Donor class

16 February 2021

Donor class

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 February 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“My god! what are you doing with all these paintings?” A friend on Facetime exclaimed upon seeing hundreds of paintings lined up like old vinyls in the bookshelves of my living room. 

“Well,... I do sell them when I can,...though lately it’s been slow.” I replied quietly. 

I tried to explain that for me, the most important thing is to keep painting no matter what else is going on in life, sales or no sales, in or outside of this tragic world (but to be honest, little has been actually going on in my life inside).

“It keeps me focused and alive, but it also anchors me.” I added.

What I didn’t go into was that it was really keeping my hopes alive that despite everything, from my low bank account to my empty love life, there still existed open possibilities for the tomorrows to come, for as any painter knows, hope, is the Holy Graal in this stoic art racket. But all this was too complicated to get into so I shut up and pushed the subject back to her.

The reality though, is that despite this digital world of quick solutions, Painting is still a vocation, and it’s crafted over many centuries, it’s an alloy of patience and dedication that, let’s be frank, is seen by most civilians as a slow, indulgent and pretty foolhardy activity. So, sadly, like other artists, I may end up with thousands of small unwanted pictures. 

Regardless, this picture from a few days ago was the first of two done from a hazy sky. I had not appreciated it until I looked at it the other morning. It’s a deceptively simple picture at first glance, and it might even appear terribly plain, but I see in this restraint a discreet truth about the sea and sky. But I’m also a real sucker for those wide and gentle stripes as if loosely decorated by a tipsy pastry chef. In fact, it’s a picture made up of just five simple sensual colours; a deep Ultramarine Blue, a warm Cadmium Yellow, a silky soft pink and a muted lime green. High overhead, a thick band of washed out Prussian Blue snugly holds everything in place. An sky as lovely as this makes me wonder if such plain celestial grace could ever be as stellar as a dazzling woman wearing such a seriously pink scarf?

Sometimes I really think I should have been a wedding cake designer. I have this thing about pastel colours that gently collide into one another and where paint slithers over itself in esculent carefree pleasure. In this study there is this delectable something about bleached peach when colluding with lemon yellow, then lightly pasted over a wafer thin sky. Above these bands is the palest of blue which arcs high up and over my head. Anyone who spends time at the beach, they’ll all tell you, it really does feel like this, I promise.

The flat sea below has crackles in the paint which whisper of old patinas, but this is actually caused by small occasional incidents during transport which I don’t seem to be able to discourage. This effect may evoke the past but it’s really over the horizon line, where infinity blurs into the hazy future. This is a very small picture with large ambitions, it’s a mouse that roars, and I like it.

So funny enough, all this talk of so many pictures lined up in my bookshelves with no place to go, reminded me of an article in the NYT I recently read. It was about a Canadian fellow who had been such a prolific sperm donor that he had surreptitiously ‘fathered’ hundreds of now grown up children. A few years back, when laws opened up which had previously restricted access to old adoption files, many of his grown children tracked him down. Within a year, this guy found himself with a huge ‘family’ and he eventually developed relationships with almost all who had reached out to him. They have even organised family reunions to further develop their sibling relations. 

When I read it I thought to myself; “Holy cow! what a lucky fellow!...” and though I’m sure that Alexander the Great father thousands of children in ancient times, what a weird thing is this modern age. Indeed, there is so much life with so little responsibility, an instant family tree!” It’s like 300 BC but without all the violence involved. I suddenly found myself envious.

Then, today, out of the blue, a curious notion came to me, clearly a nutty one, but germain all the same. I suddenly imagined that by turning out so many small studies over the past few years, sometimes as many as three or four a day, I could perhaps see myself as a kind of ‘cultural sperm donor’, like one spreading my wares equally to large and small walls in vacant homes all the world over. 

Perhaps like this happy fellow who wanked out so many infants to grateful mothers everywhere, I, too, I’d be just churning out thousands of small images, spreading them with equal success out into the world and onto barren walls everyone. Furthermore, I reasoned, as would Walter Mitty; was I not also doing all those empty walls around the globe a great service?

Realistically, I mentally noted, that out of so many small studies, how many would actually survive the perilous journey to a happily furnished home? Some, I hoped at least, would be fortunate enough to live long healthy lives. But others, I presumed might be deemed unworthy and die young. Might others be smothered by debris in the back room of some third rate Antique Shop in Paddington?

But would not the luckiest of my small pictures shine in large and happy homes? And mightn’t they all be full of light and framed with good taste? Alas, others might end up in unhappy homes and hidden away on sad and dingy walls in somber hallways and spaced poorly between cornices. Worse yet, others might be held captive and hung on dreary wallpaper in ugly homes with a loathsome family.

Though others I hoped, might thrive in small homes, much loved and looked after, in spite of deaths and divorces. But others indeed, may well spend the rest of their lives entangled in cobwebs in stuffy attics and dark cellars. But, sadly still, others will go up in flames. Even worse for the painter, the last few may well be forgotten but found one day hanging tragically from the end of a long rope somewhere in East Anglia.

But a  few others, for whatever reason, I presumed might also still find themselves caught in the middle of legal haggling in Estate disputes and argued over within shabby bare walls of Probate Courts both here and abroad. But I’m sure, as I reasoned further, that there will certainly be a few weaker ones that will be loved for sentiment only. They will be accepted and adored despite all their flaws and perhaps even for all the wrong reasons. But hey! 

But lastly, and with hope and grace for the poor painter, there may still be others out there who are cherished and admired with distant appreciation for all the right reasons by a critical and reverent set of eyes. 

Van Gogh’s deep reality

23 September 2020

Van Gogh’s deep reality

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 September 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“I think that if one has tried to follow the great masters attentively, one finds them all back at certain moments, deep in reality, I mean one will see their so-called creations in reality if one has similar eyes, a similar sentiment, as they had. And I do believe that if the critics and connoisseurs were better acquainted with nature, their judgment would be more correct than it is now, when the routine is to live among pictures, and to compare them mutually. Which of course, as one side of the question, is good in itself, but lacks a solid foundation if one begins to forget nature and looks only superficially. Can’t you understand that I am perhaps not wrong in this, and to say what I mean even more clearly, isn’t it a pity that you, for instance, seldom or hardly ever go into those cottages or associate with those people or see that sentiment in the landscape which is painted in the pictures you like best? I do not say that you can do this in your position, just because one must look much and long at nature before one becomes convinced that the most touching things the great masters have painted still originate in life and reality itself. A basis of sound poetry which exists eternally as a fact and can be found if one digs and seeks deeply enough.” 

Vincent Van Gogh to his brother

There is always such clear wisdom in his letters. Van Gogh had the great gift of compressing complex ideas into far simpler ones and rendering them more digestable. I like when he describes how “the great masters” of the past can be found, “in certain moments” and in “deep reality”. This is wonderful, and I think it’s true for all original painters or poets of any period. That “deep reality” of which he speaks is connected to nature in one way or another. And he goes on;

 

“..if the critics and connoisseurs were better acquainted with nature, their judgment would be more correct...” 

What I think he means is that what is essential (in this case an oil painting) is a profound understanding of the way both nature looks, and operates. I think he speaks of the mysterious manner wherein nature can appear both abstract and solid when seen through a holistic vision that is already sufficiently abstract in the painter’s imagination. It isn’t just about looking at ‘scenes in nature’ only to then reproduce them through technical virtuosity like back in the 19th century Salon. I also appreciate what I think Van Gogh correctly insinuates in his letter, that if critics and painters actually went out to live and work in nature they would better understand how it functioned. In France, but for few exceptions, The Barbizon School of Painters was perhaps the first movement that pushed artists out ‘en masse’ into the wild landscape around the Fontainebleau forest. Up until then Paintings were made in studios far removed from the grit of the earth. Van Gogh was deeply influenced by many of these painters. Me too, when I first came to France. 

But Van Gogh also implies that one’s understanding deepens the more one ‘digs and seeks deeply’ enough. It isn’t just about using one’s eyes, but by creating something that derives from the visual intelligence aquired through looking long and hard at the way that Nature operates. This boils down to Light, Colour, and Form.

Though I approach art as a European, and closer to Van Gogh’s sensibilities, I’m still a painter, not a teacher or an academic, so I cannot vouch for anything more than my own personal understanding. For nature is a big word in today’s world and it’s one that can trigger any number of responses in the Post-Modernist world of Art in which we all live, and where at the same time, everything is up for a nuanced interuptation. Personally, I can neither speak for African Art or South American Art, nor Asian, although I love them all, and I’ve seen lots over the years. I came into the Painting world through the portal of Europe culture so my eyes are therefore conditioned through a European set of lens. 

This picture from last week was the last of three studies and it’s one that I liked. It had been a lovely bloom, though understated, as if it had been run through a strainer. I was able to follow it cautiously into the night. Unlike the first two, this one has a lot of paint on it because I battled with a few substantial changes as the light dropped away. But, I like its simplicity, it has a carnel vibe to it because it reminds me of a rare steak under a muted sky the colour of Béarnaise sauce. I say this with mild nostalgia as someone who ate meat in my previous life. Here, it appears just thick enough to compliment the red sky just beneath it. The sea had gone dark, an ominous deep violet which appeared almost black as dusk settled in. 

It’s not the sort of painting that might appeal to someone looking for a naturalistic seascape because it’s surely not very picturesque. I think one needs an imagination to see it not just as an abstract picture, but simply as the sea and sky themselves at dusk. It came to me after years of looking at the motif in all seasons. This kind of devotion to a motif is what I think Van Gogh was basically writing about. Of course, we share many of the same sensibilities because I was essentially a student of his, one of many I think. Because of that, I learned to see the landscape through many of his own paintings. The key thing for me was to absorb what I could from all my teachers, then go out in search of my own landscapes by exploring nature’s deep reality. In this series at the sea, hopefully I’ve mapped out a path in the sand with my own footprints. 

There is little more to say except that it pleases me like a marathoner who has finished the course in a reasonably decent time.

 

An architect

10 March 2021

An architect 

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

“What motivates me is work on disappearance, on the limits between a presence and an absence of the architecture. 

Dominique Perrault (1953- )

This morning I was able to get into town for some errands. Everything still a mess and most shops are closed while people still clean mud from everywhere. Mullumbimby, was already a quiet town but today it had an unnaturally eerie and sad air about it. Piles of soggy furniture and rugs lined the streets everywhere, whole families were still out cleaning up. It’s awfull. I spent yesterday helping a friend mop up his house. The weather has been unstable since the floods, but I got out the other day. Yesterday looked blocked up in the West but clear to the East, so I took a chance. 

I like this quote from the French architect Dominiquue Perrault, in a concise little book entitled The Architect Says, which according to the editor, is full of “quotes, quips, and wisdom”, as advertised on its front cover. It’s one of those diary-styled books of easy consumption and comprised of one quote per page. It’s the kind of book one keeps on the bedside. I keep mine on a low oversized, coffee table from Bali, a gift from my sister-law. They are the go-to lounge tables here in Byron Bay where traffic is heavy between the two places. 

But I like what he says especially in regards to this picture from the other day even though I’m not even sure to get his cryptic meaning. I only understand it metaphysically. I wasn’t familiar with him so I went on online to forage. His most famous work (among so much) is The Bibliothèque National de France, and from that I deduced that he was speaking of empty space and its rapport to the material substance of a solid building structure. So then, I wonder, is he talking about relationships of spaces like we do in paintings? Not sure, but somehow, I can equate it to this picture from the other evening. 

Architects appear to me like one very large family wherein its members possess all sorts of secret histories and intimately nuanced understandings that are communicated silently through some private channel configured only amongst themselves. They even appear to use an arcane and singular language all their own; a vocabulary of proportion and mass, one that’s privy only to themselves, and guarded by an aesthetic status to the exclusion of everyone else. Actually, I’ll confess that I‘ve always felt excluded from this cryptic circle and I’ve felt full of envy when in its presence.  

Their grammar speaks of space, light, and volume, I think maybe in the same way that some painters still do. But their concerns are bigger and bolder, and more important than just flat surfaces with colour imposed upon them. They appear more concerned with grand schemes and seem to worry about how we as humans, writ large, cohabitate amongst ourselves in rural settings or in cities. If judged by Art Fairs today, my mild regret, or rebuke, would be that painters on the whole, seem less serious than architects, certainly more insignificant. They even seem more frivolously narcissitic and irreverent than the serious and consequential gang that both house and home us all. I’ve come to see painters like poets, important, but left somehow behind the real art form of the 20th century; films. Alas, mostly what we do, when we do it poorly, is solipsitic and without meaning. But when it’s sublime, it’s divine. Painting today, is what so many of us creative types do to dig deep into ours souls, exploring the hidden parts of us that we don’t really need to explain to anyone else. So it has a purpose, still. But it’s not part of the zieguist that it maybe once was a few hundred years ago. Some painters have crossed over to make films like Man Ray, David Lynch and Julian Schnabel, to name but a few, who have all made two careers for themselves. But the art world is so vast that honestly the only people who seem to make a regular income from it are the galleries. It reminds me a bit of the records labels that sprang up in the 20th century that spread popular music around the world and made oodles of money. Unless they hit it big, the musicians would scrape like most painters. But hey!

So being a painter, I must now wade back into this discussion and either put up or shut up. I was thinking of this picture from the other evening to illustrate my thoughts about Monsieur Perrault’s quote. For me, this painting reveals a delicate range of light, one that permeates a surface of the image with the barest hint of matter. This notion of ‘presence and disappearance’ is what really appealed to me about the quote. In painterly terms, this sky is an attempt to capture something as fine as light itself, so fragile it might shatter just by staring at it too sternly.

In opposition to that, the sea is solid like a building, a deep dark violet mass that contrasts sharply with the light airy sky overhead. There is an Emerald green strip at the very forefront that acts like a door mat in the first plane of the picture and it allows the viewer to peek into the image like it’s a room. It helps to create a chilly distance all the way up and out to the horizon line. 

It’s a cool picture no doubt with little warmth, save from a hint of the pale pink of the clouds which are in fact, just bits of the unpainted white canvas board showing. And this is a great example of how our eyes always will compensate for a missing colour hue. They appear pink to us due to the cool complimentary colours around them, and this is Nature as teacher, and she is as practical as a great parent. 

Though the sky appears almost empty like a vacant lot between buildings, it’s still space, but it’s made of air and water vapour. It’s an atmosphere composed of diaphanous clouds that stream across it like loose ribbons, they’re so pale and translucent one could too easily misread which is cloud, or which is sky. That effect is what made me think of this architect’s description of presence and absence, even if I’m not completely sure of his own meaning.

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.