prémonitoire

Montbrison, Drôme, Gouache, 2012, 20 X 13 cm

Montbrison, Drôme, Gouache, 2012, 20 X 13 cm

So, I have been trying to upgrade my poor website these past few weeks because it has been loitering around like a goofy guy at the dance who has never had the courage to approach a gal. This has gone on for several years now, and Squarespace reminds me that to be at the dance hall it costs me about a 100 clams a year as we say in Brooklyn.

So, having upgraded to a new MacBook Air which has changed the speed of actually, everything (including my thinking, including my typing skills) I decided to fix up my web site. Happily, with a new laptop, all this  works like a dream like I've used a magic wand. The downside is that it cost me a bomb (twice the airfare to Europe where I have been dreaming of going since 2018) alors,,, so like all gifts there are often warts lurking around too. Next year, I keep thinking to myself....next year...

Anyway, I came across these gouaches I made after leaving my home in Dieulefit when I promptly went to Japan to shake things up between chapters in my life and where I began making these gouaches while traveling light. 

But then I continued when I returned for the summer when I took a small cottage in Montbrison from friends a stone's throw away There I played around every morning. In the afternoons I went to an old factory that some other friends had offered for a pittance before they began renovating the whole place to sell. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 January 2021, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

To make a long story short, I found myself with these curious images both in gouache and oils in the factory. I was making other kinds of things also but it was this visual idea of a horizon line that was somehow planted in my imagination most certainly from Hiroshi Sugimoto whose amazing photographs I had seen a bit everywhere, over the years. 

So again, it is interesting just how certain forms will always re-appear periodically in a painter's life whether one likes it or not. Like shutting and opening a laptop they go to sleep for a while only to awaken again on their own terms. In my own case, a visual idea has usually been focussed on that midpoint horizon line separating the earth or sea from the sky. Go figure....

And funny enough, here where I have settled on the North Coast of New South Wales on the edge of the Pacific, I began in earnest, to really explore this inchoate form from within me.

Poet Laval, 2013 oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

Montbrison, Drôme, Gouache, 2012, 20 X 13 cm

Prince Street, early 1900's oil on canvas, 40 X 40 cm