A reprint, yes, once in a while I have to do it

 

First published November 2014

09 November 2014

Ki no Tsurayuki

'Poetry in Japan begins with the human heart as its seed and myriad words as its leaves. It arises with when (sic) people are inspired by what they see and hear to give voice to the feelings that come forth from the multitude of events in their lives. The singing of warblers in the blossoms, the voices of frogs in the ponds, these all teach us that every creature on earth sings. It is this song that effortlessly moves heaven and earth, evokes emotions from the invisible gods and spirits, harmonizes the relations of men and women, and makes serene the hearts of brave warriors.'

from the introduction to the Kokinshū, an anthology containing twenty books of poetry (A.D. 915 -920).

  Its color fading
with no outward sign
  in this world-
the flower
of the human heart.

Ono no Komachi (A.D. 834 - 880).

I wonder why so much celebrated 'avant-garde', 'cutting-edge' Western art of our time seems to mock and denigrate Beauty? Would it not be possible instead, to shock people by Beauty in this world instead of by its horrors? I do not speak of a sentimentalisation in front of Nature (of which we are also inundated to an awful degree) but of finding a way through to Beauty using metaphor which comes so naturally to many Japanese poets and artists. How can we (in the West) learn to show reverence for Nature, to find amazement in it, without usual denigration of it? Moreover, can we do this without employing a sentimentalisation of it?

Christmas !

           Christ, Via Dolorosa , lithograph (1960s)

 

This is a print from a limited edition of lithographs made by my teacher and mentor, Léo Marchutz back in the 1960's. I've always loved it and it has been lodged somewhere in the base of my brain as a model of what could be possible in the wonderful world of drawing.

It fits into a difficult category of work because it is too 'abstract', perhaps even messy, for some viewers of art, yet for others, it is decidedly too realist. That it is a 'religious' figure like Christ makes it even more problematic. But hey!

The 1960's in France was the beginning of a period of POP art after a brief chapter of Surrealism that reigned supreme after the war.

Léo worked alone and separate from any 'ism'. Self-taught, he developed a unique way of transferring drawings made on paper onto the limestone and ready to be inked up and printed. 

Once transferred 'into' the soft stone he was able to pull as many prints as he wished. He made hundreds of prints in this manner over two decades. Using specially made rollers, often very thin, he laboriously rolled out each part of the drawing with different colours so that he could make just one run through the press and avoid crushing the paper with numerous passes. To arrive at the right colours  he actually mixed oil paints to get exactly what he wanted. This seemed to work out well as industrialised colours were limited.

I wasn't around in those days because I had not yet arrived in Aix for University until 1972. He lent me one of his wooden litho presses and a few dozen stones and taught me lithography. I had a studio on the west side of Aix for about two years until I lost interest in it and fell in love with Painting. 

But it's the drawing of Christ that interests me the most for it's extraordinary. The expression  is spontaneous yet so well realised. Funny enough, I would have certainly loved to see many of his drawings he threw out in order to get to get to this one of Christ. 

He drew incessantly during the 1940's, and 1950's. I'm not sure about the 1960's because he was printing all the drawings. I only knew him the last four years of his life, and by then he was still working on his large paintings made from drawings in the studio.

Anyway, this drawing for me was a watershed moment because it opened up a whole world of possibilities for me. It switched me onto the chaotic world working quickly out in a crowd which led me to drawing trips to Vietnam and Morocco and in cafes everywhere. 

Though infinitely inferior to Léo's Christ, I took from him (and later Albert Marquet) an idea of working outdoors. This drawing doesn't even really work at all but I loved the feeling it at that time almost twenty years ago..

Time flies as we all know, so make a great Christmas for yourselves and don't forget two things: Get a great hobby in life, and give away not only whatever wisdom you've acquired but also, and most especially, all your love to others.

 

Monet at the beach!

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

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

The weather has been flunky these past few weeks and I haven't been out to paint at the beach as much as I would have liked. These are from last month, and they look Okay. 

This evening I went out to see what the sky looked like. It was really amazing but I didn't paint, I jumped in the sea instead. I didn't believe in it, but by the time I was out in the waves I could see that it was going to be really lovely. It was too late to change course, and yet, sometimes it is a great thing to be in the sea and just watch the sky. It's different than when I'm set up to paint because I not watching, but looking which is more intense.

I could only describe the sky as broken at several altitudes so that at sunset the various levels of clouds and colours were different. The clouds themselves were then consequently all very different shapes as well. High cirrus strands, the last thin angel hairs were golden. the pudgy line of low cumulus clouds resembled those Brillo scouring balls used to clean pots and pans were deep violet. Above them was a creme-coloured green backdrop that stretched into the cirrus cloud above. Well,,,, because I don't generally believe in photographed skies it didn't occur to me to capture it.  

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

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November 2024 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

              Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November 2024 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
 

Three beads that save a world

People will no doubt disagree with me but I think this is one of Matisse's more grand and compelling pictures. Granted in his large oeuvre there is a lot to choose from, but this one speaks to his poetic and daring faith in a picture's thirst for a spontaneous but unified surface. I like everything about it, from the colour harmonies to the organisation, to how each part appears to interlock with another like in a lego project.

Somehow, I imagine this picture would enrage feminists everywhere. A nude woman opens up her legs to a male voyeur who doesn't even acknowledge her identity! No visage! Sacré Bleu! Because context is everything for so many viewers of Art (and politics) these days, I think poor Henri would not come out very well, especially in America.

Being a painter, I don't place context high up on my list of criteria for appreciating a painting. I'm a lover of the subtle and unified grace in a picture with almost no attention to any context concerning it.

I marvel at how each of these colours come together as objects. Each one takes its appropriate place within each object it assumes. I love the two pinks that monopolise the entire surface. The warm pink for the woman's body, and the cool, not only for the nightgown, but also for the walls of the room. Is the floor red? Or is it a rug? Or is that a golden rug? Is that a green door or green window? Is that a small blue cupboard in the distance? Do any of these 'things' in a picture even have to do, or be anything at all? What if a painting just surprises us but its mystery?

My real beef with the Non-Figurative, or Abstract genre of Painting, in this era of ours, is that I almost never see any paintings that possess a sufficient cohesion of relationships as to make an image even remotely believable.  

So much painting usually appears mushy with poor light sources, and is scattered about randomly. To call it Light isn't even possible because it's usually Lighting, like used in a photo shoot. Without a natural light source how can form exist? And without that, how can colours then exist?

I love Matisse for so many reasons, too long to list and expound upon here, but it's primarily because, over his lifetime, he was an unabashed explorer into the wild jungles of the Plastic Arts. When he hit it, for he did a lot, it was solely because he painted so prolifically and by that account the odds were in his favour. He was a constant gardner producing every sort of edible in each season.

He worked tirelessly and faced a continual uphill battle against a mercurial and mistrustful public. And, like almost every painter he made some truly awful pictures at times but I love him for all his experimentations that encompass an exceptionally wide set of styles and materials. He was up for for everything it seems. Even towards his end, when ill in bed, he made cut-outs with coloured paper shapes using a pair of scissors.

But in this painting, I think the most important element is the small necklace made of just three dark coloured beads. Are they deep blue/grey or black? For me, they are the keys around which everything else revolves. The strong accents represented by these small three 'beads', perhaps without which the entire surface of the picture might suffer, are pivotal. Somehow they seem to act like tiny batteries that keep the entire picture moving around itself in a slow docile movement.  

In Chiaroscuro terms, they present the strongest accents in the painting which they permit him to use all those surrounding pale, bleached pinks everywhere.

The great display of foliage placed behind the model in the form of an indoor house plant is a brilliant and anodyne solution for creating a passageway over to the deep green door (?) on the right, or is it a window (?) hallway (?) whatever it is, no problem because it there to set off the red (tile?) floor. 

This is a painting that delights its viewers but does so without making a big fuss about it. In it, everything reposes. 

 

As an afterthought, and because I like upsetting people, I include a de Kooning just for fun. It's from a later period in his long life, and certainly not one of his better pictures for which I apologise to his fans, but I picked it out on Dr Google because it's a model painted in a somewhat similar situational place like the Matisse, and as a oil painting I find it dreadful.

While Matisse opened himself up to a visual window of the world, de Kooning, by contrast, appeared to close himself off from it. It's as though he only seemed to pretend to look at the model, because for me, the result explains that he didn't even see her in the first place.

I will be crucified for criticising a god like de Kooning, but honestly, who cares? I think that as critical space has expanded between today and the world of yesterday, it's clear that the Expressionist movement, barely some eighty odd years old, is actually another weak link in the long history of Art. It certainly did not add much to the rich history of Painting, nor was it a lighthouse for the next generation. In many ways it was an myopic diversion away from everything that many have loved and cherished in Painting for centuries. 

Specifically, when comparing it to the Matisse, look at the random ad-hoc and irrelevant way he used colour and placed his model in the picture. The colour is all wrong, was it meant as a joke? There is no light in it all, it's a horror show, and no contextual gibberish can prop it upright with ArtSpeak.

To be fair, it looks like it may have been painted at night because of the garish overuse of yellow paint. This comes from working from artificial light. It has lighting but no luminosity. Honestly, the more I look at it the more ridiculous it really appears. Yes, he made some interesting pictures in his life but no. I don't think many of them stand up to time.