Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Monday! A sunny day for Piero della Francesca, whom I can never get enough of during these cloudy times. They say, (some idiot back in the day) that all roads lead to Rome. Well, in the world of Painting, I wonder if all roads don’t just lead us back to Arezzo and Piero della Francesca. I think somehow that there is enough in his oeuvre to please just about everyone who loves Art, even the Post-Modernists.
Although I try not to speak with others about politics, art, or religion, I sometimes cannot help myself because in the news the other day was an article about all the idle rich people who travel around the globe looking fabulous. At the very same time I had been looking at some photo details I had taken of the Piero della Francesca’s at the National Gallery in London, and it occurred to me that no matter how rich one might be, one still has to face one’s ageing body and mind as well. But nothing, I mused, will decay a mind faster than spending all one’s time and money looking and being fabulously rich. But hey, that’s me. Besides, being glamorous is more than just looking glamorous or rich,,,, just sayin.
There are those (usually in Europe and Asia) who can sometimes handle immense wealth that's been kicking around in the family for centuries and know how to handle great wealth. At the same time, too much money can also cast long dark shadows over any family's legacy. Like Balzac wrote, behind every great fortune lies a great crime. But it isn't it so easy to forget everything when one feels rich?
Anyway, many Americans know all about being rich, really rich sometimes, but I think only a tiny portion of them understand the cultivation of wealth. Even more importantly, it seems like a even a long lost art, this cultivation of its close cousin, culture.
Myself, I think one's possession of culture is one of the greatest attributes of being a human. It's right up there with honesty and humility. Though many pretend otherwise, it is not strictly aligned with wealth. Nor is the possession of culture is the kind of wealth that can be stored in a vault or withdrawn from a cashier. It's a discreet currency and valued heroically by a person's understanding of history; artistic, economic, and socio-political. It may sound stupid to some, or obvious to others, but I think in the end, it’s better to be a poor but happy and cultured person than a rich unhappy and uncultured one.
Further, I can personally affirm that being a poor but reasonably happy artist is far superior to being a rich but unhappy collector. Though obviously, I'd be in a tiny minority in this circle. So when I read about glamorous globetrotters looking fabulous, all my barbed bias flies out of my ears like asian hornets.
But the solution to all this lowbrow inanity is for a painter to spend time with Piero della Francesca, whose light will banish any dark clouds away from anyone's tarnished soul.
Being a painter, I'm assaulted by all kinds of questions in his presence. When in London, where I regretfully haven't been in ages, I’ve always visited him in a small room in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery. It's a small cloistered space, so discrete that I don't think I've ever shared it with another gallery visitor. In front of these pictures, I'm immediately astounded by the bright colours which appear to have been bathed and pampered in luminosity like they're newborns.
His colourful creations must have been a great surprise to the 15th century world of Art. It was a rich period in this early Italian Renaissance which he shared with many other painters around him at the time. There were many
painters around him who also loved rich colour, notably Masaccio in nearby Florence, who I think was his closest artistic cousin.
But I think we had to wait until the harsh Provençial light of Cézanne before witnessing anything as effervescent, for both he and Cezanne seemed to have evoked the sheer joy of painting pure luminosity.
I approach him not as an academic, nor even as an historian because I'm neither, I'm just a painter. His pictures cannot be understood from a book or indeed even lectured about, but to be seen and experience with shock. I confess freely, that I come to them humbled by own shortcomings as painter of the 21st century.
Is his delicious work just a remnant of a distant past and locked away from our modern world? Or is it relevant to painters today? Naturally, I believe the latter because I see a future for Painting in his entire oeuvre. It will no doubt be a new artistic sensibility with a fresh set of eyes that's capable of finding the key to its entrance.
Whenever I look around at what I see in the art world today I can often feel lost, so I retreat quickly back into my own small oeuvre like it's a cosy mouse hole.
Though surely a cultural zeitgeist must exist somewhere today, it's not something that can be accurately described because I think it's but a perception framed by its own time. I also think it's unreal, a kind of unicorn, like a rainbow in the sky that everyone wants to touch and hold, get a piece of, so as to not miss out on it. In this time of digital interconnectivity it's become even more nebulous and hard to pin down especially in cultural terms. There are lots of things going on but are they real and lasting?
This idea of the zeitgeist is a conceptual container to hold everything together perhaps like a vase, but does it hold wine or water? Is it The Dark Ages or The Enlightenment.
How do we bookend our cultural relevancy? Don't we classify everything as chapters in our past that we retroactively ascertain to be a time of some importance only from a future vantage point?
So today, for instance, when I look around at trends in the art world I see an explosion of possibilities. Alas, much it of is dictated by the world of the money-ed and the cashed-up. They leave it to the galleries and museums who make most of the choices. They are the salespeople, who like jugglers, keep all the balls in the air at the same time.
The cultural zeitgeist of today is still forming but when one looks back on this chapter of humanity, will they see PornHub or Parasite?
Personally, I think the future of Painting for me is mostly found somewhere in the past. When I cite the past I also mean the bits and pieces from my own work that show up at random moments when I least expect it.
And though we all do it from to time, it’s an unhealthy pastime for artists to be looking around in the present moment for something durably original. Somehow, I think it's like those who insecure souls who are trying be glamorous at every instance. If there is a zeitgeist today, it might not be more complicated than what our Instagram influencers get up.
So what's the answer for a painter? All we can do is keep looking, keep seeing, and keep painting while hoping for the best.
So now, after all my pontificating, I must also speak about my own humble endeavour at the beach the other evening. The clouds which were forecast to arrive in the afternoon never did so it turned into a delicious sky. This is one of two studies from the other day. It gave me that age-old feeling that I had somehow missed my vocation of being a pastry chef. It’s not brilliant or anything original but it felt really good to be out painting again on the dunes. I really liked the swab of thick peach paint that sideswiped the lemon-yellow band already encrusted and pasted over a thin sky.
Is is it alive? Would someone who sees it today maybe like it in one hundred year's time? It's hardly glamorous, it's just postcard after all, but one from this time precisely, because I dated it 4 March 2021. It's a window, maybe a small one like on a 747 in economy, but a window nonetheless, through which one can see the world outside.
If there had been enough light left to see my palette, I might have continued because the sky was still quivering with energy.
