The whole darn sky for sale!

11 January 2021

The whole darn sky for sale!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 January 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This turned out to be the start of a study from last week that I wisely stopped in mid-sentence. I had arrived early to jump in the sea before painting. It was one of those giant blue days and the sand was so hot I had to sprint to the water. 

This was to be the first painting. It was unusual for me to start early in the afternoon but the day was a scorcher so I went to the beach earlier than usual. Everything there appeared so crisp and blue. Hardly had I begun, when for some reason I just stopped. It’s rare that I show this restraint because normally, though I may like the start on a painting, I’ll just grab a quick shot of it and continue working. Only rarely would I put it aside for a rainy day. Because I don’t always have an idea in advance of where I’m going, a picture usually morphs into something unexpected. But this one today spoke to me and told me to set it aside which I did. I then quickly jumped into a new canvas board. But this raises that big question that bedevils so many artists. When does a painter decide when a picture is finished? A painting isn’t a jig-saw puzzle after all, it’s a whole organism existing on a flat board and full of nutrients that want to expand in every direction.

When I set aside a study that I may feel ‘unfinished’, I’m aware that what I want to preserve is the fresh idea, maybe even just a fragment of some fleeting sketch of a feeling that is to me alone, authentic. But this means that by keeping just an abridged fragment, I’ll be necessarily preventing the completion of something else that could have been created, a Sophie’s Choice of sorts. This isn’t an habitual practice, so I don’t generally worry about it too much. For me, a sketch is but an abbreviated pictorial idea and no big deal, it’s usually for me alone.

And yet, I’m still aware of cutting something short, and there is danger of this becoming a habit. One cannot always hold onto all great beginnings after all, if we did, we might never get beyond the first kiss or the first few delicious dates. How would we ever move on to marriage and children? We’d remain a teenager forever. No, we must jump in further, making mistakes along the way with a secret hope that they’re repairable at least until they aren’t. Then maybe tears turn to divorce and recriminations from all sides. But life, I know, is a lot more nuanced than painting. I’m really just trying to discuss a picture but you can see how all things are related. Love affairs that may start so beautifully can quickly turn ugly, full of messiness and regrets. Then comes the end alongside the truth which is usually the hardest of all lessons to face. In a painting I'm always trying to be truthful, but in a love affair this isn't always practical.

Like a love affair, a small painting is also bound by the rules of harmony and discord that create their own dramas, but both these disparite things are a search for resolution no matter where its takes us all for better or worse.

The start of this little painting, though not great at all, had a germ of pictorial promise in it which I had wanted to keep. There was something in it which also reminded me of Japan and my Nippon fascination. Once bitten, one is smitten, and then it’s a life-long infection. If I could, I’d visit Japan two or three times a year. Who can argue with emptiness and space, even when they’re crowded all together? 

This precociously small sketch of painting evokes both the sand and the deep blue sea as unsteady stripes that run across the picture plane. Above them, like some displaced polar bear, a monster white cloud seems to barely fit under the eaves of a blue ceiling.  

But in it too, it also evokes for me something truly American, like in the heyday of large Minimalist Painting back in the 1960’s when life seemed, oh, so much simpler and expansive, happier and optimistic too (but mostly if you were white though).

Come think of it, when Americans see emptiness, they immediately think; “This needs to be filled” because this is Marlboro Country. Suddenly this big blue sky unveils to me that voracious American appetite, the one that screams ‘More Park sausages Mom!”. And at the same time, this small start of a study also speaks to me of a giant oversized and slightly faded billboard somewhere out on a desolate stretch of desert off the iconic Route 66, one that advertises the sale of the whole darn sky with clouds included! 

Twin Towers, a unique story 25 years later.

  

September 11 2001, oil on canvas, 50 X 44 cm 

         September 11 2001, oil on canvas, 30 X 36 cm 

So 25 years later, the scars of 9/11 are still raw for so many people not just in the USA but the world as well. The perpetrators of terror seem to be a revolving door of different actors but the victims are always the same innocent bystanders. This weekend like others around the world no doubt, I've naturally been watching lots of different shows about 9/11. But because our world goes on, there are also many new stories of the same kind of terror along with the same kind of innocent victims. Seeing photos and videos of the rubble of downtown New York in the aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks next to videos and photos of Tyre, in South Lebanon, and Gaza, I'm reminded that the terrorists may have different motives but the innocent victims are always the same.

(This was first posted 9/11 2011 when I was living in France.)

Exactly ten years ago I was living here at the Belvedere with my friend Lydia who is also a painter, and we spent that day trying to take care of a lamb whose leg was broken. At this time there was a shepherd named Roger from Catalonia, who walked his dog and troop of sheep four times a day, up and down the small road which is below the house. Early each morning, the sound of tinkling bells and his bellowing voice awakened us.

Up to a large field about a half kilometre off the road each morning he went with his sheep, then back for lunch, and back up again, then back home late afternoon was his daily routine. For us it was a wonderful way to mark each day of our life here in the Drôme. Roger was friendly and always shouted 'Salut' when he saw me coming out onto the terrace to wave to him. Once in a while a lamb with a broken paw would straggle behind crying pitifully which was painful to watch four times a day. That week it was too much for our city sensibilities so we asked him if we could take care of the latest invalid. Thinking we were a bit crazy, but being affable about the whole thing, he gave it to us much to our surprise.

So on the morning of September 11th we took it to the Vet's in La Begude who probably also thought we were being a little 'dramatic', and he advised us that it had a broken leg and should be someone's dinner quite soon. We brought it back to Roger who promised he would put it in a small field next to his house. After lunch we each went into our retrospective studios and painted for the afternoon. Lydia painted a portrait of two large dying sunflower plants (see top photo) They were slumped over and hanging to one side. I worked on a few things but couldn't concentrate so at one point I threw two red vertical lines onto a small canvas hoping to throw me into some movement. I suddenly found it to be a compelling image. I don't know why but I stopped and left it in that state, hoping I guess, to pick it up later and to make something from it.

We did not have a television in those days, and at that time, retrieving emails was a dial-up affair, so we were living a somewhat remote local life. 

In truth, being so close to the end of our relationship, we didn't have much to say to each other, so I imagine that we ate dinner outside and later eventually made our to bed. I do remember the telephone ringing once or twice during the night but it was downstairs so I didn't think about getting it. 

Needless to say we didn't find out about what had happened in New York until the next morning. Not knowing what had happened, I came upon condolences from several French friends which I found perplexing and an hysterical message from my sister in the States. I went online to see what the fuss was all about. 

What really surprised us both were the two images which had come up for us both completely independent of one another. Being six hours ahead of New York, there was something quite eery about these images being painted at just about the same time as the towers were falling in the early morning there.

Generally, I'm not a superstitious fellow but I do find these two images painted simultaneously in different rooms by us, quite remarkable.

(An update to this story: Lydia wrote to remind me (which I had forgotten) that the small lamb which she had healed with argile had somehow lived and walked after a week)

Proust for tea in Tivoli Gardens

 

6 May, 2020

Proust for tea in Tivoli Gardens

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 May 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is very curious picture came to me seemingly zoomed up via some unique portal from childhood. It isn’t uncommon to be working on something when I taste my own ‘Madeleine’, of which Proust evoked so personally. I think everyone must have one lurking about in the bird cage of their subconscious mind. Though they could arrive through any one of my senses, this one came visually to me and it relates to some kind of cryptic memory I may have either seen in a museum or book. Possibly even, it might replicate a colorful drawing I might have made as a child. In this picture, in any event, it appears that I have somehow merged the visual with the sense of taste because while working on it two nights ago I had the unatural feeling that I remembered making these sort of flat pictures as a kid. It was so strong that I even had a taste of it in my throat.

Of course I thought of Marcel, who wouldn’t? But even stranger, I had came across an anecdote about Proust’s Madelaine recently. It seem that in Proust’s first draft of the novel, In Search of Lost Time, there wasn’t yet a Madeleine. Hard to believe it, but the iconic metaphor was initially ‘a toast topped with honey’. In the second draft, according to this source, it became a hard biscuit, probably an Italian ‘Biscotto’. But only in the third draft would it become the deliciously famous ‘Madeleine’, the petit four that we are all so used to coughing up when we need a literary metaphor. So you see, all art is inherently made up of both a lie and a truth, what’s in between I think is the creative ingenuity of the artist. Over the last few years I’ve come to place all my faith in this small space.

I was working somewhat normally last night at the beach, nothing out of the ordinary had changed my habit but as this child-like image began to appear I immediately felt that it was a strangely familiar image. And like Alice in Wonderland, I found myself willing to follow it’s fragile thread with my brushes and paint. It was not a picture I would have imagined making, at least the other night. It was one of two, and the one that unearthed these memories and feelings that became so intermingled as I tried to find a way to finish it. In the end I left it in its primary state, stillborn perhaps but it made perfect sense to me alone, and it’s the audience for whom it matters most. 

Looking at it today it still startles me but I’m drawn to it as one is drawn to certain persons to whom one is attracted for only vaguely sensorial reasons. These feeling don’t live on the surface like lust, admiration or intellectusl respect, or even just curiosity for another, they’re buried deeper inside me. Certainly some people are just great-looking and they attract everyone but it isn’t that sort of attraction because after an hour minutes of speaking with them one can quickly find out who they are and more importantl, who they are not.  

These go further backwards into a place where ones’s earliest desires, those made of nebulous filaments have yet to coalesce into sturdy memories that take form through visual, olfactory, and sensual highways in us. These, I think, are the cryptic signposts that point all heroes and heroines back into their own personal time zones. When these ‘Proustian’ feelings arise they can display all the haphazard feelings that seize us in an instant with intense familiarity. I cannot speak for others, but these senses come on like a freight train leaving me in quiet mysterious mood for no apparent reason at all. They don’t happen often enough that I’m even used to them, so when they come it’s always unexpected. They are deep secrets I’ve managed to hide from myself. 

When I was four, I visited Tivoli Gardens with my family when we all went to Europe in the summer of 1956. We crossed on the Andrea Doria which provided me a rich treasure-trove of memories of which I retain several still. But in Copenhagen, I’ve never forgotten a kind of Danish pastry which I ate there and one which I can sporadically access through my taste buds today.. Even just walking into a particular pastry shop anyway in the world can sometimes trigger this olfactury bliss, then, bingo! I’m right back in the sheltered etherworld of Tivoli Gardens.

With the passing years, little by little, these earliest memories have surprisingly taken over a larger portion of my imagination like towards the end of the day when a tree grows a longer shadow across the flat lawn. The taste of my Danish pastry can arrive out of the blue, unexpectedly, but it’s almost always accompanied by a shower of blissful feelings. Without rehearsal, they’re released, again and again, as if one has disturbed a large bush from which hundreds of butterflies scatter into the air for no reason at all. None of this should come as a surprise to me because I’m currently knee deep into Lydia Davis’ translation of The Way by Swann, 1st volume of In Search of Lost Time.

So this small unremarkably strange image that churned up so much emotion for me came as I was struggling with a flat drawing in the fading light. I was feeling lost by what was coming up. It was so wonky and yet so familiar to me that I felt confused. Do I redo everything or pursue this strange path forward? By going forward I was dredging up an image that was conjured just for myself as if it had been custom-ordered. 

I haven’t a clue whether it’s any good or not, but I’m unconcerned, for it’s the electric jolt to my system that counts, irregardless of its success or failure. Isn’t this why anyone indulges in these absurd artistic endevours in the first place? If we’re lucky and we’ve survived our many failures, whatever comes up will often be precious by virtue of its own circuitous provenance. 

Although I wish I did, I don’t have a conscious compass to locate an image like this whenever I feel like it. It came randomly to me of its own volition like a yellow butterfly through an open window in my bedroom. 

What else to say? I know that through any creative endeavor, anyone who ventures into these unexplored places in themselves can find rubies and emeralds for themselves, even for the briefest of moments. For Proust it was his Madeleine, and for me it was this little picture.

“Man!, you hadda be there!”

6 June 2020

“Man!, you hadda be there!”

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 April 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

There are some days when I paint I feel like I’ve taken mushrooms but forget that I’ve taken them. These kitschy confectionary skies look edible and delicious even as if found on a shelf at the candy shop.

At some point in my youth, I discovered the works of Maxfield Parrish who was an American painter and illustrator. He lived a long and very successful creative life, and his paintings and book illustrations were extremely popular in the 20th century. His colour harmonies were kind of over-the-top and quite fantastical even as I remembered them as a child. Because he was an illustrator his pictures were often loaded with dreamy-looking damsels in distress and young men dressed as brave handsome white knights. Looking at them today, I see they lean in towards the Pre-Raphaelite school, but not by someone who insipidly with drab colours but one who had ingested psychodelics. 

So, curiously enough, this painting from the other night reminds me not of two great colourists, Vincent Van Gogh, or Pierre Bonnard, but of the Maxfield Parrish of my youth. So like any figurative painter, of any era, I’ll always try to convince you that the sea and sky from the other evening really, 

really did look like this  (I swear!), but I’d be exaggerating because it’s really just a painting, an illusion like Maxfield Parrish’s whole oeuvre. Just like all art of every kind because  it’s just an interpretation, an invention created out of curiosity by a clever painter. 

But indeed, the other night was really rather exceptional I admit. It was a clean polished sky of unusual clarity and I tried to do it justice. This was the second of two studies. Honestly, just being out there on the frigid and desolate dunes while working from these crazy twilight colours, I felt completely at home. 

While writing, I’ve been listening to the film work of Gabriel Yared for months on end this past year. Over and over again, the same scores seep their way right into my heart and into these paragraphs. Like most of his oeuvre, it’s extremely sensual. I’ve gone through all his work many, many times over, and the ones I really like, even more. It’s perfect music to settle down and write by. 

This week I’ve been listening to the English Patient. Now I know many people like to hate it but frankly, being in Tuscany with Juliette Binoche is pretty nice and worth the ticket price. Then there is the marvelous scene in the church of San Francisco in Arrezzo, when Juliette is hoisted up by the nimble Kip, a Sikh, who rigged up a system of ropes and pulleys in order to raise her high up with his weight so she looks eye to eye with the figures in the Death of Adam, an enormous fresco by Piero della Francesca. 

I think lots of people who write might prefer silence when stitching ideas together. But this begs the question: What does silence sound like? Marcel Proust famously insulated his bedroom like it was a modern day sound studio so he could write in absolute peace in his bed. This sort of silence, like on the moon maybe, would make me crazy. I’ve never been one who has been able to wear headphones even to listen to music with. They make me feel cut off from the world outside me. I marvel at people who can and do. I’m one who needs to be plugged into the world around me no matter where. I’m not even sure that one could get ‘away’ from the outseide world because there would still be hum on the inside of my skull. Better to let the outside filter in in as amabient performance like John Cage apparently did. 

Each morning here, the rural countryside around me serves up a soft symphony of blurred harmonies. The spongy air is thick with spontaneous and incidental chatter. This is a bird’s world of tiny whistles and clucking rings that makes me often stop to listen for my phone. I like all this random racket because I’m used to it after all these years. Being an obsessive-compulsive, it would drive me mad trying to keeping it all out of my head. Actually, why would I even want to cut off the muted fury of a braking truck in the faint distance?   

I like it all, because like with this Painting business, when one learns to look, one begins to see, and so, equally, when one begins to listen, one also begins to hear. I like especially the rain for writing. But even just a cloudy day of unruly wind outside the windows is also good too. I can write anywhere in fact, because when I have an idea it just slips out of me like a burp. 

So, anyway, the other evening was great, and the pictures came up easily to my relief. Like the surfers around here say, “Man, you hadda be there!”

Putting the earth to sleep

3 June 2020

Putting the earth to sleep

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

These Autumn skies give birth to colourful and kitschy postcards at the moment. For a painter to work from such skies can be extremely dangerous but I proceed without caution regardless. I’ve made a bargain, not with the devil but with the carnival barker who lives high up in the sky and suckers me in each afternoon. “No backing out now buddy”, the barker yells at me whenever I get skitterish, “you’re in now over-your-head, whether you like it or not!”

So, like a wild animal, I just follow the scent in the sky as it goes blood red. Once I’ve got it I don’t let go even if I don’t know where I go. That’s the hook actually. Just like writing a story, a painter just needs to start painting, and they’ll quickly find out who they are, and who they’re not. I have no clue how these things will turn out nor what they’ll look like anymore than a parent might imagine how their infants will turn out later on. And like for most everything else in life, the real surprise, is always surprising.

This is a super simple picture, a postcard really, of a sublime evening sky that someone could have easily missed had they been indoors at a cocktail party or at the cinema. They may have indeed been out strolling beneath this colourful sky but also talking on their phone so they missed it. Not to worry, for painters like me are out there in the sky like internet providers working hard to make sure you never miss a thing. 

This study (one of two) possesses an untroubled calm that I really appreciate. The solid inky sea has an assurance about it that announces that it can easily handle the weight of the entire thick sky overhead: “Bring it on!” it crows to the overweight sky. I actually think this painting aptly expresses the very moment when the earth is truly tired and ready for sleep. 

And indeed, in this time of the Corona Virus, I curiously feel in both the earth and sky, a strangely ambivilant calm. People talk these days about the earth slipping into a divine sleep, fewer cars on the highway and no more aeroplanes or tiny lights overhead. In the empty skies here at the beach, the scratchy din of jet engines are no longer and I almost miss the regularity of flights from Sydney into Queensland each night. The highways snaking around the globe are deserted too, so I’ve read in the NYT. But I think I’d have to see it to believe it. Surely, if anyone needed a rest, it’s our poor earth.

They say that pollution has virtually disappeared in the skies over Paris, Beijing, and L.A, even New Delhi it seems. And from Katmandu one can now see the Himalayas for the first time in ages. This earth is our precious friend, seemingly full of abundant love for all creatures and flora alike, but will it forgive us too for all our abuse? 

As I close up shop here on this desolate beach at dusk I often have the feeling that I’m like the manager of a regional playhouse who closes up the theatre and makes sure that all the lights are out, the stage is clean, and the doors are locked. I’m here to make sure the beach is ready for nightfall and the morrow. I know they’re may not be many of us, but the painter in me, at least, has always been a friend of the earth, because after all, I’m here to put it to bed most nights on the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia.

Mallarmé, and the effect of dusk

6 April 2020

Mallarmé, and the effect of dusk

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 April 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It was near clear the other night, and boy, it was fun. It was a gentle and humid sky held in a thin diaphanous veil of pigment, the kind of sky I love working from. Like many from this series, its drawing is extremely simple and it’s void of much drama. Others, with complicated drawings can be more theatrical as when clouds swarm the sky creating action, but this one merely hints at it. It’s a portrait of serenity, and looking at it this morning I wonder if it doesn't evoke the scent of both daybreak and dusk?

At University, I must have skipped the lecture on the Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé in French Lit class, but I certainly came across him later when I read about Impressionism, of which he was a big fan at that time. With a poet’s arcane clarity, he wrote about Painting during this revolutionary period of the second half of the 20th century. (But come to think of it, haven't the French always been rioting about one thing or another while breaking down the barricades? And isn't it always for a just and good cause? And isn't that why they exasperate us, and why we admire them so? Are they not the feisty intellectuals who will block their autoroutes over the price of an egg? I think maybe as any Zen monk might tell you, thinking a lot leads to frustration,,, just sayin...) 

 

So anyway, I was recently perusing the world through Google and came across a small piece that Mallarmé had written about Manet and the Impressionists. Manet was already established in Paris prior to the arrival of the young Impressionists, and with avuncular flourish, he presided over their artistic rebellion.

In his text Mallarmé described how the Impressionists had changed the nature of Painting and he marveled at their explorations into light as if they were foraging through the metaphoric and transient substance of the air itself. He describes the vibrant colours and the play of light in a painting as both a fusion and a struggle between the surface and the space but at the same time, between the air and the pigment, and I liked all that.

His own investigations into the ephemeral sensuality of his own poetry appear to parallel their work as painters. The air, as it occupies an empty space seemed to be a counterpoint to Mallarme’s work as a Symbolist poet. This new generation of 19th century France would soon be sending Realism to the guillotine. For the first time ever, the viewer was to become a participant in the artwork because a landscape or portrait was no longer a declarative (or decorative) statement but an existential question. For these ‘Modernists’, paintings would henceforth became an interaction that would elicit a response from the viewing public. Art was changed forever and it led to Post-Modernism with a few scruffy brushmarks.

Expressing the inexpressable was already something Mallarmé had himself become obssesed with, and he looked for it everywhere. To bypass Realism became a cri de coeur for these Modernists. And what could possibly be more inexpressable than to paint the air itself?

Thus, in this study here from the other evening, I found myself also taken in by the soft quality of the velvet sky, but as with many of these studies, it’s the air itself which is what interested me the most. And why not? It’s the tiny thread that connects all breathing elements here on earth. As a painter, it is the most purplexing element to work from and render. This resonates for me perhaps because, like the accidental Symbolist that I seem to be, these pictures, display virtually no content but for the water and the air that make up the motif. 

In the painter’s world, the sea, being water, reflects back the ‘coulour’ of the sky overhead. In Malarmé’s world, the sky becomes an empty pause, either an unfurnished phrasing of Debussy or a vacant space in one of his own poems, for this is the essence of Symbolism and the birth of Minimalism. 

The painter’s sky can appear invisible, but at certain times when it allows us to look up and through it into space, we can see that it’s mostly gaseous in its various guises, and it provides the painter with a gluey substance with which to capture light from the sun. High cirrus clouds at dusk perform this task with grace and they give the painter a handhold onto the air itself. 

But beyond all these explanations, I really just love the way this painting came out. It isn’t too often when I can connect so emotionally with a picture of mine but thankfully it does happen. If it didn’t happen a lot then I might be just a scientist, happy and satisfied, but not emotionally engaged enough to die a small death. So yes, it does happen enough, but here, I admit, it feels like I’ve waited my whole life to see this painting. That I was the lucky one to have painted it, is the real surprise this week. There are so many evenings that look like this, yet too often, they're unduly dark and I cannot always see my palette. Fortunately though, this sky can be seen at the tail end of some evenings around the globe if one is really lucky .