Past and future

9 February 2022

Past and future

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 February 2021, 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 a picture in it. My experience has been that painting the sea in the late afternoon has made it easy to witness the natural changes that go on imperceptively during the daylight. I imagine that working in the desert would be quite a different visual experience and it would certainly change my response to how an empty dry landscape would hold and diffuse the light during the day. But here at the beach, the light is very much conditioned by the sea.

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. 

    

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint

30 July 2021

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint

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

This was the first of two from the other night, an evening of wild colours, a veritable pot-pouri of happy hues. This is the winter after all, when these skies DownUnder show off all their splendour and these psychedelic evenings strut like catwalk models at an Hermes show in Springtime Paris. In contrast though, the second study from the same evening that’s on the following page looks like the front door of hell.

Both pictures reminds me that though colour behaves the same way everywhere in the world, they can appear uneven due to the atmospheric conditions at various lattitudes around the globe. Towards the equator, so they say, colours will appear brighter and more embelished than towards the poles due to more light. This is what the scientsts say, but I’m just a painter and this bears out for me empirically well in the spots I’ve travelled around the world. 

For instance, coming from New England I had never experienced colour like I did when I arrived in Provence for my third year of Univerity. It takes most people about an hour to fall in love with the South of France, but me, it took two years because believe it or not, I was so uncomfortable under such a bright happy blue sky. The sheer cheerfulness of it all made search out dark bars in the narrow streets of Aix. This intense light of Provence gave me the jitters actually. I was so much more at home under the grey gravy overcast skies of the dismal North. This was a psychological thing, though I didn’t know it at the time. But when I decided to stay on for another year and I when moved out to the countryside and began painting the landscape, I became smitten with this talented light that changed costumes so rapidly in the day.

I suddenly fell in love with the rugged dry landscape that first Spring after I moved into the Chateaunoir only a few kilometers outside of town. I found myself overloaded with all sorts of new sensations, all the flowers and the bark and the olfactorius bed of pine needles in the dank soil that stewed in the mornings. By noon, a rush of rosemary, sage and thyme rode the wild Mistral like a bronco up and down the unruly hills. I had never experienced Nature so vividly, and it was all inextricably linked arm in arm with the act of painting. That first year at the Chateaunoir I read John Rewald’s two volumes about Impressionism, and in it, I discovered paintings made by men (and a few women) who went out into the landscape and committed their lives to Nature in every season and under every bit of weather. 

I took to walking through the forest in the early evenings, often with cats in tow. It was May and I first heard the song of the nightingale. The forest was full of them. I was an American from the city and the suburbs, and I had never lived so closely to Nature, literally outside my kitchen door. It was a revelation. And because I had never really studied anything after the Italian Renaissance in High School, I barely knew anything about French Painting except what I had seen in the Met in New York. I soon delved into the earliest chapters of French Painting which led me through the Barbizon period where I met the humility of Daubigny, Dupré, Millet, and others, all of whom I liked for different reasons. I saw through their eyes what it was like to go out and paint the countryside just for the fun of it. I understood that for the first time in its life, French Painting had moved out of the studio and into the wild wooly outdoors, and I discovered it all like a curious toddler learning to walk.

After the Barbizon, when I came across Manet, it was like a brick wall and he seemed to possess such a loud voice in this chapter of French Painting that it was impossible get around him. But by that time, I was already studying with my teacher Léo Marchutz whom I had met at university in Aix. He led me to other heroes of French Painting; Delacroix, Corot, Degas, and Daumier. Only later did I discover Cézanne and Van Gogh and the Impressionists. 

Funny, as I write this today, I realise that my contemporaries were all setting up studios in large lofts from New York to L.A. and Paris to Berlin, and many of whom were searching out a second act for Expressionism. This was the real beginning of the Art Market, the one that had begun with the bang of POP Art. Since, Contemporary Art as we know it today, has exploded into the international circus tent that cruises non-stop around the globe. 

And then, there was me, an expatriate, wandering around dreamlike in the past and searching to cleave out of this dry landscape, a rich and authentic voice, but also my own salvation too.

Doubt is our passion, #2

14 June 2022

 Doubt is our passion, #2

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.”

I believe this was lifted from a talk which the art critic Robert Hughes gave at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Academy of Arts in London years ago. I came across it somewhere online and I liked it. I love the idea of ‘slow art’, even though I work quickly at the speed of light. Of course, he’s not referring to the speed of the execution but of an art work, once completed, might already be a thousand years old.

It especially fascinated me because he made reference to the ‘skill and doggedness’ that makes one ‘think and feel’. Without saying it, he is really speaking of craft, something that comes up often in these page because a possession of craft is the vehicle from which I believe, all creativity is born. It’s the vessel that holds ideas and feelings, and it shows up everywhere from the lute maker's workshop onto the potter’s wheel. Generically speaking, it’s the undercurrent of how we all share our skills and intelligence. Is it not also true that for any creative act, the quality and vision, always proceed from one’s command of their craft?

From my diary the other night: 

“Cold evening! Ouch, I made a fire with what little wood I had cut in the afternoon. Three studies last night, a lovely bloom swayed in slow motion that expanded ribbons of warm yellow and pink into an arc before turning into a mass of violets. The waxing moon eventually brought it all to a sudden halt..... I am nonetheless into some wilder colour harmonies; more pure colour pigments and when I can; flatter drawings.”

So this painting from the other night was the last, and though it’s interesting it’s so abstract that I cannot seem to get a handle on whether or not it holds up for me. Does it manifest craft as I preach? Maybe, or maybe not, of course the painter always hopes so, but only time will tell. Sometimes, one’s fresh picture, like a loaf of bread and right out of the oven, isn’t so easily digested. I’ll let it sit for a time. Although the session was short and sweet, I like the colours of this after-burn that was prolonged only by the generosity of an artist’s licence.