze that diffused the colours and set off a rich and colourful bloom. Nice! It was calm with hardly a breath of wind and the sea was flat like a mirror. 

Although I usually develop a few vague visual ideas immediately upon arriving at the beach, I'll generally only commit myself to them after preparing a palette and after perusing the sky a bit, but by then I'm ready to commit to a visual image. All this happens quite fast. So because I’ve learned to place faith in my eyes and my craft, I'm always ready for an adventure and I can easily turn my will over to both these things. It makes it easier, sort of like getting into a Waymo taxi for an afternoon spin. 

And yet, there are moments when my wild child rises up in me to complain, demanding that I take back the wheel and drive myself. But in this series, it never really works out well. When I paint in front of this sky, it feels to me like I'm guided by sonar which is very different than how I approach painting in the solitude of the studio. Though both ways of working are equally compelling (and fun), they demand a different side of my imagination.

In the studio stillness, I can easily lose my bearings when confronted with just my own ideas and cut off from the windy dunes and the big sky overhead.

It's like I'm switching languages when in the studio where I invite my wild-child into the room, and when arguments usually follow.  

"But all this is good!"

Philip Guston, one of my favourite non-figurative painters might casually declare. Further, he might also add; 

"...that is the whole point of painting in this era of existentialist choice..."

And I would agree. But because I work both figuratively and non-objectively, I need to see them as two separate compartmentalised spaces, and the DMZ between the two areas is also my own DNA of light and colour. I'm like a UN observer who moves uneasily between the two zones.  

I know that many of these pictures from the beach may look alike to others. A few friends have already intimated this to me, but no matter. I've come to realise that I don’t care so much what others think of them in the end, I only seem to care about how I think of these things. And anyway, one cannot judge a series by just a few pictures that pop out anymore than one could judge an athlete's daily performance. Artists and athletes are in it over the long haul, though perhaps athletes may have shorter long hauls. Unlike artists who can work till they drop dead, athletes are comets who shine brightly, before passing on.

I really enjoyed painting this picture from the other evening. First of all I’m a sucker for a pale turquoise sea that is as delicate and feminine as a gardenia petal, one that I would hesitate to touch, much less paint. 

And just like a happy couple, the sky and sea on evenings like this, complement one another like in a great marriage. The sky on this night deferred to the sea as would any thoughtful loving husband who wished nothing more than for his wife to scintillate by yielding to her glow when entering a dinner party. 

I want to tell the world that it looked just like this but of course I'd be lying. But I could say that the sky on this particular evening brought out the very best in me like would any great partner in a marriage. 

Glacial change

 

I'm sure that watching the tragic aftermath of the flooding in Nepal has upset everyone around the globe, but no matter the continent, rich or poor, spiritually vibrant, or lazy and decadent, human suffering hits all of us in the same gut most everywhere.

Is it too abstract, or just too convenient, for some politicians to stay mum on the connection between the flooding in the Himalayas and the science behind climate change? Why such glacial action, when we can all see it, feel it, and die from it?   

 

Willy Nilly

31 December 2022

Willy Nilly

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

This morning I was looking at a catalogue for an old Cezanne watercolour show and I was reminded of something I've often felt when looking back on my early years in Aix as a student. 

When just starting out as a young painter I found it difficult to spend time learning from the late work of Cezanne, his watercolours in particular. They are sparse and they can even appear unfinished, and I felt that trying to understand them was akin to stumbling upon a set of notations written by Albert Einstein while at Princeton. 

So looking back now from my perspective today, I see more clearly the difficulty of learning from a painter’s later work. It can be done, and maybe many have succeeded, but I found it confusing. The problem I had with trying to learn from him was that he had already painted most of his whole life before arriving at these late watercolours, and there just wasn’t enough information in them for me to grab ahold of for myself. 

Though it took a while I finally realised that copying these things as a student would only lead me to something that 'resembled late Cezanne watercolours’ and they wouldn’t advance me onto a path where my intuition was already trying to steer me. I couldn't get there from his work but I know others who did. I guess it's a question of temperament.

I understood later on that Cezanne's austere pencil drawings done throughout his working life actually prefigured these spare watercolours at the end of his life. Not only that, but his very early work was not only thick with paint but of darkness too because to find his own ‘light’ later on, he had to pass through his own tenebrous past.

I suspect now, that many of these ‘unfinished’ drawings and watercolours were simply left in their abbreviated state for a reason known only to Cezanne. He certainly could have gone further but he stopped, why? Only he knew, but maybe he cited reasons for it somewhere in his letters. I'm not an expert on Cezanne, could it be that he stopped just because he liked what he had achieved? Did he not want to ruin something that he wished to retain as an idea or a study? Maybe he thought he had arrived in heaven?  

But beneath all this, the real problem with working from his late watercolours is that it didn’t allow a young painter (like me) to dig deep enough into my own backyard to find a light of my own. No matter how much one adores or admires Cezanne (or any painter of consequence) he doesn’t just give his light away willy-nilly. I learned that ‘light’ had to be earned the hard way by making lots of dark, lugubrious failures before I would find a way into it. I know this now because I struggled like everyone else trying to figure it out. 'Light' in a painting, is never given away, but it will appear freely when a generous drawing allows it.

Of course, all artists are different and they all evolve (and devolve) in a myriad of surprising ways. I sense that most really grand painters have to dip down into their own personal muck before rising up again to meet fate because many do pass successfully through darkness to get there in the end. A painter like Vincent Van Gogh, certainly went through hell, painting all the way through it and out again in his last luminous paintings from Auvers right before he died. 

Unlike most painters, I think one could learn from any chapter of his life’s oeuvre, from the earliest drawings and paintings around Etten and Drenthe, and finally to Auvers where he died. The early work revealed his scrabble to grapple with learning how to draw, but also his discovery of the surface of a picture plane. A few years later on when he landed in Provence it was as if he had been rocketed into the fourth dimension. The work he made there is so infused with light that any painter, young or established, could learn everything about colour and drawing from just studying him alone. He was a singular figure in art history and remarkable both as an artist and teacher. I have an obvious bias towards him for many reasons, but mostly because I also learned about light and colour in the South of France. 

But alas, all this comes late to a painter like me. Looking back at my own twists and turns, I see that I was looking for solutions to Painting like a worm burrowing blindly through the long dark corridors of great museums. Ignoring my own nagging intuition, I erroneously imagined that I still needed something from the past, like maybe a magic ring or such, a thing that I didn’t realise I already held in my possession. 

So, back to the present here in Australia, this painting was one of two that came out of the other evening. It was a confusing sky full of different kinds of clouds that indicated a front moving in from the South. Not often, but when the sky is all higgledy-piggledly just before dusk, the last bit of the setting sun can shine high in the East lighting up several layers of clouds simultaneously overhead. Like from this picture from the other evening, there can appear small cotton ball clouds at low altitude that will turn bright pink, orange, or gold, usually in succesion.

I love these evenings when colour is working on several different layers all at once. They free me up and yank me out of my habits. Skies like these are chaotic and they’re the best teachers but the fail rate can be high. These are evenings as close to heaven as I’ll ever get I fear. And these jewel-like clouds on this night, some would buy them if they could find the right currency. 

Sophie’s choice

 

29 June 2020 

Sophie’s choice

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 June 2020, oil on canvas board,

 30 X 25 cm

So winter nights are here again, and this evening especially, the cold wind feels like a Dr Zeus character with long green arms and legs that slide into my bed each night wrapping its frigid limbs around me. This is one consequence of bachelorhood, but hey!

On the other hand, there is beauty in these inky black skies when one sees the Milky Way full of diamonds haphazardly scattered about overhead. I am still lost in this Southern Sky and although I regret the shorter days, I love these crispy mornings when the birds seem happy under the clement sun.

This week a shy new moon hangs overhead and the ‘blooms’, although brief, have allowed me to work longer. By the third or fourth study it’s been just enough light that a faint trace of pink lingers in the evening air like perfume after a woman has passed by. It’s also been clear this week so most afternoons I get to the beach with high hopes. 

This is a painting I really like from a few nights ago. One of two that evening. Although a viewer would not see it from its warm harmony, I was chilled to the bone when I finished because I’d foolishly forgotten to wear socks or long trousers. Out there when it blows from the South it can be fresh indeed.

When I arrived to set up, the sea looked creamy, and stretching across the sky were wide ribbons of colour. I jumped in and had a ball with it. Although it looks a little scruffy around the edges, the overall effect feels complete to me. But then, like all painters will tell you: “I swear, it looked just like that!” 

It came so easily, I think because I had initially connected so emotionally with all of it, not just the sea and the sky, but the joy of just being out there under such beauty. At times, its just like that. This might be a funny way to put it, but it made me happy, all of it. 

And that I walked away with a study that really pleases me still after several day of looking at it, this feeling has only amplified in me. It’s hard to describe why, out of so many other pictures that one of them comes along every so often and it becomes a favourite over so many others. Why is that? Was it the look of the sky or was it the session that was so pleasurable? Maybe both because I’m partial to sassy big ribbons that one finds in deluxe linen shops in Lyon. Regardless, sometimes painters just has a thing for certain pictures for whatever reason. Might this be akin to what it’s like for a parent to prefer one child over another as awful as that sounds? Is it like Sophie’s choice? 

Because these pictures are done so regularly, I’ve come to see them as paragraphs in a long book, a diary of sorts. And like a diary it’s also a dialogue with oneself, and I’m still finding out all these things about myself that surprise me, shock me, but please me too.

Isn’t this why people keep diaries in the first place? These pictures that come up every few days or so are also certainly like a diary of course. There are snapshots of things I’ve learned over time, but because they're encrypted  I don’t always understand them immediately myself. I think I'm someone who has always gotten life in drips and drabs as they say, but also a little late.

 

So like I said, I really love this painting for reasons I cannot fully describe. But it’s certainly an emotional thing for sure. And why not? It’s Art after all. But also, I like it for its discretion. It was painted quickly, maybe in 10 minutes, and that gives it an air of carelessness that I think disguises all the elements that make it function rather easily. 

There are always loads of problems involved with making a painting, sure, but the painting itself, at the end of the session, is the outcome of fixing all those problems unconsciously. The placement of brushstrokes in these quick paintings create the drawing. In French they call these ‘Ébauches’ or as referring to quick messy and unfinished studies. It was a common slur thrown at the Impressionist Movement as a whole at the time. Today, of course, I think anything goes because we live in wild new world and it’s a GO-GO period for Art, writ large. Besides, since Jackson Pollack, nobody has complained about making it messy.

But in my case, there is no preparation for the pictures, no pencil indications, no outline, just anything can happen and it does, but just in case, I always say a little evening prayer beforehand to make it come right.

That said, where does the foreground begin in this picture? Where is the upper limit of the sky? (and of the picture itself?) Do the foregrounds in both the sea and the sky directly overhead sync up to create the illusion of distance to the horizon line? There are always so many questions but I never ask them unless I have problems. Like a surfer here in Australia, doesn’t one just jump in and hope for the best? There is an art to almost everything concerning the sea after all and mostly it just requires jumping in.