Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 30 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Eight studies from over the past several weeks, a few of which were done on the same day while others, the day before or after, but they all seem to be born from my sometimes not so discreet obsession for most anything striped. I'm sure I have already spoken of my fascination with the main floor of the then, still existing Brooks Brothers, on Madison Avenue at 44th street. My father would take me shopping there when I came to visit him. It was an immense building with at least 10 or 12 floors but I would always get stuck on the large main area downstairs where ties were lovingly squeezed into special long wooden spaces resembling coffins made of dark wood. There were hundreds of them in rows three and four deep and they framed a kind of open square around the center of the room wherein clerks and salesmen (no women yet!) were busy watching for patrons coming in off the street, ready to pounce. All those wonderful films of the 1940's reveal this exclusive world of white businessmen. Myself, I never needed help and they didn't fuss with me too much, I knew exactly how to appreciate this kaleidoscopic display of visual pleasure just like an epicurean facing a display of pasties at Boulangerie Chambelland in Paris. These multicoloured ties made me crazy in a way I wouldn't understand for another forty year's time. Shapes and sizes of each stripe, a cacophony of colour harmonies that threw themselves at the inchoate painter inside me. It went on and on, and as a young boy it was a visit to Ali Baba's cave of treasures, and I wanted all of them, at once and forever. And though I only enjoyed wearing ties for a few short years thereafter, my early love for this sartorial appendage seems to lurk forever in my unconscious, and in my closet too.
So in the end, these small pictures are just souvenirs of a quiet hour spent at the beach in front of a motif at dusk and far from the Madding Crowd. But curiously, they're also like models on a catwalk whose desires are to be seen with new and flashy outfits.
"M'as tu vu!!!"
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
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