Doubt is our passion

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The weather has changed again, after intermitant weeks of rain the skies are mostly now clear so I am again allowed to get to the beach. As we approach the Winter Solstice here, the afternoons begin to clam up like heavy iron doors each day before 17h. But hey! Soon, I tell myself, that by the end of next week the days will lengthen and again grow optimistically.

When I returned to the motif the other night for a string of good days to paint, I felt like a novice, a beginner like I knew nothing at all. This feels strange but it can equally feel invigorating. I guess it depends upon how much or how little sleep I’ve gotten the night beforehand.

So I approached the motif with a little trepidation but full of excitement too. These two studies both came quickly and just a day apart. 

What they share is that pale lime turquoise sea right before the onset of dusk when the sea is flat. Many other pictures can dig deep into the violet sea which come later as twilight melts the night. But these in particular have something in them which I really like; They possess that incredible ‘lightness of being’, to borrow from the title of Milan Kundera’s brilliant book of yesteryear. I am always amazed and grateful that this motif is a gift that keeps giving ever more generously over time. 

Of course it’s the same motif I first approached five years ago and its mercurial behaviour hasn’t altered an iota. What has changed has been m. I’m a better painter today only because I’ve learned to see better, and that is what a good and hardy motif can teach even a mediocre painter. 

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion (cont)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Like all work, the quality of one’s paintings goes up and down in accordance with the mood of the muses.  I think it’s the same for every painter that once in a while, having just one great painting session can awaken one and silence our doubts. After all, isn’t this why all artists, writers, musicia  keeps showing up day after day, trudging through all the seasons? 

For Henry James once wrote, “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion, and passion is our task -- the rest is the madness of art.”  Henry James (1843 - 1916) What artist could argue with this?

What I like especially in this study here, the first from the following night, is its immediate feeling of joy, for it sings. I can say this because it’s so rare that I’ve been able to access this quality. Too much of my work has rarely exhibited love for joyous things. I’m melancholic fella even if people find me jovial. I’ve always drawn to darkness, and sadly, pathos for me, has been a stronger bridge to others than joy. But hey, maybe I’m changing?

But here, even inspite of myself, the joy is apparent and I’m so glad for it. I painted it quickly, it was one of three two nights ago. I even like the wonky horizon line that droops slightly on the right, but even this, is just a part of an organic whole, a creative mishap, not really a mistake, more like a misstep, and these misteps reveal the process of painting and give it its originality, like it or not and for better or worse.  

It’s a flattened picture, compressed like a candy wrapper one might find on a city street. This flat quality is everything I’ve been secretly coveting ever since ‘seeing’ Matisse decades ago. I just didn’t know how to get there authentically on my own. Such a conception of painting one cannot fake. It has to be ironed out slowly from lots of failure. What I also really like is that this picture is not locked to the horizon line but exists beyond it, in a world of make-believe and into the realm art. 

These are now winter skies and winter seas that sparkle and glow as June appears to calm the ocean down by turning it a sublime lime. But how to capture it?

In the end, I’m so grateful that I’m the author of all these things for better or worse, even for my most worst things because they’re still like offspring to me, and I accept them all. If I saw this one study somewhere for instance, on any wall, celebrated or otherwise, I would rush over to it embracing it like a young mum to her infant son after school. Is this vanity? pride? or perhaps just foolishness?

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion (cont)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.”

I believe this was lifted from an address by the art critic Robert Hughes at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Academy of Arts, in London years ago. I came across it somewhere online. In a nutshell, aside from the fact that any real craft comes from centuries of long tradition, one born of experimentation and failure, I think he means that art needs to be separated from the clever world of Advertising. I think it began back in the 1960’s with appearance of POP Art when these two worlds became entwined. 

I love the idea of ‘slow art’, even though I work quickly at the speed of light. But of course, he’s not really referring to the speed of the execution of art but of the mind-set behind an artist’s entire oeuvre which is in direct contravention to the entire idea of advertising and selling. But anyway, it’s a pretty self-explanatory. 

It especially fascinated me because he made reference to the ‘skill and doggedness’ that makes one ‘think and feel’. Without saying it, he is really speaking of craft, something that has come up often in these pages. And a possession of craft is the vehicle from which all creativity is born. It’s the one that shows up everywhere from lute makers to a potter’s wheel. Generically speaking, it’s the undercurrent of how we all share our skills and intelligence, is it not? Isn’t it also true that for any creative act, the quality (with few exceptions), always proceeds from one’s command of their craft?

This picture was the third one from the other night. Does it manifest craft? Many might not think so, but of course for the painter, he must absolutely believe that it does, because for him it is matter of life or death, at least in his fragile heart. From my diary the other night: 

“Cold evening! Ouch, I made a fire with what little wood I had cut in the afternoon. Three studies last night, a lovely bloom in a gentle slow motion expanding warm yellows and pink into an arc. The waxing moon eventually brought it to a sudden halt. Tonight might be still be possible but the full moon arrives in a few days and may kill it.....I am nonetheless into some wilder colour harmonies; more pure colour pigments, and when I can; flatter drawings.”

So this harmony in various violets from cool to warm, came after the ‘arc of colours’ had passed in ‘slow motion’ leaving a kind of afterburn which lasted only a brief moment but was prolonged by the generosity of artist-licence.

No brandy? There’s always Morandi!

14 July 2021

No brandy? There’s always Morandi!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 July 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I’ve been thinking about something recently that figures into this study from two nights ago. Because these are such small pictures, there is consequently less horizontal room to create a wider seascape. Of course, I could create more of a wide-angle effect if I used tiny brushes and painted in the style of the small 18th century Dutch paintings where the sea was small beneath the giant skies overhead, but I’m not that kind of painter. In the photographic lexicon, it would be like using a 28mm lens in order to fit everything into the confines of a small rectangular canvas board the size of 30 X 25 cms.

So I reasoned that in my small pictures, to further push the photographic analogy, I actually seem to be painting with a 50mm lens, which makes the images look more cropped because I’ll be taking in less of the horizon. My pictures almost always appear to be zoomed up to a specific portion of the sea as if I’m a captain on the bridge of a surfaced submarine peering through binoculars at a giant cloud over the horizon.

This study, from the two nights ago for example, is a case in point. It’s sort of right in one’s face isn’t it? I like it but I do admit that it lacks all the earmarks of a traditional landscape. No aparent hints of a foreground or distance that normally help navigate the viewer into the picture. In fact, it could almost be a pressed flower between two layers of glass seen under a microscope. Yet I like it, and there is a freedom in it that reminds me of my old flame Giorgio Morandi who also presents his intimate paintings without much fanfare. Their presentations are often absent the classic parameters that have defined the Still Life genre. 

This study was the last of four from a fairly mundane sky that I found myself trudging through without much inspiration when suddenly, out of the blue, and to my total surprise, the sky blossomed open spraying millions of tiny clouds the colour of fuchsia every which way like confetti at a wedding. I love when this happens, I had a field day.

Though I would not compare my small studies with those of Giorgio Morandi, I have always had a big love affair with much of  his entire oeuvre since I was a young impressionable child. My father had a book filled with images of his small bottles and cups. Looking back, I can see now that at my attraction was a reaction to all that delicious sensuality of his brushwork and oil paint. One can never know to what extent children are influenced by these attractions at such an early age but they are the mysteries that help form a person. I also remember Philip Guston’s paintings as a child, and it too, made a deep impression upon me. Much later, when I began painting in France his brushwork also hung over me like a shadow.

So over the years, I’ve seen many, many exhibits of Giorgio Morandi, some small, but others, like the retrospective in Paris at the Musee d’Art Moderne in 2008 which was huge and fairly inclusive. I loved it but at the same time, it felt overloaded with so many small pictures all pressed tightly together like a bulging wallet. Too many riches in such a tight space! I had thought at the time. I also noticed that his work can sometimes blur together in monotony when I see too many of them. In such quantity they can lose their individuality, the precious quality that make each of them so extraordinary for us all. I take note of this for my own small pictures which can also visually stray little from one to the next. This should be a cautionary red flag for me if ever I were to show lots of them in a group. I’ve also recently noticed that large exhibitions need a great variety of an artist’s oeuvre so that individual paintings can take a viewer’s breath away, while at the same time, allowing viewers to move breathlessly from one room to the next. This is in itself, an art form for successful curators I think.

“...to see too many at once reveal his limitations”...., said a painter friend to me about Morandi years ago. I understood what he meant, but I didn’t agree in the way he meant it. He inferred that the quality was diminished which I found harsh. My objections were about the monotony of a show, not of the works themselves. For me, small is beautiful, even in large doses, but they shouldn’t be bunched up too closely on a wall which I tried unsuccessfully to explain to him.

Morandi’s gentle obsession of small bowls, cups, and bottles, lasted decades into his life and these intimate mise-en-scenes were painted over and over again in various colour schemes. These arrangements were recycled and shuffled obsessively about over the years ressembling intimate family photographs spanning several generations. I think it’s evident that all artists are rather obsessional, and this is a natural aspect of a rich and creative imagination. But Morandi’s interest in these familial arrangements bordered on an almost erotic obsession as if he were also a curator of his own harem wherein an unlimited variety of small curves and rounded forms could be possessed by him alone at moment’s notice. 

When he wasn’t teaching he painted landscapes, or was home in his native Bologna where his life revolved around his work. He had a studio in a comfortably bourgeois family home which he shared with his sisters. His studio was a room at one end of the large home on an upper floor. To access it, he had to pass through each of his sister’s room’s, one right after the next, like what used to be called in New York, ‘a railroad apartment’. This is the one story about him I love the most, for there is a special kind of family home that is inhabited by the adult children whose parents have passed on. The intimacy of Morandi, this soft-spoken gentleman as he was known to be, gently knocking at each sister’s successive door before finally arriving at his small studio each day could be from an Eric Rohmer film. This arrangement of such domestic familiarity no doubt found its way into his pictures. 

Like in some bohemian homes, I have a very large coffee table cluttered with piles of books, and parked in a nearby corner of it, is a large book about Morandi. Whenever I feel a certain restlessness come over me like my life is going pear-shaped, I’ll often reach out to it, being so close at anxious hand. So, when there is no brandy, there’s always Morandi.

Confession from the Old Man and the Sea

28 January 2022

Confession from the Old Man and the Sea

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 January 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I’m not sure what I think of the picture but I really liked the session and that’s because I had to struggle so much after losing this study several times like a fisherman with a swordfish on the line.

I had gone out to work even as rain was pelting the windshield on the way there because I had been inside all day and I was going stir crazy. During the short drive there I began to feel foolish thinking it would clear up. I found myself looking for splatches of blue and white everywhere in the sky but to no avail.

 

When I did arrive at the beach the sky suddenly looked angry with dark clouds rolling in from the Southeast anda light rain. But I went out and set up anyway because I believed. Sometimes that can be enough.

So I began to mix colours and was ready to do something, anything, despite the light rain. My heart was begging the clouds to back off for an hour and I cursed my foolish self silently.

Just as I was starting a canvas board a large dog began scampering out of the footpath and bounded around on the dunes in a state of joy. At this beach, dogs are always the first to announce the arrival of people. Then, moments later, small kids would sprout out laughing and shouting, then a few older ones would appear. After a short time, the parents arrive at the end of the small sandy path as it opens generously at the wide beach. They might be accompanying the grandparents who follow up like the caboose. But one thing is for sure, when they look up to see me, this funny-looking guy in front of an easil under the rain in the middle of nowhere, they almost always smile with surprise and perhaps laughter.  “Finally!” I sometimes think to myself,  “All my life, I’ve waited for people to be overjoyed at the sight of me.” 

But on this particular afternoon it was a family of five gals appearing from the pathway. They immediatly pulled out an enormous umbrella from Bunnings and began to huddle beneath all it except the dog, which had come up to say hello to me quickly before racing down to the water’s edge. Three generations, a grandma, her two daughters each with young girls of their own, all huddled together like in an advertisement for Woolies or Coles. They were staring out at the dark sea under a Bunnings umbrella when barely a minute later they apparently decided to leave and called to their dog who obligingly came back sort of straight away. I was getting a little wet mixing colours but still full of hope for a picture. 

When the family passed by me they smiled, and I said to them:

“You know,,,,if you leave it will stop raining don’t you?

But if you stay, the rain will continue.”

They laughed as I did, getting soaked.

Then I added

“Thank you for leaving!”

They laughed again, and were gone like in a puff of smoke.

But to my own surprise, I was right, and I managed to finish the session as the clouds gradually parted. I made two things, the first was rain streaked but this was the second. Yes, it’s strange and different, but there is someting about it that speaks of the session. Despite my doubts, my angel Grace, had made an appearance and allowed me a session full of surprises.

To mask, or not to mask

 13 March 2021

To mask, or not to mask

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In spite of the rain pouring off and on for weeks now, there have barely been a few windows of light. It sometimes pours downso hard on my steel roof that it makes me feel like I’m wearing an infantry helmet. But when softens down a little, it’s becomes a piece by Steve Reich. The grassy lawn around the house is spongy and it soaks my ankles, so there’s been little painting at the beach these days.

And COVID has hit the area hard and everyone is either anxious or angry, they either wear a mask or they wear defiance. And so the vaccine fight goes on, but one thing is sure, everyone is depressed either way, and lonely from everything I hear through the grapevine. I’m a kind of a solitary guy so I’m somewhat adrift to the rhythms of  life in this community and hardly an authentic gauge of truth or sanity around here. I got vaccinated and that’s that. In these matters, I’m quite conventional so I don’t have an opinion about others.

Surprisingly though, despite all this turbulance in the air, in just these past few days, the skies have cleared and it has allowed me to get to the beach to mix a palette ‘for work or recreation’ purposes’, so the regulations dictate for us all around here. That said, in theory, we are all in lockdown though it hasn’t really affected me coming out to paint at the beach. This is rural Australia after all, and anyway, I still need my regular dose of heavenly breezes upon me. 

This was the only one from the other night because I scrubbed out the first. This is only the second or third time in the past few years that I have abandoned a picture. I just lost it ,and like the drowned swimmer I recently witnessed here on the beach, I just couldn’t ressurect the light in it. Death, alas, is the same for everyone but still, it put me in a bad mood briefly. 

So, I then started this hoping to reset my mood. It has a feeling in it which I like. I had fun with these gentle clouds that channel my love for strawberry ice cream. At the same time there is also an uncertainty with the way in which they were painted, I think because I was unsure how to treat them. The colours were changing so rapidly and they had to be synced up with the changing sky that was shifting into gold. It was tricky, but this spontaniety forces whatever skills I can muster to follow the colour wheel into dusk. After all, Nature provides the map to all the answers if I’m clever enough to follow it without prejudice.

Addendum; We all wear masks now when we’re out and about. It’s a curious atmosphere, but of course, many don’t, which is also another curious thing. But I caught myself in a mirror the other day at a store with my mask covering most of my face and I suddenly thought to myself;  ‘Wow, I’ve never looked so handsome!”.

Fail again, even better

15 April 2020

Fail again, even better

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 September 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This picture came out of a very frustrated painter who could not decide how to treat the vast mess of clouds in the sky. From the start, as I set up,  I decided to grab a small idea and run with it but as usual, I couldn’t keep up with all the movement going on as the light changed.

Unless one is Bonington, (Richard Parkes , 1802 - 1828) or one of those magnificent Flemish painters of the 18th century, a sky full of clouds can be a hairy operation for an amateur like me. There are just too many problems with them.It’s not normally a difficult motif to work from, it’s actually quite the opposite, which is why I like it. But when clouds act up which they do on occasion, it can be hell to organise. It’s a lot like the difficulty of drawing hands. Unless one can render them with the grace of Van Dyck or with the rustic truth of Van Gogh, one must be prepared to fail. Or maybe, one could try to think like Picasso employing his graphic audacity which spins the attention of the viewer away from his mangled hands like a magician distracting his audience.

Clouds can overrun the sky, distorting the distances, and making it hard to push the horizon back into the painting. When floating above us, untethered clouds will run amuck like children at recess, oblivious to discipline. Overhead, they roam casually at random confusing the poor painter below.  When I found myself lost in this study I changed tactics, my goal was not only to fail in this picture but to fail successfully, as Samual Beckett advised us, “Fail, and fail again better”.  It helps from time to time to remember our elders.

And so the other night, just when I let go of all expectations, something wonderful happened. Skating on thin ice I suddenly felt weightless and finished this small study with a certain joy that surprised me. It’s a very simple thing, like many of these small studies, and it might appear boring if one looks only with a surplus of expectation. Yet everything works in it. There is distance in it, and the pink cloud bank on the horizon, reposes upon the heavy dark sea like its a wall. There is a faint hint of foreground at the base of the picture that represents the closest thing to the viewer like a doormat outside the home, and it’s the first stepping stone into a new place. 

I sometimes find many pictures uninteresting (everyone’s work, not just my own)  but if they are unified within their own chosen parameters of abstraction, they will get better and better with time like the cliche of the ageing bottle of wine. When a picture doesn’t come together, no matter how dazzling or sexy it may first appear, it will turn to vinegar within a very short while.

Though it might not dazzle, I’ve come to like it anyway in these two days. It’s a billboard, perhaps for myself only, one that reminds me that it’s just a another study, another failure that succeeds.

Mallarmé, and the effect of dusk

6 April 2020

Mallarmé, and the effect of dusk

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 April 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It was near clear the other night and I had fun. It was a gentle, humid sky held in a thin diaphanous veil of pigment, the kind of sky I love working from. Like many from this series, its drawing is ultra simple, and when clear, empty of much drama. Others, with a more complicated drawing can be more theatrical as when clouds swarm the sky, but this one merely hints at the suggestion of any substance.

At University, I must have skipped the lecture on the Symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarmé in French Lit class but I certainly came across him later on when I read about Impressionism of which he was a huge fan. With wonderful clarity he wrote about Painting during this revolutionary period of the second half of 20th century France. But come to think of it, when has France ever not been revolutionary? The country seems to be in a perpetual state of revolt because the French are serious thinkers, and as Zen monks warn us, thinking a lot leads to frustration, (just sayin).  

So recently, perusing the world through Google, I came across a small piece that Mallarme had written about Manet. He described how The Impressionists had changed the nature of Painting. He marveled at their explorations into light as if they were scientists foraging through the metaphoric and transient substance of the air itself. He described the vibrant colours and the play of light in a painting as both a fusion and struggle between surface and space, between color and air. I liked that and it really resonated with me.

His own investigations into the ephemeral sensuality of poetry appeared to parallel their own work as painters. The air, as it occupies an empty space, seemed to be a counterpoint to Mallarme’s work as a Symbolist poet. This new young generation writers and artists would soon send 19th century Realism to the guillotine. For the first time ever, the viewer was to become a participant in the Art because a landscape, portrait or poem, was no longer merely a decorative account but an existential examination. For these ‘Modernists’, Paintings and would henceforth became an interaction that elicited a response from the public. Every Art form was changed forever, and with one small pirouette, Post-Modernism was already born.

Expressing the inexpressable, was already something Mallarme had himself become obsessed with it, and he looked for it everywhere in both painting and poetry. To bypass an out-moded form of Realism became a ‘cri de coeur’ for these new artists. And what could possibly be more inexpressable than to paint the air itself?

In this study here, I found myself taken in by the soft quality of the velvet sky, but as with many of these studies, it’s the air itself which is what interests me the most. It’s the tiny thread that connects all breathing elements here on earth. And as a painter, it is the most purplexing element to work from and render. This resonates for me perhaps because, like the accidental Symbolist that I seem to be, many of these pictures display virtually no content save for the water and air that make up the subject matter.  I wonder what Mallarme would think of it?

In the painter’s world, the sea, being water, reflects back the ‘coulour’ of the sky overhead. In Malarme’s world, the sky becomes an empty pause, either an unfurnished phrasing of Debussy or a vacant space in one of his own poems, for this is the essence of Symbolism, but also the birth of Minimalism to arrive shortly.

The painter’s sky can appear invisible, but at certain times when he allows us to look up through it into space, we can see that it’s mostly gaseous in its various guises, and it provides the painter with a gluey substance with which to capture light from the sun. High cirrus clouds at dusk perform this task with grace and they give the painter a handhold onto the air itself.