English patience

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 July 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm 

I have been listening to the film scores of Gabriel Yared for the past week. I can sometimes get into a composer for a time, then stop and move on. Nothing like Apple Music in this époque. So last night, feeling a little homesick for Europe I saw The English Patient for which Yared composed the score. 

A curious thought came to me while watching the opening titles, wherein a simple figure is being drawn as the credits roll, a small brush draws an almost primitive-looking, sepia-coloured figure which we will soon understand to be a copy of an elongated swimmer reproduced from a wall in an Egyptian cave. So we watch the figure begin to appear out of just a few sensually precise lines that at first resembled a Japanese calligraphic letter. 

I didn't remember this opening scene since watching the film the last time. I had loved the book, and though the film has wonderful bits in it, at times it also felt like a perfume ad but I warmed up to it last night.

So listening to his music for a few weeks now I suddenly felt like a nostalgic voyage back into my past experiences around Siena where often I stayed with an old friend at her place in Sovicille. 

Sadly, she died this past January at home there. We had had a falling out over a lot of silliness which is usually the case for these breaks. I had not seen her since about 1996 in New York. I only found out about her death from her son. I had written her a postcard because I had been thinking of her for months. Alas, she received my card about a month before dying and was too ill to respond according to her son whom I knew as a child. 

Like for the doomed lovers in The English Patient my timing was off, and I was sorry I let so many years go by before finally writing to her.  

But while watching how this 'swimmer' began to appear in the opening sequence last night I began wondering about what it means for a an artist to have a concrete idea in their head when they begin work on a piece. 

One can easily forget the magic of the moment when an image begins to appear on a page, somewhat like an old Polaroid coming slowly into focus over a few minutes.

We don't know what is going to eventually appear but the artist certainly does, either consciously or not. It's a marvellous moment that can take one instantly back in time to the amazement a young child feels in front of any form of verisimilitude. 

There is a slice of a story about a young boy who stumbles upon MichaelAngelo who was at work on a giant stone from which a lion seemed to be coming out of. He simply asked the sculptor who smiled. 

"How did you know that there was a lion in there?"

So then, I thought about my own work and wondered about just what goes on in my own mind at the time of those very first brushstrokes on a canvas board. Do I think?, Intuit?, or just wing it by blindly jumping into a picture?

I think at the start of any painting, my idea is always a pictorial one, one formed by what the sky looks like and the colours I see. So maybe I see a slow-moving but bright-coloured train and I just try to hop aboard for the ride, then who knows where it will go?

Then I tried to imagine the difficulties of working as an American Abstract Expressionist, and what might have gone on in their heads when working. Where did their pictorial ideas come from? Were they even necessary? Somehow it appears that it wasn't relevant to their process of making a painting. Was this to their detriment, or advantage?

Painting what one feels, without a premeditated  thought or idea, can be a wonderful way to work at times, but over the long haul, is one working from a window or a wall?

Anyway, Here are two things from a few nights ago. They didn't knock my socks off,,, but hey! I was happy to get out and throw paint around despite the result.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 July 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm