Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

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Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

J.M.W.Turner (date ?)Gouache and watercolour on paper 188 x 227 mm

I was sent this small Turner watercolour recently by a mysterious gentleman, whom I didn’t know, a certain Peter Shear from Indiana who is a painter. I believe that he stumbled upon my small blog space l’Air de Rien, and which has been the skeleton for this book. Evening Prayers at Brunswick Heads. This was a nice surprise. He understood not only what interested me but was kind enough to pass it along. 

It was a shock to see it, for this unpretentious little oeuvre, lacking in any visual presumption is just so perfect and beguiling that I can only weep with envy. Its innocence speaks of a rare and simple vision, one which could likely only come from the hand of an assured artist, or perhaps even a very creative young child of rare sensibility on a very lucky and insightful afternoon. 

There are, at certain moments, an awkward honesty in Turner’s voluminous record-keeping of the sea and sky that reveal such a playful abstraction that one could think (if they knew little or nothing about Art) that indeed it was made by a child. But this would be a fairly cheap value judgement by a smug smart-aleck whose sensibilities are but ruled uniquely by the left side of their brains only, for this is a masterpiece of invention.  

For me, the brilliance of this tiny and unobtrusive little souvenir is beyond description. This child-like innocence belies a profound vision, one that was not only cultivated by a lifetime of looking at Nature, but also by a lifetime of experience and talent that is buried deeply within the structure of these four corners and behind its quiet and simple design. 

But also hidden within this simplicity are the essentials of picture-making. There is a foreground, middle-ground, and background, which all together, seem to come racing up to the viewer all at once as one plane, and it replicates how the visual world operates. In Painting, this is called abstraction and it has to be learned not only through patience and practice but also through a generously extensive understanding of Art History itself. 

This is because normally, our eyes don’t allow this to happen due to our incapacity to focus on all planes simultaneously. It is therefore left to the artist to reconfigure this physical impossibility so that we, the viewers, can imagine it. But this sounds way more complicated than I am making it out to be. To put it simply, our eyes generally only reveal to our brain, at nanoseconds at a time, an entire organic view of the world as we look out at it, one instant after the next. It is why some painters will squint their eyes whilst looking at a landscape in order to ‘see it’ as one whole organic form in their mind. But to paint it as one whole viable form can only be achieved through an abstract process, one which both a gifted child, and painters like Turner, performs so naturally. This child will see everything as an ensemble. 

This means that normally, we cannot, without practice, perceive a landscape as painters have learned to make them because they were re-created using a kind of abstraction built by planes that move forward and backward on the two dimensional surface.  There is no doubt that a landscape painter will surely look out at the world quite differently than a gardener whose macro-visual of intimacy is at a different scale. Conversely, imagine a mouse suddenly seeing the view from high above in the claws of a hawk? 

The painter must be inventive. For instance, he needs to put into place a kind of visual scaffolding that can fashion a foreground, middle ground and background which all together, is not readily apparent to the rest of us because our eyes don’t naturally take them in as one. This is a necessary invention, an  'abstraction' that all painters, from early toddlers to professionals, devise to create their own personal systems with which to make pictures. 

Viewers don’t realise any of this because they don’t have to think about it, it’s a given, and instantly taken for granted. Though most serious viewers of art can sometimes detect when an image falls flat, it’s less evident to discern the attributes of a painting that succeeds. But the ones that fail usually do so from small bruises throughout like on a fresh pear.

But a painter like Turner, through his experience, knows how to ‘read the room’, intuitively. Like other great artists, He understands intuitively how to reconfigure the visible world through a connivance of both talent and gumption to reconstruct the logic of a landscape and to fashion it into a painted image. Alas, for the gifted and clairvoyant child (and a few lucky painters and visionaries) it’s always innate, yet for most painters it needs to be learned. I was a painter who had to learn it because I had already lost that creative child much earlier in life, so none of this came intuitively to me until much later on when I re-discovered my early love of painting. 

Put another way; the ‘Academic Painter’, of which there are many prestigious adherents, are trained to paint Nature (landscapes and models), as a compilation of separate parts, attaching them through a painting technique alone. I think that an academic painter appears to be trained to only see a picture as separate parts, things to be attached to one another and joined bit by bit. Consequently, the end result resembles a patchwork quilt, albeit maybe full of skill. But worse, the academic painter only seems to look at the landscape just once,  at the very start, and they proceed with that concept already established in their vision. A fellow like Turner would naturally be assessing the ‘motif’ from start to finish and yet might even be loyal to his first impression. I know this from experience because I have had enormous problems trying to overcome this problem. 

But unlike this process, a painter with a vision like Turner’s, sees everything as an organic whole image, and one all at once in his mind. The secret of this mind is that it has learned to make sacrifices in order to achieve a whole picture plane, one that we call a painting surface. This is why Turner is such a great example of seeing the ‘motif'  as a unified visual idea, one already formed mysteriously in his mind. Like so many other really great artists who produced large pictures in the studio, he managed to hold onto his vision throughout the long process.

Either because of his long experience or his immense talents, or both, he saw everything as one, not unlike a poet whose poem has been stripped away of the extraneous to expose the bones of his feeling.

Dazed

 

This is a reprint from 29th December 2009 when I lived in France. I couldn't resist putting it back up 17 years later.

Finally, to the poterie studio where I have put off too much work before I leave for Australia on friday. Yikes! But I'll get it done.

Its easy work but I need to be inspired and I can easily burn out after three hours

I end up feeling like these teddy bears look, dazed and confused. 

Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

These are simple pictures, they’re not big enough to be considered ‘great’ and they don’t pretend to be so. The idea was just to catch all these wild colours swimming in the twilight sky. There is a time limit to these sessions unlike ones made in a painting studio that can stretch on leisurely for weeks at a time. At the beach some sessions are short, but on my luckier days they can go on and on into the night.

Just as each picture can be so different from one day to the next, I too, am quite different. Somedays I’m joyful, sometimes not, maybe I’m tired and a little grumpy with a mind full of problems, real or imagined. But because I go out there as a habit to work, nature has a way of opening me up to it regardless of my state of mind and as a result, I am always changed by the painting process. Over the years I’ve now been transformed by it and it’s why I still go out there. As a painter friend has always reminded me, “when one paints, one lives better.” 

These studies have also opened me up again to exploring a limitless expanse of the grey half tones that link together all the colours as they cycle around the colour wheel. What surprises me when I take a few steps back to view the whole ensemble is that most of the paintings, even though they obviously share my fingerprints and DNA, they are usually so manifestly different due to the weather.  

Many of what I call my Evening Prayers have been moving gradually towards a flat and graphic disposition. I like that. When I compress the motif down to just a few horizontal stripes of subtle colour is when a small bell rings inside me and I feel good. This is where my compass naturally wants to point on its own. 

I bring all this back to my own desire to see the motif as fresh as if for the very first time, each session, day after day. This means approaching it quickly, seizing it, and subduing it with whatever experience and craft I possess. By working this way I’m able to avoid a sentimental view of nature, something I deplore in Painting. This isn’t a recipe for everyone, it’s just a way I discovered for myself because I am an anxious person, and in this series, I need a colourful frenzy at the end of the day to find peace. 

In summary, I initially thought this project was about colour but to my surprise I discovered it was really about light, without which, there can be no real colour. And because the drawing is fairly easy and without real complications, I can really focus on colour. This is something I began to appreciate over time. By consequence, when I get out there to paint it feels a little like I’m getting into a Waymo self-driving car because I have so few concerns about anything else except to take in the view and enjoy the ride. After all, I’m just looking and seeing.

Addendum, editing this book has taken almost three years. Two and one half years longer than I had originally imagined it would take. It’s been a great experience, the richest one of my life actually, but because I wasn’t a writer I needed to find an authentic voice and become one. So of course I also felt like Dr Jekel and Mr Hyde due to all the editing I faced every day. Passages I had thought polished and complete, would over the next day or two, look like someone else had written it. Basically I needed to learn to write. 

 

Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction

                 February 2006, Tombo pen on Muji paper, 15 x 10 cm

For the past eight years, I have been making studies here at the beach on Brunswick Heads on the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Done at the end of the afternoon when the twilight hour approaches, they represent a visual diary of my evening sessions which I came to call ‘Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads.’

Many years earlier, I had seen the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto who spent years travelling around Japan making large black and white studies of the horizon line that appeared to cut it in half. He used an 8 X 10 camera, often with long exposures during all kinds of weather and in every season. I was deeply moved by these things. And although prior to seeing his series, I had never been too fond of black and white photography, in his case, I was taken aback by the painterly nuances of black, white, and a vast multitude of greys. 

Although his images were the inspiration for my own series, I only wished to explore the horizon line in colour using oil paints at the dusk hour. Like so many people, I had spent a lifetime of walking the beach at dusk, and I had long been intrigued with the idea of painting twilight skies. But while Sugimoto’s photos were created using a long exposure, my own in complete contrast, are painted with lightning speed due to the quick colour changes at that hour. 

Although I call it a series now, when I began I had no idea that it would become such a long project. Initially, I had simply wished to get back outdoors to paint again and have some fun mixing colours from the evening light at the beach. I had been previously working in the studio for a number of years where the creative process is so completely different. But one evening I just went out with an easel and a backpack full of colours, rags, and turpentine, to see what I could make from it. Nine years later, I still go out regularly when the weather looks interesting.

I now practice two kinds of Painting forms simultaneously, one complimenting the other. One is done in the studio while the other is out in front of this motif at the beach. They both bring pleasure yet in different ways because they speak to different corners of my curiosity.

Although at the beginning of this exploration at the beach I hadn’t imagined these paintings as being ‘site specific’ or even a serious project of any kind. The early pictures just naturally became a series without much thought at all. It was more of an accident because I had no idea I’d still be painting out there nine years on. Only later did I understand that it might be a kind of ‘site specific’ term to describe it. I had assumed that ‘site specific’ referred generally to a site chosen, then altered by an artist who subsequently documented it in one way or another. In my own case however, it turned into a series simply out of repetition. And though I haven’t altered the site in the least, I see now that I have certainly been altered by it. 

Because the motif is so inherently abstract, being just the sea and sky separated by the horizon line, I use colour as the principal vehicle with which to push the foreground backwards into the painting while at the same time bringing the background forward up to the surface. This is for me one of the greatest lessons from Cezanne, who in the 19th century, single-handedly ushered us into the era of truly Modern Painting by demolishing perspective and breaking down distance. 

During these years I’ve made lots of studies, and through many failures, I’ve learned a great deal while at the same time also growing into the ‘motif.’ I’m always looking for a pictorial resolution in each picture that carries its own illusive logic. I’m interested in the unity of the whole surface as being one that creates a formal integrity for each visual idea. Consequently, if these studies appear scruffy or a little sloppy and unfinished, it’s because I’m certainly more Expressionist than Impressionist. But personally, I like all these spontaneous and accidental elements in my own work and in others’ too. It’s a matter of taste. 

Dreams and reality on Chesil Beach

16 February 2023

Dreams and reality on Chesil Beach

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 February 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

There are lots of people who find more reality in works of fiction than in non-fiction and I’m one of them. I wonder all the time about how this understanding relates to Painting. I’ve just finished On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan which I really liked. I came to him late so it’s no surprise that I’ve only just discovered his novel, a copy of which I plucked off the bookshelf recently whom a friend had gifted me years back.

So I finally got around to reading it, and as they say, better late, than never. But I’ve been late to so many things in life that I’m not surprised. I’ve been late to many other authors, but late to many musicians and composers too, even late to a few painters as well. But I’ve been so late to other key parts of my life; late to discipline and hard work, but also, just late to work, period. And I’ve been too late to love, but now I’m way past my expiration date on that one as well. But significantly, I arrived much later than I would have liked at sobriety’s front door. In any event, I’m not alone, for there are lots of other latecomers like me who show up to life like we would at the cinema and miss the beginning but stay till the end, even through all the credits.

But in this life, there also just are too many no-shows as well, because life is really hard after all. It could be a long or a short distance, this life, depending upon so many factors. It’s a complicated and rugged terrain between our birth and death. There are just too many cracks that can swallow us up whole. Even under the best of circumstances when life starts out well for some of us, all bundled up in a cute pram off Regents Park. Storms can pass through too easily sweeping many of us unlucky ones into the gutters of King’s Cross later on. There are also late bloomers, and late doomers too, who spend their adult lives teetering on the edges of bar stools or tipsy on comfy divans off Park Avenue. But for way too many poor souls around the world, life begins and ends on a dusty barren bit of land in the middle of nowhere. Who can say where any choices have been made, freely or otherwise? But however one awakens to this great reality which some call God but others like me, just call just call sanity, it’s still all quite varied and deeply mysterious the more one ages. Some say that God is the mystery, and that only through mystery can we know God. Why not? Others, like the Sufis who say: “When one calls out to God, God comes running”, so even if I don’t believe in a religious God, I like both of these adages. But then many of us, for one reason or another, and regardless of our age, we never awaken to any sort of mystery at all but sleep through life, most of them consciously or not. For me, being a painter, that is a shame, regardless, for life nonetheless, seems to be a great parade. For a long time I used to watch it from the sidewalk while secretly wanting to be part of it.

But inspite of my somnombolic habit, like everyone else, I love really good authors, not the cheap-reads, but the ones who take us to an existential space where we can be confronted with this great parade of reality, one where we all fall down and try get up again. This is the creative space of art where imagination both creates and disrupts, and where authors (and painters) show us how they too, fell down and how they got up again. This for me is where invention turns life into fiction, then art. 

So from the very first page of this intimate book by Ian McEwan, I was transported back in time, to a Britain I could not have known. McEwan has the gift of narration, and not unlike a great painter, a love for detail and mood, for it’s a postcard of postwar Britain. 

He paints a picture of a complicated and unified order that is on the verge of a social collapse. I had seen lots of great British films, the edgier ones from the 40’s and 50’s that foretold the social unrest of the 60’s to come, but I had not read too many books about it. The 60’s in every way, was the collision of several great forces that challenged the social order. The usual suspects were all involved: politics, economics, and culture, which all collided to spearhead a tsunami of changes. Painting of course, also changed dramatically like everything else, as it went POP! This isn’t my favorite artistic movement, but hey! I much prefer the collective hives of figuration practiced by painters around Britain and running parallel to POP. These were painters who stuck with figuration and pushed it into darker places that appeared to mirror some of the films at the time that spoke to the social and economic upheaval in Britain. Personally, I like many of them like; Leon Kossoff, Frank Auberbach, Francis Bacon, Josef Herman, Shiela Fell and Eva Frankfurther. But there was also on a brighter tone, and partly POP, at least in his beginnings, Howard Hodgkins. And not to be forgotten, the really famous and popular David Hockney, whose art work naturally went full sunshine when he went to live in California. And why not? It’s no fun being bleak, I know that from personal experience. 

In the world of Painting, like a work of fiction, a narrative is equally important because it’s about how content (idea) is transformed into a picture, hence my issue with POP ART. Is it through style or technique? Does it lay-in-waiting deeply inside a painter’s soul for the right pictorial idea to surface at some point in his or her life? Is it too obvious to ask to what degree does our upbringing and surroundings mould us, as either writers or painters, or anything else for that matter?

I suddenly think of Guernica, Picasso’s grand oeuvre and plea to the world about suffering and the terror of war. It’s subject is specific and it’s Cubist style is employed adroitly to convey the subject matter with authenticity. It’s why it is is still around and people flock to see it though it has not changed an iota. A painter’s problem is always about how to recreate a visual world that is conveyed through an authentic voice to the viewer. And how does a painter render all this specificity of detail but at the same time avoid bogging us all down with tedium? How did Picasso create a theme of war that lives so generously in a grand operatic space like Guernica when he was actually living in Paris at the time? The answer to this his ferociously fertile imagination. 

Ian McEwan, on the other hand paints his British social landscape with the eyes of Chardin, full of details that dazzle the reader and place us firmly on the soil of Interwar Britain in a tightly spun visual form of verisimilitude in such great contrast to a picture like Guernica.

Like McEwan, a good painter depicts the visible world at large by first pulling it all apart only to piece it back together again through abstract means uniquely personel to the painter’s style like Picasso at his best. When re-assembled through the device of sacrifice, he hopes it will be whole and fresh by the end of the process. The result is not a copy but an entirely new and believable world for the rest of us to imagine for ourselves. So like with a painterly skill, Ian McEwen also pulls me into his pictorial drama immediately within barely a few sentences, as if with just his few brushstrokes. I was taken in by the authenticity of his 1960’s much the same way that as I’m pulled into Picasso’s topsey-turvey world of horror in the late 1930’s. Both equally speak to me. 

And what is it about truth and fiction in this space of memory and invention in which we all live together yet so separately? How does a book, or painting in these cases I’ve cited, possess the power to transport us to a particular place deep inside ourselves that we can recognise even if we’ve not yet been there? Readers and viewers, listeners and sightseers; all of us, are seduced by art when it’s successful. Diverse participants, all of us, we're mysteriously brought together by art. But if the art fails, we'll sigh and quickly move on, forgetting it because we, the public, can be brutal.

Lastly, it occurs to me that I’m more moved by Truffaut’s, The 400 Blows, than I am about my own lonely childhood memories of early family life and boarding school. Is it not uniquely through art that our dreams and personal histories are pieced together by a concrete form made up from so many flexible memories? Isn’t art, in all its forms, the place of invention, where fragmented memories are made whole again through the imagination of empathy? This is how it is for me at least.

Like a tiny bowl of sorbet between gourmet dishes to change the palate, this small picture is offered up as a souvenir of Chesil Beach in Dorset UK. Though I’ve never been to there, I’m sure somehow, that on certain evenings the sky would bloom just like this. It’s a nothing of a picture, a mere afterthought and yet hopefully it lives with just enough oxygen to survive its spartan life here on the Pacific coast.

 

Delacroix’s studio, cont

30 December 2021

Delacroix’s studio, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 December 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

“Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture. (1 September 1859)”Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

Among so many jewels in his studio is a small watercolour, I believe it’s just entitled The Unmade Bed, but it’s something that has haunted me since forever. I’ve had a postcard of it for decades now, the same one that has somehow found a home on every piano I’ve ever owned, always stuck to the left of the sheet music where it can be seen. It is a complicated subject made from layers of linen and yet it seems so fresh that it looks like it has just blown into the bedroom like a leaf through a window. And it’s modern too, unlike most things done in 1827, France. But strangely, if I look at it in a particular way, without blinking, for instance, so that my eyes don’t focus as usual, it can remind me of a Christ figure hanging off Mary’s lap in a Pietà painted by Titian in Venice. One needs an imagination of course, but memory, too, that’s for sure. But then, this is the realm of art where magic and mystery are twins. What is important in this regard is always deeply personal, for this private memory cannot ever be transferred to anyone else except abstractly through the alchemy of art. Marcel Proust, among others, taught me that.

E.Delacroix, Le Lit défait, watercolour, graphite and ink, 18.5 X 29.9 cm, Le Louvre,  

Then again,  I have a big imagination and I do see ‘things’ ‘everywhere’. My brother Mark has always confirmed this to me when I tend to forget it. For instance, driving to the beach to paint not 10 minutes away from home in the late afternoon, I take a small stretch of the highway, and for the past month I’ve seen a dead dog on the left shoulder. Every afternoon I swore to myself that I would come back with my truck to remove it and place it in a gentle resting spot on our 100 acres. Every day I forgot, until last week, when one evening I wrote a note to myself and put it next to the coffee grinder which simply noted in magic marker: “today! DeaD doG.”

So the next morning after a coffee I put a tarp in the cab along with some gloves and drove to take care of the ‘dead dog’ on the highway. As I slowed down to approach it I pulled into the shoulder lane and stopped abruptly in front of a faded black tire on its side with a small thin bit extending from the left side. (!)  So, anyway, I still take the highway most afternoons, and in my ‘mind’s eye’ I still do see the DeaD doG laying there.

These two studies are from the other day. They sort of remind me of watercolours, perhaps even modern ones yet done nonetheless in the spirit of the late 19th century. And yet they ‘seem modern’ only perhaps because of their composition, unlike anything that would have ever been conceived back in that period. They certainly could easily resemble ‘cropped details’, perhaps taken from larger pictures that wouldn’t have otherwise made a painting complete back when they needed more story content in a painting in those days. Yet I like the light in them, and the colours too, but there’s also a freedom in them that wants me to buck the restraint imposed by the composition. In the end though, they do actually make me think of the watercolours of Eugene Delacroix in a certain way.

It was Boxing Day here in Australia, a holiday so there were still lots of people on the beach when I arrived. I had it in my mind to try something completely different that evening. I wanted to just treat the motif with as little referential description as possible; not clouds, but maybe just large irreverent shapes that could rub up against each other on the picture plane. Yes, I’ve done this before, but this night I wanted to see them as large puzzling shapes that might naturally provoke more ambiguity. In the end I didn’t really succeed because the one on the previous page feels like it’s trying to be a landscape. I also dropped it in the sand when leaving so it’ll now be scarred for life, like having a limp. But this one appears so airy that it hardly feels like an oil painting at all. But what I really like is the pale green sea, filled with a soft light because it is so rare that it appears in the late afternoon when I’m there. 

These two images are so abbreviated they might appear fragile but they’re certainly not. They’re just delicate and they live from sheer luck that I didn’t screw them up while painting them, because unlike composing music or writing stories, one cannot erase or crumple a piece of paper to begin all over again. Like paper, canvas too, is capricious, especially so with an unforgiving oil paint over it. The mistakes are permanent. 

Although they can be painted over and either corrected or manhandled into something new and different, in my own short time frame at the beach it’s not easy, so I'm rarely up for the task. In the studio work, yes all the time, in fact that’s all I seem to do. But happily, here at the beach, it’s extremely rare that I’ve needed to perform these surgeries.

At the beach, all these ‘mistakes’ and ‘corrections’ simply become ‘issues of style’ so when they don’t work, they’ll just fail even more visibly. But when they are lucky to survive post-op surgery, they can be surprising. Painting any kind of picture is to take a journey because it's not unlike being a tourist; there’s always work to do, getting lost and getting found, and shlepping one’s luggage around foreign streets in search of a soft bed.

And like tourism, if a painting doesn’t take me somewhere interesting then I’m less interested with the result. The more successful the transcendence of the experience, the more successful the art work, I think.