Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 August, 2020, oil on canvas board, 20 X 25 cm
Here is small picture from 2 weeks ago which surprised me. It was the last one of three done that night. There is something in the light that I have been chasing after since I first began doing these studies a few years ago. It feels to me today as if it were painted during one long exhaled breath.
Today what I see in this small picture is an unrealistic, almost fantastic desire for something completely natural, something unadulterated and simple, an image perhaps so unpretentious, so unpresumptuous and bereft of any need of attention that it might almost be invisible if hung on a wall.
And yes, it's crazy to say such a thing about one's own work but I suppose that I am looking for a purity of feeling in these small pictures and any bit of artifice would be almost a sin.
And unlike so many pictures in a gallery which hustle the public like hookers, this one seems to hide in its own bashful bliss, alone. It does not shout at the world looking for praise nor attention, but hovers quietly hiding... "unshaded in forgetfulness divine" to quote John Keats in Ode to Sleep.
Most exquisite excellentness
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