listening and seeing

16 July 2018

listening and seeing

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 July 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

At the piano this morning I was playing around with the iconic tune Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I found myself spending an hour leisurely just moving through a few simple triad inversions to harmonise the song in different ways. Eventually  I began to slow down just enough that I could really hear each subtle shift in the melody from the variations.  

This is not unlike the process of looking out at the motif here at the beach as dusk approaches calming down the shifting colour patterns. I’ve understood that even just casually looking out at the sky can become for a painter, the first step towards actually seeing it, and this puts me into a place of reception which is my real landing zone. 

Only just recently in my life has this receptive form of patience become a kind of North Star for me. It has established a trust in whatever activity I’m engaged. It’s the new point on my compass too, because for most of my life I’ve been a bit lost and unfocused. But patience, even now, is never a given, it’s not something that appears like magic whenever I snap my fingers because I’ve only just recently learned how to amicably access it. This is because I’ve been anxious all my life, and I’m an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist according to a well respected pharmo-psychologist in New York whom I saw back in 1990. It was the first time that anyone had ever addressed this part of me as an adult in such a clear-cut fashion. I was somewhat shocked, but also relieved at the same time because it was after all, a bona fide explanation that in an instant, reeled me in from deep space where I had been hiding out since I was a kid. His short term solution for me was Prozac, but that was really just a happy short term solution. I knew had to stop drinking which came six years later. 

But relief from much of all this anxiety had to even come many years later when I seriously began studying the piano each morning and painting at the beach most afternoons in Australia. There is a nice symmetry to these activities that bookend my days now. Little did I know that they would both land me into a place of gentle creative submission.

My method is pretty simple I generally jump on the piano first thing each morning with a pot of strong black coffee and into the hardest piece I don’t want to play. So needless to say, learning piano has really helped me lot. Horowitz describes how he learned pieces in slow, slow motion until they were completely memorised. I took that on board immediately when I read that about him. 

So playing a piece slowly, at a snail's pace, I began learning pieces. Listening to chords in slow motion, over and over again, settles me down like I’m on a couch following instructions from a hypnotist. I mean, what’s the point of trying to play anything if one is not really present? I've spent my whole life hurrying through all sorts of activities, oblivious to whether I was absent or present. It was the piano that finally brought me to heel. Then, only gradually did I settle down enough to begin looking and seeing a motif with patience.

So, like the piano, the beach skies have also brought me down to earth. I’ve progressed slowly from looking to seeing, a quantum leap for a painter. Somehow too, I’ve allowed myself the space to see just watch the sky until colour harmonies trigger a natural response in me. Looking and seeing are passive voices in this process of creating a picture though I’m sure it’s different for others. For me, the key that opens up a picture each evening is a kind of patient reception.

Most days it’s the same ritual. Once I’ve arrived and set up, I’m able see to what’s on offer. "What’s on tonight’s menu?" I think to myself, rather matter-of-fact. Then I set about making a palette which is the easiest part of the process because it’s pretty much the same these days.  

At the moment I use six colours: Quanicridone Magenta, Ultramarine Blue, Prussian Blue, Cadminium Yellow Deep, Lemon Yellow and Titinium White. It’s a limited palette, compact, but one that easily expands to a full-ranged colour wheel that makes both warm and cool sides of each of these colour tones pretty interesting. 

This quick study was the second of six from the other night, a wild winter sky that just kept expanding and exploding. It went on for the longest time these fireworks, and I jumped into it wholeheartedly. Like each of the others, this is a warm vibrant image, freely painted with abandon. They were all okay, but this one has a certain feeling in it I like. Though crude, it’s alive and for me, that’s the most important thing. If it were a piano piece it might be something warm (and French), both light and playful too, like part of a suite by Darius Milhaud or Francis Poulenc.

At the end of each session when I’ve packed up my things and stashed a few items in the nearby bushes when I’m sure no one is looking, I’ve taken to making three sharp claps facing the sea, followed by three brief bows with my hands in prayer position, something I picked up over the past year. It's from from Japan because like everyone else who has visited that marvellous place, there is nothing quite as disarming nor as gracious than their soft bows shyly performed for just about every occasion. But then again, it might have also come from all those Zen Buddhist books and memoirs I’ve read for so long, hoping to find answers to life's problems and maybe steal something from them to make my very own. Naturally, I feel self-conscious doing this brief ritual which I admit would be funny to watch from afar. Then again, lots of people around here in Australia have quirky spiritual ticks and no one bats an eye. For me though, it’s already part of my ritual, and besides, I like the way it closes the session and reminds me that painting here at the beach is always a gift. Even the awful pictures that come out of it are part of the plan because these are apt called Evening Prayers. 

Double bass

22 February 2022

Double bass

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The weather has been typically chaotic but at least not so crazy hot. The other night though was insane, a wild firestorm in the evening sky. Sometimes one has to let go and fly into directions that might have seemed previously off-limits. For example, in this study from last week, it’s has an abundance of sweetness, an overload of candy that overflows and seems to border on the pornographic. This kind of thing is a risky adventure for me or anyone, really. Though I actually appreciate its absurd audacity it’s the kind of picture one might find in one’s grandmother’s home placed near the hearth. In it is a charming quality that scares me. 

But the memory of such a firestorm in the sky also leaves me at the same time, with a certain affection for it. The sky was so difficult to render in such a short time frame that I kind of forced my way through it on intuition alone. The sea came at the very end, and without it, I would have lost everything. I don’t know how I was able to get it to recede like it does, sometimes it’s just wild luck. So yes, it’s an over-the-top-image but a part in me is also amazed that it sort of works in a crazy sort of way. There is truth in it, despite everything, but that doesn’t always mean that it’s a great picture. Like the ultimate of cliches: “It really looked like this!” Yes, it’s kitschy, for sure, and yet, you know what? Sometimes one just needs to paint these kinds of things once in a while. 

Like I’ve said previously, since childhood, everything in life has always felt like a final exam, even just playing tennis or keeping a diary. There is a perfectionist hidden within every chapter of my life. Though I pretended otherwise, every important action I’ve ever taken had always felt like a death sentence hanging over me. Remarkably though, I somehow found a way to live with it. I just lurched from one problem to be solved, to the next. Needless to say, I was wreck, and running on one cylinder.

Providentially, a solution came to me from a piano teacher at a school of jazz in Aix I had seen just a few times before moving up to the Drome back in 1999. Previously, I had been working on my own and spending time trying to figure out music theory on paper. I was attemping to learn a few Standards on paper and dutifully writing everything out in hopes that I could understand harmony theoretically.

So on the first lesson the young guy came in and I told him I was learning All The Things You Are, a favorite of everybody’s by Jerome Kern. I tried to play what I could but mangled it thoroughly.  He brought his giant Contra bass and set the metronome to an easy pace and asked me to play with him. I didn’t have the changes memorised so I again mangled it. No worries, he told me.  Memorise it and play from the chart for the next week. So I left the lesson excited and terrified and went home and worked on it all week. 

The next week we jumped into it quickly, and of course I faltered but tried to keep up. “He didn’t stop for nothing”, as Dizzy Gilespie used to say. “No freight train, nothing” He kept going and going and I gradually began to get it. He basically pushed me in the water and waited for me to sink or swim. It was a great lesson, and it changed my life in so many small ways thereafter. But it also took patience, that magical thing that had eluded me all my life. 

So a small crazy study like this reminds me not to judge too much, just keep it moving. Remember the chart, remember the double bass that stops for no one, ever. Had I not moved away from Aix, I would have kept working with him. Sadly I don’t think the little school lasted too long but it was just at the crossroads for me and I’m grateful for it.

So now years later, I’ve been on the piano every morning just because it brings me joy. Importantly though, it essentially prepares me for the day ahead. There is so much pain and irrational violence in this world, and I’ve never been able to keep at bay, so I’ve always been anxious. This was the root of my perfectionism hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. But this piano study has moved me, soothed me, and changed me forever.

  

Shéhérazade

2 March 2023

Shéhérazade

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 February 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When I arrived the other night the sky was so densely packed with colour that I simply looked at it and felt like it had already been painted. All I needed to do was copy it like in a numbered picture book for kids. Would that make it inauthentic or too close to verisimilitude? 

Each year I make a series of postcards at a great little print shop in town. Lovely people who know what they are doing with colour are a god-send and this image might make a good one. I sell them at a few places around the shire, but for me it’s just for vanity and some publicity. I’m still a big fan of snail mail in all forms but the price of stamps here is over the moon so I’ve had to curb my enthusiasm. And yet I love to imagine these sea and sky pictures stuck on fridges from Taiwan to Pittsburg and Paris to Milan because I’m still an analog kind of guy.

I have been listening to Maurice Ravel off and on now for weeks on end. I can get into composers this way. Tonight on France Musique, I heard the soprano Christiane Karg sing Shéhérazade, a languid and darkly mysterious piece evoking the antique fable where just for once, a woman comes out on top. Suddenly, seeing this picture while hearing her sing put in me in a strange mood. It’s as if this taciturn image were painted expressly for this version of Shéhérazade. Even if it weren't, how could this be I wondered? 

I’ll be honest, almost every interesting thing I’ve ever learned concerning music has come from  France Musique. In a recent podcast about Ravel’s life I learned that he was a teacher. Already an accomplished composer and celebrated pianist himself, he just really loved teaching music. Not unusual, but hardly normal for a composer with means, but time constraints also. He wished most for his students to find their original voices. He valued it highly and he believed it was that one quality that made a good artist a really great one. As a painter, who could argue with that?

I’ve always liked Ravel, so I began working on a small piece he wrote called Prelude 1913. It was simple enough to imagine learning it. It was originally written for students to play as part of their entrance exams into the Conservatory in Paris. As I understood it, they were given this piece only an hour or so before the exam and expected to play it in a giant hall before the judges. It’s but a tiny fragment of a musical idea, just around 1:15 minutes long yet it embodies a host of ideas that seem to spring out of it like wildflowers. And like a pulse, after just a few measures into it, one can already hear Ravel’s own heartbeat coursing through its bloodstream. Any great artist or painter, writer, or composer, reveals themselves within a just the first few measures, brushstrokes, and sentences. It’s what makes them uniquely singular.  

And this is especially so for the painter, where a brushstroke acts like a fingerprint pointing to back to the painter. Even just a small fragment of a picture by Van Gogh can reveal his touch within the painted brushwork. And just like Ravel, or any original composer, classical, Pop or otherwise, a small detail of Vincent’s handiwork is quickly recognised by any astute amateur of art.

As a consequence, over the past year at the very end of each day, I’ve gotten into the habit of playing the Prelude 1913 before getting into bed each night. It’s the last act before sleep. After I’ve locked my doors, shut off the lights and brushed my teeth, I sit at the piano conveniently situated on the way to my small bedroom. There, I run through it a few times, stumbling here and there, because I’m really a crap pianist. Some nights it feels like a life sentence. I know it by heart of course, but knowing it well doesn’t mean playing it well. I struggle because it needs a soft touch and that requires a great supple strength in the fingers, something I lack. I often imagine I’m wearing a catcher’s mitt on my left hand. 

Listening to any bit of music one loves is an endless emotion. It has an easy way of getting under one’s skin to vibrate through one’s nervous system.  Imagine at any given moment around the earth, the billions of different melodies that people sing in their heads all at once. It’s one of those distinctive things that make us all human even whilst under the worst of circumstances. In fact, isn’t it a lot like laughter? 

Forgotten hero

14 April 2023

Forgotten hero

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 April 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The idea of portable oil colours had been kicking around on the continent for a while before the invention of the ‘tinny tube' of ready-made pigments. Painters up until the arrival of the tube with a screwable top had been using pig bladders sewn up to make them function as small portable pockets of colour. Yuck!

The squeezibly practical tin tubes came on the London market in 1841. The inventor for this bright idea was an American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand, who was living in London and painting portraits. His US patent soon brought him wealth beyond measure when the paint maker Winsor Newton began selling his tubes full of their own oil paints. Alas, with this income, Rand invested in an exotic idea for an Aeolian Pianoforte(?), an idea that never took off. So sadly in debt, he sold his patent to Winsor Newton and the rest, as they say, is history. Rand went back to America where he continued painting portraits but with little apparent success. Despite this, he was a happy man with a large family, as it was noted in his obituary a few years later. I like that happy-go-lucky American spririt that pervaded entreprenuers in those early days. 

Here in the 21st century, don’t we all seem to take everything for granted? Needless to say, Rand’s idea changed everything for the painting world. Would we have had the wave of Impressionist pictures or the millions and millions of amateur artists painting today? Imagine the effect this had upon the work of someone like Vincent van Gogh, born merely twelve years after this invention? Somehow, I cannot imagine Vincent filling pig bladders with Chrome Yellow or Ultramarine Blue on the night before his outings in the fields around Arles. 

And the funny thing about it, is that no one has yet improved upon it in almost 200 years. Yes, the cheaper versions are now made of flexible plastic, but nothing has changed about its use. Personally, I am forever both indebted and endeared to Mr Rand here at the beach where I come most nights to make order out of all these colours housed in little tin homes and squeezed out like toothpaste on the palette. 

This picture was one of two from the other night. It was a wonderful bloom,  and just being out at the beach did me a load of good. These beach afternoons are in an uneasy truce with the Autumn weather. There are whole weeks when I‘m cooped up at home. But rain is good, so they say when it’s been dry, and which it has. When I do get out to paint I often feel like I’m visiting my therapist. But despite the uneven météo, some days are super clear and they bring on some great blooms too. This one I managed to catch and reel in like a fisherman. I’m not sure what to think about. It certainly reveals the melodrama that spills into the night, or maybe just all the melodrama within me.

Looking at it now it suddenly occurs to me that there is has no black in its DNA. Indeed, none of the paintings in this book has even a tiny scintilla of Mars Black, Ivory Black or any other black. I know lots of people use black in every genre of painting, but why would anyone use black of all colours, in a seascape? But hey!

In these pictures I never need to get close to black, but if I ever did, I'd use Prussian Blue with some Alizarin Crimson and a dash of strong Chrome Yellow, give or take the proportions, and adjusting it like a festive cook in his kitchen. 

And speaking of black, unlike the sartorial soberity of so many of my fellow collegues in this art game, I never wear black. I’m a light-grey kinda fella, for I like to be no one and nowhere, invisible in fact,,, socially speaking.

Black is defiantly Post Modern though. It’s also pretty Goth too, so there is humour in there somewhere if one has the patience to find that. Years ago, When I lived at the Chateaunoir outside Aix. A ‘serious poet’ moved in for a time. Every 10 days or so, after washing his laundry, he hung it out on a line between two immense pine trees in a small clearing above. Everything that on it was black. Though slightly faded, there were black socks, black underwear, black tees, black dress shirts, black shorts, black slacks and black jeans. It was weird, like living next to the Adams Family.

At Sea, reeling and feeling

2 August 2022

At Sea, reeling and feeling

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Chilly nights, these nights! I jumped into this first picture just as the sky was turning pale lemon after the short winter afternoon. Against this like smoke pasted over it, was streaming a hint of lilac mist like la bevy of lost doves. I kept it simple not because I wanted to, but because it just came out quickly and was done before I even realised it. But suddenly, the sky began to heat up like an electric hotplate and then all hell broke loose.

Four rapid pictures, one after the other came in quick succession. They came easily. The whole session felt effortless because of the sumptuous ‘Bloom’ that had been building up slowly only to  suddenly explode, and its effect seemed to last forever. It doesn’t always happen like this but when it does it’s spectacular and I don’t want to miss a thing. When I finished up there were still a few beach walkers in the fading light and even fewer surfers in their wetsuits.

I include three out of the four but in fact I liked them all. I’m certain that it’s because of my immense pleasure in watching them come up out of nowhere, filling up the empty canvas boards as if by magic. Sometimes, this mysterous fact catches me off guard even if I am the author. But the two below were more of a struggle but I persevered without thinking. I had faith in this fantastic sky that was just pulling me along like a I was a drunken sailor happy on leave. 

Like most painters, I’m wise enough to know that a good painting session is only enhanced by the battle, and that’s only if you win.

So I packed up in the dark, feeling like a fisherman with a big catch and left the cold beach, alone, but happy and with a full heart. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A giant hug from Earth

7 October 2021

A giant hug from Earth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 October 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

To my great surprise, two nights ago, several small studies rose up and out from the sea as if it were a field of daisies, violets and bluebells. And the sky made a magnificent ‘bloom’ also, but I almost didn’t make it out to the beach. I had been in the studio all afternoon and was full of myself in doubts about everything I was trying to do at the beach but  in my whole life too, such that I didn’t have the heart to go to work. Imagine a brain surgeon saying such a thing? Dark thought about my entire life swamped me. “What more I can I possibly generate from the this motif anyway?”

It may have been precipitated by a remark a friend had made earlier in the day,

“You should move on from these little paintings and work on your big ones in the studio.”

I knew he liked the things I was painting in the studio much more than what I was doing at the beach but, “Hey!  My pride growled, “Who was he to be telling me anything?” Although at the time I didn’t seem to be bothered by the remark except that I had had a difficult painting session on the night prior, one, which without words, pretty much told me the very same thing. It’s one thing when some else makes a critical remark about your work but another thing altogether when your own work speaks directly to you through itself. 

But in the end, Really, all I needed was a great session, a big beautiful evening ‘Bloom’, to blush wildly and unabashedly for me alone and replenish my curiosity anew for this motif. I really needed a big hug from Mother Nature to reassure me. After all, it is for me alone, and similar to this diary, the results may or may not please others, but the real pleasure of ‘doing’ is all mine, mine alone. I am responsible for myself, no one else.

And this takes to something that I experienced in the studio a few days earlier. A remarkable discovery just for me alone. It was getting late so I decided not to paint at the beach. I had put on France Musique and reclined on the chaise lounge in the studio by the large window. Once in a when I’m there I like to stay and watch the setting sun hide behind the forest as dusk descends quietly. Last night I noticed a star appearing through the trees and leaves. It was quite high and I began to focus in on it. After a few minutes I noticed how it appeared and disappeared because of the wind, but also by its own slow movement as the earth moved through space. The star, a bright one, began to align itself to my focus as I squinted to see it more clearly. As I watched the star I began to perceive that it actually had the specific form of a cross. I kept looking at it contiually as it appeared then disappeared between the gentle sway of distant leaves. But by now, it always re-appeared as ‘the same cross’ each time to my astonishment. It was a cross, but one with extra smaller rays going out at different angles of ‘the clock’, 1:30 o’clock, 4:30 o’clock, 7:30, 10:30 etc, etc. It reminded me of the gold stars painted on a deep Ultramarine background that ones sees often in Italian paintings everywhere. Giotto, I think even made them in the frescoes of Padova. I was simply astonished to witness such an example of science melding with memories of the Early Renanaisance. And I realised that this cross was of pure light as if nothing could have been lighter in value, nor anything in the spiritual sense to sully it. 

 

I made a drawing of it yesterday in my diary and indeed it looks like something extrapolated from religious iconography. No matter that it disapeared momentarily, it would quickly reappear immediately by taking its unique shape. They say that all snowflakes are unique, is this somehow related to that mysterious idea? Would this cross also have its own visual DNA make-up, one unique in the universe?

After a while I noticed another star appear through the forest, slightly smaller, but it too, seemed to possess its own unique shape, different from the first cross. It was shaped in the form of a trianglular cross resembling the iconic Christmas tree in a simple graphic form. Again, it was made of a splintered kind of pure light, and every time it disappeared behind the distant tree leaves it quickly came back into view, it would always only return as the triangle. I began to look up at the first star, and again after focussing and squinting my eyes, it too held true to the same shape of cross as before. I began to look back and forth at each star, each time they retained their unique shape. I was dumbfounded like an infant who discovers the switch to a lightbulb turning it on and off again with fascination.

And like the infant, by the end, as I sat in the darkness of my studio, I reasoned that these two stars seen through the filter of the tree leaves far off in the distance must also posses their own original shapes much like snowflakes. But unlike the snowflake, I should be able to see them again on any clear evening through the filter of leaves to confirm my discovery. I was astonished.

This is curious picture from two nights ago appears slightly illustrative which I usually frown upon, but there is something in it I like. It’s certainly got a lot going on in it. What I like is the light that separates the large rich yellow stripe from the pale layer above it. The light is actuelly the white of the canvas board that I left. That kind of nuanced transition interests me more than pretty much anything else at the moment.