Don’t mess with Nature

14 June 2024

Don’t mess with Nature

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 June, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 June, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

These two studies came the other night. It had been a clear chilly sky all day long so when I arrived at the beach I wasn’t surprised to find myself in front of a magnificent June Bloom. I managed three studies but these were my preferred.

Funny, because that afternoon I had not planned to go out. I had been cold and tired all day after the previous night of tennis, so I was comfortably writing on the sofa all afternoon. But from there I could see that the sky might be interesting so the painter inside me suddenly got up and pushed me out of the house. And that was a good thing because the sea was as light as it can be in the winter months and there was a thick cloud over the horizon that caught fire upon my arrival. Under certain circumstances at this beach, I'm always amazed that two paintings done a mere 15 minutes apart, can manifestly be so different from one another. Happily, I was there the other evening to catch them both. Nice! 

The picture below came from another wild evening a few days later. The same bright silky winter sea awaited me but with an altogether different set of colour harmonies. It could be my imagination but these winter months seem to clearly create a different kind of colour harmonies. It's hard to put my finger on it but it's there.    

Tangentially, I recently went to Adobe online looking for a colour wheel to see if I could find a solution for a large picture in the studio that was causing me heartache. I’ve know lots of designers who use colour wheels and for good reason, but as a painter myself, I’ve never felt I needed it. But online, I discovered that it’s pretty interesting because it allows one to find every colour under the sun. And the advantage online is that unlike a Pantone booklet, it’s all backlit with light so the colours are brighter. Adobe's software allows one the means with which to play around with them using the many combinations of compliments, primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, etc, etc,,.  It’s pretty cool.

I was exploring a pink tone which I was having trouble with, so with a quick click on the Adobe’s colour wheel, I found what I was looking for as the little curser opened up the split-complimentary options. Remarkably, it reveals two options of the compliment, one on the warmer side and the other on the cooler. Both hues are related like brother and sister. In this case of the pink hue, the cooler complimentary option resembled the classic Veronese Green whilst the warmer option is a warm yellow green. Both can easily mixed on the palette. 

As I’ve often said, ad nauseam in these pages, the beauty of working out in Nature is that it will almost always reveal to the painter each of the options regarding any colour harmonies if the painter is patient from not colourblind. Moreover, Nature also provides a complete set of instructions when a painter opens his or her own optical senses wide enough to see a motif as a whole unit. Like in Nature, as in the Painting world, everything is connected, especially colours, even when they are on the opposite side of the colour wheel because Nature will always confirm this to the painter. This truth could be carved into granite. 

But for me, this is obviously easier when working on a small canvas board at the beach and not in the studio where I could easily feel allienated from the natural alchemy of colours. Thus, my trip to the computer was beneficial, but regarding my situation at hand, this large surface needed a bit of both pink and green mixed into it for it to fully harmonise enough to resolve the entire surface. In the end it was a clunky task in the studio and with only mixed results. It turned out to be a learning curve which is always regretfully, somewhat great. 

But this kind of resolution is also found in every art form from music to cooking, and architecture to basket weaving. For me, I think of this holistic resolution as our home base. Even Schoenberg’s great atonal piano works found resolution eventually although one sometimes had to meander uncomfortably with him through a sea of discordant melodies before arriving at the end of his pieces. So, too perhaps a musical work is also not unlike a long novel. But contrary to the linear activities of a book or a song, a viewer in front of a painting is confronted immediately with the entire image and is visually processed all at once. The resolution is as abiding as is its dissonance.  

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Although the resolutions in each creative domain are singular, they're all just the means by which each artistic form returns home to rest. For instance, the Circle of Fifths is a given in Western musical tonality just like the Colour Wheel in the world of Painting. Each is a map that helps the artist navigate a journey and both are replete with unlimited options that allow every creative traveler to choose their own itinerary. 

In each of these artistic choices underlies a landscape where originality can be fully exploited and the logic of harmonic relationships expanded. Artists and musicians can both explore the very distant parameters of dissonance yet still be able to return home again fully rested and resolved.

In the painting world, I've always imagined the Colour Wheel harmony as a language, one wherein the grammar structure is its drawing. And in a similar fashion, in music, the Circle of Fifths is a map of keys that organise musical harmony. For me, drawing is to painting, as a melody is to harmony.

Because I create paintings so quickly, this pictorial organisation needs to be done at the outset of a painting. Unlike in the studio, it’s almost impossible to add different colours in order to repair a faulty colour harmony that I've already programmed at the onset. It can be done (of course), but then it becomes a very different painting altogether though not inferior, if one can pull it off. Still, it’s hard for me to do it in one session at the beach. The Dutch did this sort of thing perfectly well in the ‘perfect’ 18th century, but then, they were masters at the craft of Painting. Their idea of perfection was a different beast than our own today. And besides, like any Modernist today, I'm more interested in authenticity than perfection. 

Perhaps cosmetic surgery is an apt analogy to Painting. When you do chin tuck, you may need to also lift everything else as a result. A little filler here might entail a little more  down there,,,, ad infinitum, hmmmmm........ But on the other extreme, anyone who has worked a lot with Adobe will know that it can be an endless maze of too much choice and too many possibilities. It can drive a person mad, so in these pictures of mine, I try to keep it simple and finish them in one clear shot, even if I fail. Generally, what I make in one session is what I get.  

The lesson? As we say in the Bronx...

“Listen Pal, don’t f**k with Nature!”

A secret hiding in plain sight

24 June 2024

A secret hiding in plain sight

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

With all the cruel craziness going on in the world at the moment, I wonder against all my usual hope, to what purpose is it to keep making pictures? Yes, I know it’s a hyperbolic complaint with an implicit bit of self-pity but I can't help myself sometimes. Is it pointless to paint under the weight of so much man-made suffering going on around the globe?

So when in these states, I need to consistantly remind myself that I’ve already wasted too much of my life worrying about so much chaos over which I’ve never had any control. This is my own personall issue and yet, the chaos of humankind, with all its cruelty and violence, receives so much attention that many of us can forget that angels still fly in and out of our stormy clouds. Art, through all its guises, has always survived because its creators have laboured through thick and thin finding light during history’s dark chapters. I can too easily forget that when I find myself disheartened. So in these fragile moments when I am saddened by a world overun by greedy and hateful people, it’s easy to imagine that a lugubrious filter shades the light of humankind. Against all odds I think it’s the unseen world of the Arts that have always lit up the world by keeping it brighter. If I lived in a large city I would make a bee-line to any large musem, one, full of historical wonders to replenish my thirsty memories of this fact when I feel down about the world. 

An artist, I remind myself, must be resolute and make sure that my heart is as flexible as my imagination in difficult moments when I’m prone to worry about a world overtaken by human cruelty. 

Inevitably, when in this line of thinking, I almost always come back to my go-to black hole and think of Germany in the 1930’s, when the onslaught of barbary and genocide rained down upon Europe. My teacher Leo Marchutz went through the second world war living just outside of Aix-en-Provence at the Châteaunoir. Being German and Jewish, he was constantly pursued by the Vichy Government yet remarkably at the same time he was protected by lots of angels in the form of his local French neighbours. For much of the war he often had to sleep in the caves of Bibemus Quarry. So when I worry that the world is falling apart I think of him, so poor, that he couldn’t afford eyeglasses during the war and couldn't read books nor see his own work clearly.

After a lifetime of watching it all and getting way too worked up, I‘ve finally made a saner vow to follow a life of artistic creation wherever it takes me, even to the poorhouse. More precisely, perhaps, I’ve really made a vow to Light. I couldn’t know it for most of my painting life but now I see clearly that it’s always been about luminosity in every sense of the word. Does it derive from my discovery of light in the South of France? Or was it from seeing Cezanne or Van Gogh? Who knows? But my obsession for it finally kicked in conscientiously during this series at the beach in Brunswick Heads. What a relief to finally understand something so evident about oneself, because it’s been a secret hiding in plain sight all this time. 

So, at the beach the other night, there was a lovely bloom. A vibrant sea of yellow that slowly went pink. I was lucky enough to bring this one home because I blew the second one. It was a shame for I had a wonderful start on it but went too far and too quickly. I should have stopped earlier. This one is in a rather abbreviated and somewhat unfinished but I decided to keep it as a record nonetheless and today it looks more interesting. Regardless, it was a beautiful evening.

It’s colder these days and the evenings are shorter but I am physically well and I’m grateful. I've been dizzy at times and I'm never sure if it’s Long Covid or the effects of heart medication because my balance is sometimes so poor that I often walk the streets like a drunken sailor. Like my father always said, “When you have your health you have everything”. Amen.

 

Spinach Omelette

31 December 2023

Spinach Omelette

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 December 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So Christmas is over now, and we welcome the New Year, and like most people I call into my dear, and close extended family of friends to say hello. 

One of them is Bernard Tessier (AKA Poussey K.) who  owns the Châteaunoir just outside of Aix. I check in with him every few weeks and because he’s an analogue kind of guy he doesn't have a mobile phone. I have to call his old telephone at home and catch him around lunch time when I know he’ll be there. When we chat I ask about everyone which invariably leads to general gossip and secrets which he freely passes on to us all because the one thing you can say about gossip is that it cannot be hoarded. In Provence they say that a secret is something you can only tell one person at a time. Naturally, this gives us a broad lattitude for our dicussions. He not only knows everyone in and around Le Tholonet, but also in Aix too. Who’s suing who, who’s sleeping with whom? That sort of thing. “Are the nightingales there yet?”  I ask timidly ,,, “and how are those wild boars? and the deer?” "and how are your small mésanges?" which he feeds and are chickadees in English. What we both love about them is that apparently mate for life.   

The other night when we spoke I pushed him further back in time towards his family connections which often I like to do. He’s coming up on eighty now and like everyone his age, he loves to talk about the past. I asked if he remembered a second cousin from his father’s side whom I had met 50 years ago when I had first moved into the Château. “Oh, she died a long time ago”, he told me quickly. I figured this because it was indeed a very long time ago, even the both of us. Already, by then, she must have been a woman in her 70’s by then. I asked if he remembered when she had last come to see the Château on a spring afternoon. I had been sitting with a friend Alan, in my kitchen when Poussy K was leading a trio of elderly people around the courtyard in which the famous bust of Cezanne that his grandmother had cast in bronze was mounted upon a stone plinth. As they walked around my place, one of them poked their head into the kitchen where we were sitting, and Poussey K introduced us to his aunt. They apparently lived in the North of France. I invited them all in for tea. His aunt was wide-eyed and very curious about seeing everything on her visit. She was a very handsome woman of a certain age and one could see she would have certainly been a great beauty in her day. I made them tea and she began regaling us with stories. I slowly understood that she wanted to visit the Château for perhaps the last time in her life. She remembered my kitchen that had once been a set of rooms where Cezanne left his materials between painting excursions around the property. Poussey K’s grandmother who was a very skilled sculptor, was one of the very few people around Aix who actually believed in Cezanne and saw his greatness. She befriended him, and he apparently had free rein of the place to come and go as he pleased. He certainly made good use of it by painting everywhere on the property, even up to Bibemus quarry where he made a monumental series of pictures at the end of his life. There also are numerous pictures of the Château from several vantages points in the forest. All these pictures are now spread around the globe in museums and private collections.

This aunt told us that she had often come to visit the property as a child and recounted to us that on one afternoon when she was maybe six years old, Poussey’s grandmother took her by the hand and told her, “Today, I’m going to introduce you to a very great and famous artist”, whereby they set off on one of the paths leading into the forest. Just a short way in, they came across an opening where an old balding man sat on a stone bench looking at a few canvases that were propped up on some bushes surrounding him. In her telling, “he scared me, and he looked like a wild bird of prey.” she exclaimed. Both Alan and me were on the edge of our seats by this point. But, as she continued, her fear quickly subsided when they were introduced and he put her on his lap so that she too could also look at the pictures surrounding him. Then she told us the most astonishing thing of all. She said that the paintings she was looking at resembled a spinach omelette (“une omelette aux épinards). I was dumbfounded by this extraordinary memory that seemed to fly off a page of John Rewald’s book on Post-Impressionism that I was reading at the time. Afterwards the trio departed and Poussy accompanied them back to their car. 

This memory would stay with me forever, and to this day whenever I see any of Cezanne’s pictures from Bibémus Quarry, I think of this lovely woman who filled my imagination with history that eventful day. I knew it was true because who else, but an imaginative child could come up with such a fitting visual association with those paintings? 

So, here on the Pacific Ocean and so far from my youth in France, comes not only this wonderful memory but also this painting from the other evening that displays the colours of Bibémus Quarry. 

We've had some really splendid blooms lately, skies that have knocked me over with the weight of their ferocity. But this evening bloom from the other night was gentle and friendly-looking.

Because of certain skies, people hall look alike. I take in stride because I know them all  

like an extended family so I see them differently despite their strong resemblances to each other.  I understand all their quirks that exist underneath their colour harmonies and drawing structure. Although I'm the author, I'm also the kindly grandfather who loves them all in spite of their character flaws and unlikely rapports. .    

And like they say about snowflakes, that seeing a sky full of them, they'll appear all the same but actually, no two snowflakes are ever the same according to God (and the scientists).

Observing the sky on most days, I marvel at its behaviour as it takes me into dusk. When it's tactile enough to allow me in to find a solution for a picture I'm always grateful. 

 

Winter hope and Winter blooms

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

Weather has been friendly enough to get me to the beach on and off for the past two weeks. The blooms have also been accomodating though sometimes short-lived. Here are a few of my favourites.

We are decidedly into winter skies now. The nights are cold but the days are often pleasant with a warm sun. Not bad, and this winter light provides lots of smooth glassy seas which mirror the exotic skies that are fun to work from. 

I came across a text about the Italian inventor Nikola Tesla on Facebook today which I like very much. I've never pushed anything into this personal and discreet blog space but I'll make an exception now, because it's something so very close to what I wrote a dear friend just yesterday who is going through a very difficult time. I wrote:

"I know I sound like a loop but one way to change the dark groove in our thinking is to dive deeper into where our gifts lie inside us.

You are a writer, so again, I encourage you to explore your family history through writing and let it take you where it will. I believe in an intelligence within each of us that is also tailor-fit to each of us. Sadly most of us never venture into this domain for a million of reasons. As fully formed men I think we need to act like salmon and find our way home again like we did as tiny sperm cells. Most of us don’t make it but when we’re in a mind-induced dark space we also need to remember those artists, writers, thinkers and simple farmers and scientists, who all found their own pathways in this sometimes unbearably difficult life. They are the heroes of humankind. 

Happily I'm a painter, and being that, is something of a distraction from so much of this dark thinking that can underlie my own life. But unknown to so many people out in the world, there are artists of all kinds who, despite all this tragedy lurking everywhere, still attempt to capture an essence of humanity, coaxing it gently from the earth, as if soothing a distressed infant. 

Also

Give yourself some joy by getting back to your  tennis! Hang in there, this ride has more in store for us."

So then this morning, I came across this text which someone had posted about Nikola Tesla who curiously expanded on what I had written to my friend.

"Since my youth, before bedtime, kneeling on my bare knees, I prayed to God. I prayed that way until I reached the age of 50. From that time onwards, I pray a bit different, but it doesn't matter, the essence is the same." 

N Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s quiet confession opens a window into the inner life of a man whose mind lived far beyond the limits of his century. With an intelligence often estimated near the extraordinary, Tesla carried a sensitivity that made him both visionary and vulnerable. People with deeper perception often see the world without its comforting illusions. They notice the hidden patterns, the contradictions, the cruelty, and the beauty that others overlook. This clarity can create a kind of loneliness; a distance between the thinker and the society that cannot yet understand him.

Tesla began as a mystic who spoke of angels, light, and the invisible forces shaping the universe. But as he grew older, his spirituality changed. He no longer prayed through ritual; he prayed through creation. His devotion shifted from religion to humanity, from dogma to discovery. He believed in a God of beauty; a presence felt in harmony, mathematics, and the silent intelligence of nature.

This journey from mysticism to universal compassion shaped Tesla into a man who lived not for himself but for the future. His inventions, dreams, and sacrifices were offerings to a world he hoped would one day awaken. And though he walked much of his path alone, he carried within him a faith that did not belong to any religion, yet belonged to eternity.

I'll not add anything more. I’ll let the paintings speak quietly as they often do.

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

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 June 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 1 June 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

Guston

24 March 2023

Guston

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 June, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. Five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow. Where do you put form? It will move around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not be paid for, or a form that has not been lived through. Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.” Philip Guston

Disclaimer; I really like everything about Philip Guston. I always have, since I was a child when I saw his work long before I knew what to make of it. Naturally, it doesn’t mean that I love everything he created but I’ve loved his cultivated spirit, one which held the highest esteem for both Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, just like me. I also love that he was a fellow American, who, like me, was fiercely connected to European Painting. It seems slightly ironic to me that most of the ‘American Expressionist’ painters were from Europe yet Philip was perhaps the least American but with more aesthetic roots in Europe. I love his willingness to abandon all his work that gave him a successful career in the early 1960’s by moving on from decorative Abstractions to re-embrace a figuration of his earlier self. His risked losing friendships and patrons because of it. He was the kind of American hero who for me cut his own path and he was never comfortable with a career built upon a status quo.

Though I am not as severe as him when he disparages satsifaction, I understand what he meant for himself and his own work. His extra large pictures from the 1970’s onward required of him a total commitment. I’ve read his letters and journals and my impression of him in his studio is of a gladiator in the ring surrounded by all his earthly demons. Hence, he scraped and clawed his way to the finish line in each of his pictures like his life depended upon it. But viewers would be mistaken to see his large abstract pictures as just battlefields of emotion for they were structured, and he was obsessed with pictorial unity and obediant to chiaroscuro. For me, he was the most accomplished painter aligned with the Abstract Expressionist School of New York, yet ironically he played an almost an invisble role in it.

But that said, let’s be honest, one cannot love everything that another artist, poet, writer, musician, creates during their career. It’s not even that he or she, has had a great booming career because when an artist loves another artist, it’s more like how one might love a partner, not only for their attributes but their blemishes too. It’s a holistic attraction, spiritual even, because when we love another, we invest our whole selves into that relationship. So, of course we accept faults that we may find in them like we would with our own children. All this is to express y why someone like me would never make a reliable art critic. Like a ruthles lawyer, I only seem to be hard on those whom I have no real attachment.

To be honest, I cannot think of any of my favorite artists whose work pleases me completely. Though really close, not even Van Gogh can do that. And who doesn’t love his work or find deep empathy in his person? Regarding him, there are a few paintings which I cannot bear to look at, but it has nothing to do with his work, just me. For instance, In elementary school, on a long wall near the entrance was hung a print of his famous boats offshore at St Marie de la Mer, but because of unfortunate memories only to do with that school,  I cannot find any affection, critically or emotionally for this image even today. But there are a few others too of which I’ve seen way too many reproduced in posters and on table linen in shops around France. This is unfortunate because all this hype around him has tarnished for me some of his most iconic paintings. But like they say, once seen, they cannot be unseen. Even, that wonderful Starry Night in MOMA in New York leaves me ambivilant much to my own secret shame.

Guston, like Van Gogh, also suffered for his Painting, and I really love that about him. Recent art history is littered with too many success stories that elevates too much bad Painting I think. I’ll be discreet, just one; Pablo Picasso. Why? Because he made so much junk at the foot of such greatness. He was like a king who lived in the royal palace strewn with own garbage. Picasso was sadly an artist of such creative capicity that it somehow must have corrupted his thinking. Possessed with such large gifts he compromised his giant vision for just mere talent and commercial success. It’s hard for me to reconcile the author of a colossal work like Guernica with so many really comically awful portraits that were sprinkled throughout his career along side so many genuine pearls. Might Picasso have been someone plagued with this nonchalent satisfaction for unworthy work of which Philip Guston wrote? 

So what about this small picture from four nights ago? It’s a strange image. I cannot figure out what to think of it. Worse still, I cannot tell if its worth anything or just nothing. What does please me is that it is so very strange, something so unusual for me, that I am really more curious about it than anything else. It had been an overcast afternoon when I arrived. Unhappy with that situation, I set up anyway to see what might happen when the sun went down behind me. I made a palette and watched and waited. Gradually, the clouds lifted off the horizon line and the last rays of the sun lit up the entire sky made of pink clouds. It was very uncommon and reminded me of cotton candy. I tried to make visual sense of it. Am I happy with it? No, but am I satisfied that I came out to make a go of it at least? Yes, indeed. It’s so rare that I regret coming out to the beach even if I fail.  

I think like any creative person, conscious or sub-consciously, I glean everything that crosses my path like some underwater crab that forages the bottom of the ocean and filtering out everything unusable. And like the clever crab, in my personal life too, I’ve learned by trial and error about what is useful or what needs to be thrown out. What I’ve thought was great has too often been lousy and vice-versa. This has been true in every corner of my life from women to jobs, to people, places and all things. They say that the worst things that happen to you usually turn out to be the best, but it took me a long time to understand that or even to believe it due to me cautiou crab-like nature, As Philip Guston said in a quote from 1970’s: “A artist has to be flexible enough to get outside of their own obsessive convictions when it mirrors that of a mule.”

So in this strange picture, I had the insight to put it aside for a time and let it bake inside holding judgement before I` see what it’ll says to me in the future.