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 realised that there was a reason I wasn't aware of at the beginning. I see now that it was something almost difficult to express, somewhat nuanced for me. I have always seen these studies as small souvenirs in a way that ahas been hard to write about. By putting them in these little 'mise-en-scenes', I am declaring to the world that these 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, and they are just reminders that the ocean is ever-present no matter where one lives, even Utah. They are postcards, souvenirs of a moment in time to remind us of this. 

They repose standing up in the kitchen as well as on the bookshelves and once in place, they are domesticated already like small 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.