Takes one to know one

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 October 2024 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

An old friend of mine, Micheal, is visiting the Gold Coast, here in Australia, about an hour from me, near Byron Bay. He came by for long lunch, and though he has been here many times, he continually marvels at these curious Australian people. For example, he recounted two wonderful anecdotes to prove his point. They both took place on a wooden walkway alongside the beach within days of his arrival. 

The first encounter involved a fit woman in an exercise outfit who was briskly walking towards him from the opposite direction. Because the walkway narrowed at just the spot where they were about to pass one another and one of them would have to give way to the other, the clever woman approached home gently clasping his arm and waltzed herself around him, twirling not once, but twice so they were each able to continue on their respective directions. 

Not bad. 

The second encounter occurred the following morning when on the same walkway he found himself approaching an older couple from behind walking the same direction. As he passed them on the left (which we do here in Australia like in Britain) he nodded with a smile, when the wife looked up at him and immediately said, "Watch out! my husband is farting". 

Whoa! Life is certainly a gas here in Australia! he recounted to me. 

But not to be out done by his stories, I had to tell him about an encounter from just the night that happened to me when I was at my small dune and setting up to paint. I began mixing colours on the palette which is placed horizontally upon the front of the easel. I was apparently using my palette knife with such vigour that when a retired couple that was passing below on the path, the husband shouted up to me; 

"You look like you are masturbating", 

"Come again", I said to him, because I didn't really believe I was hearing him properly. He repeated it then disappeared quickly up the pathway back to the car park. I wasn't shocked because in all fairness, it's usually me who shocks strangers not the other way around. But it did take me by  surprise. 

Recounting this to Michael, I confessed that it's rare that I find myself so disarmed that I cannot repost something quickly so speechless was I to hear a complete stranger say that.

Without missing a beat, he replied, "You could have said, 'Takes one to know one'".

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 October 2024 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

But Australia is also know for its critters that live amongst us all. There are venomous snakes in our backyards, pythons in our roofs, and poisonous spiders that take over our shoes if we leave them out on the porch. In fact, when I first arrived about 25 years ago, I was terrified by all the things my brother and his roommate warned me about doing and not doing here. Of course, I soon realised that Australians do that to every tourist as a joke. But nevertheless, the nasty critters still abound  and one must take certain precautions. On the other hand, there are cute residents like koalas, and wallabies, kookaburras and wombats, etc, etc.. 

Painting has been good to me lately. I am moving through a new chapter because I am re-working studies that had never really pleased me. I take them out to re-paint after I've done a few new studies when the palette is slurpy and rich with paints. So now I often bring a few out with me when I show up at the beach.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 October 2024 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

  

El Greco and me

Unfortunately I don't remember who I gave this to many years ago. If i did I'd send them an insulting letter about why they would try to sell it at auction which is where I found it online. 

I guess it rubs me because I mostly gave thing away to friends and I cannot imagine why anyone would a gift. For for how much? Peanuts I'm sure from the look of the Online Auction House. 

Well, what are you going to do,,, as my aunt Molly from Glasgow used to say. I remember it as being one of the very first dry-points I ever made in France perhaps 45 years ago. I immediately fell in love with the process working on copper plates but only made a few because I wasn't set up. I think it was a couple whom I knew who had invited me to come into their engraving studio in Aix to try it out. 

It was a 'copy' of an El Greco reproduction I had in those days. A self-portrait he painted in 1584, so Google informs me. But because I was making was a dry-point, the image is reversed and thus the face is backwards so the expression turns to the left instead to the right.

Of course it looks a bit wonky because I didn't know what I was doing, I negligently didn't finish it by ignoring many of the details. The copper plate was the size of a matchbook and I remember being unable to manipulate it in my hand left hand I was also new to gauging into this soft metal. 

But those are excuses! The truth, is that I find it full of life today and I'm grateful to see it again after all these years. 

About 25 years ago I tried again to make dry-points but this time by using plastic postcards....! Go figure!... (I cannot remember why I didn't again use copper plates which make a real dry-point) 

Sometimes, I don't even understand my own thinking...!

But anyway, I fell in love with this El Greco self-portrait that I saw in my early years in France.

El Greco, (The Greek) was born on Crete in 1541, His real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, but only after his death did historians call him 'El Greco'. Why 'El Greco' when Crete was ruled by Venetians? It is Spanish because he spent so much of his life working there.

Enjoy!

Addendum- I was telling this story to an artist friend David the other night who wisely suggested another scenario for me. Perhaps the auction was part of deceased estate sale and whomever I had given the print had died? A mystery.

    

         El Greco, 1584 Self Portrait, oil on treated burlap  

Paintings as postcards and ready for the fridge door

Anyone familiar with my facebook or Instagram accounts would see these recent photos I've put up. I just started doing it for fun but I've also now realised that there was a reason of which I wasn't aware when I began. I see now that it was because I've always seen these studies as small souvenirs in an unpretentious  way that has been difficult articulate. By putting them in these little 'mise-en-scenes', I am declaring to the world that they are just 'part of the woodwork' of everyday life as it were. 

They are 'nothing special', an apt title of a favourite book of mine by Charlotte Jono Beck because they are really just reminders that the ocean is ever-present, no matter where one lives, even Utah. They are postcards, souvenirs of a particular instant in time reminding us of this moment. 

They repose standing up in the kitchen as well as on the bookshelves, and once in place, they are domesticated and at home, like small sleeping dogs in one's living room.

Enjoy!

 

 

Hiatus, and Uncle Boris.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 September 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

After a long hiatus I got back to the dunes at the beach last week. I was nervous, and I had to push myself out of the house in order to get back into the routine. 

This top one came from the first session wherein I made four studies somewhat quickly. The skies weren't brilliant on either days but luckily I'm seem to able to pull something out of even the worst skies. 

I wasn't thrilled by any of them, but dutifully, I put them in the boot of my small Toyota. There were done on different nights. The next mornings when I pulled them out to take photos I was pleasantly surprised by these two in particular.

Towards the end of a 'bloom', I've always had a problem dealing with the thick stripe of colour that hovers over the sea as it steadily grows taller to eventually meld into nightfall. 

In the top study, the stripe arose from a somewhat dull-looking sky, its broken tint of purple appeared almost solid as it expanded upward. In the study below it, two evenings later, the sky had been a little brighter and thus the stripe appears brighter, though a little faded with more light Prussian Blue in it. 

It's strange zone, this thick stripe that widens gradually as the colourful 'Bloom' fades away and the sky returns to a more conventionally local colour before dusk. It can be any variance of violet as it rises into the evening. It's rarely the same hue of purple on any given night. It's confounding and troublesome. 

It's an androgynous sort of colour that befits our nuanced, gender-bending moment we all live in today. It can feel robustly masculine on some days and yet, (as in this first top study) it carries a feminine scent like an airy perfume on others. But I've come to appreciate this problematic space, one so delicate and nuanced, and one that survives the turmoil of a sunset that already presents me with such agony. Like a lynchpin it holds everything together, and I have so little time to see it, then find a solution for it. 

Maybe, for a civilian, it's too difficult to explain properly. But as my uncle Boris, back in the Bronx used to say when I was still a virgin: 

"Hey kid, you gotta do it to understand it,,,ya got it?" 

Anyway, Thank God for Uncle Boris, who also taught me how to stick with something until I finally understood it. And this motif always seems to open up new problems, (but solutions too) invisible to me when I started out just a few years back. 

Rain is scheduled for the next few days.