Starry night revisited

 

Every few so often the New York Times presents to its viewers this 10-Minute Challenge to spend a few valued moments in front of a work of Art. The other day they proposed Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. Here (below) are a few details I liked. Little to say about it except that in this crazy news cycle it's a 10 minute oasis of calm.

If you are not a subscriber to the NYT they generally allow one or two free peeks at articles during a month. If you are a subscriber then it's just a quick click into a wonderful image that b.t.w. was completely invented by the artist while living in the asylum his small room in the asylum in Saint-Rémy. And b.t.w. (encore) When I visited the asylum back in the early 1970's, I managed to find my way into his old run-down room which was not at all difficult nor even forbidden. It was a run-down building at that point in time and watched over by a friendly guard, long before the commercial renaissance of Vincent Van Gogh. I remember the bars on the windows and the view of the field below, Les Alpilles beyond. 

Unlike so many of his large late pictures which were almost always finished quickly in one or two sessions, this was laboured and one can see the dry thick paint underneath later layers. I wonder if it's because when he was in front of Nature on the motif he 'saw' everything he needed at that moment to complete his vision? But without the motif at hand, he struggled to get everything 'right', thus the subsequent layers? 

Rain, rain, rain

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2025, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 cm

Rain Rain, go away, please come back so I can paint today! "Well, what can ya do?" As my Uncle Morty in the Bronx used to all the time. Every morning when I see the clear sky I'm given hope but by afternoon, the sky plugs up like my bathwater after a day of cleaning out the hog house. 

So, both the Summer and Autumn have been wet. Hopefully it will be a drier Winter here Down-Under. But last week I did manage to get out a few times and work. One recent evening I came home with these three studies so I was appropriately grateful. They are shown in the order of execution.

The first one reveals a gentle-looking sea when I arrived at the dunes. It was placid and easy to get into. Looking at it now it seems that I wanted to channel Monet (which I regret, but hey!) I like it anyway. 

Truthfully, I really accept everything that comes out of a session, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But in this one I rather appreciate its delicate feeling and that's because I can sometimes be so brutal with my brushwork. In the end though, I am really just amenable to whatever the sea and the sky offer up to me on any given day. Not only any day, but any moment as twilight begins to cycle through the stormy stages of the colour wheel. Like the logic of harmonic laws regarding the circle of fifths, the colour wheel shows me how the chromatic changes proceed in a logical fashion. One can watch it unfold easily at dusk when everything has sped up.  

So the first study (above) was a warm-up. Then came this one (below) which of the three, is my preferred. I think it's because I really struggled with it and it only 'came right' through a serendipitous accident that I was able to exploit at the last minute, then bingo! "Never give up on a picture". I wish I had learned that adage decades ago and my road would have been far easier.

 

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2025, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 cm

This last one was really an afterthought because the sky was so exquisite right up until nightfall. I would have kept working had I been able to see the palette clearly. It was one of those rare evenings when the luminosity felt turbo-charged and was enriched right up to the edge of night.   

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2025, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 cm

Susan Sarnoff and Rachel Whiteread

Suzanne Sarnoff for the New York Times

 

These wonderful small sculptures made of tofu were created by the photographer, Suzanne Sarnoff, for the accompanying article in the NYT. Clever! She has a real talent.

So these pieces made me think of the celebrated British artist Rachel Whiteread who worked in concrete and plaster.

Below, is a photo of her famous piece entitled House, which won her the Turner prize back in 1993. The life-sizework was created from a concrete cast of the inside of the original house located at the edge of Wennington Green just off Grove road. I presume that the original house was then destroyed to reveal this interpretation of it, et voila! Apparently it was part of a set of row houses which were slated for demolition to create a park.

House lasted 11 weeks before it too was demolished. What a shame. It created quite a buzz during that time from both detractors and admirers. I like it. She's an interesting artist

 

              House, 25 October 1993 - 11 January 1994

Desire, je ne sais quoi...

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I think everyone around the globe loves the French language for so many reasons even when they don't always understand it. What is it about that breathy self-assurance that casts a spell over us all?

Like many 'foreign' languages it holds an aesthetic resonance, but then so does Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, among others. Personally, I kind melt when I hear a Russian woman even just explaining street directions in Moscow. 

Some languages are so melodious that they roll off the tongue in such a way that we're instantly transported to distant lands across the ocean. Naturally, our cultural legacy is that each language after centuries of evolution  possess personal expressions that evoke the flavour and temperament of each country.

One of my favourites is indeed from France. It's the following:

"The best part of sex is climbing the stairs to the bedroom." 

Now, because I often frequent Dr Google, I typed this curious adage into his little window to see if I could find out where it came from. Sadly, all that came up were thousands of articles like the following;

Sex Tips for Women: 15 Handy Tips on How to Be Better in Bed

And from Men's Health, a real beauty for the insecure man:

40 Foreplay Tips That Will Make the Sex So Much Hot

So as you can see, I was not going to come anywhere near anything heady or highbrow that might lead me to a reference page or a linguistic history of expressions from literary sources around the world. But, hey! I'll do further research on this and keep you posted.

So, "Revenons à nos moutons!" Another favourite of mine that means; 'to return to the subject at hand'. And thus, the subject I want to investigate is about Desire and Painting. 

It occurred to me while watching a small TikTok clip of a sexy young woman singing and dancing to a slow Cha Cha Cha French song from the 1960's (Zsiou Bisou Bisou). The first minute of it was positively  electric and desire appeared to spread like the measles throughout the cocktail party. I quickly understood that it was from the American television hit show,'Mad Men'. I missed that series, but anyway, like I said, the first minute of this clip was riveting to watch. Desire seemed to drip from everyone, men and women included during this 3:00 minute song. It was very sexy in the way that the French can sometimes be in real life though not always, because French films which we're all programmed to believe aren't real despite all the hype. 

So, apparently, this one minute of TikTok got me all hot and bothered about desire, something we all know about because we feel it all the time. Isn't it that mysterious carnal perfume that floats around us at the moment when we're suddenly turned by someone, or something? 

For centuries advertisers have exploited it to push certain brands of coffee, drive certain vehicles, smoke cigarettes, everything in fact. Without desire there would be no Art of Advertising, no Madison Avenue. 

Being a painter, I naturally pondered this nuanced human sense in so far as it manifests in the world of Painting. How has desire infected the world Painting? It's so unlike the verisimilitude of photography that was invented at the end of the 19th century and which changed mankind forever. It was also immediately hijacked for the purpose of making lewd photos of women, by, and for men. Pornography had again erupted when desire was re-configured into a celluloid art form.

Somehow, it's not as easy to imagine something like an oil painting as provoking the same ardent verisimilitude of lust so easily transmitted through photographic means. 'Sexy' just doesn't seem to cut it in the abstract world of oil painting, though I do confess that I've personally seen at least one painting of a women which aroused in me something quite close. A picture of St Margaret and the Dragon by Titian in the Prado.

Titian (Titiano Vecellio) painted in 1565, The Prado Museum Collection, Madrid 

It turned me on in the strangest kind of way when I saw it in my early and vulnerable twenties. Frankly, it turned me upside down and I've loved every woman painted by Titian ever since. Btw, his daughter Lavinia Vecellio was his muse and posed as a model for many of his pictures.    

But when it comes to the creation of a painting  I'm really talking about something completely different. It's not about the subject matter that interests me, but about how an artist paints a picture by pushing it right up to point  that leaves a viewer on the edge of their seat. If the artist is clever enough to leave the picture in that state, then it will live on leaving future viewers in a state of perpetual longing. This is a place of limbo that can separate a great work of art from all the rest. A successful painting, like any other work of art, leaves us in a state of desire. 

So I propose the painting above (top), from October 3, 2023, to illustrate this idea. (And btw, I use my own work to show what it is that I'm pontificating about, because as they say, "I have a dog in this fight.")

So I guess what I'm trying get at is that it isn't the content, or subject matter, that is as important as the way a picture is painted. That is to say that what is left out of a picture is often more important than what has been included in it. Thus, the desire is created in the viewer by the clever manipulation of the painter. 

When a painting arrives at its apex of desire, isn't it bit like a being on a roller coaster at the amusement park when the fragile cable car into which we are all strapped teeters at the very peak of the first drop before plummeting earthward leaving us screaming with delight? It's a place between two worlds of thought, where pure emotion resides. 

This is the exact opposite of pornography, because paintings too, can also be pornographic when they reveal more to us than is absolutely necessary in order to convey an idea. Consequently, an image that is overloaded needlessly die from excess weight. A successful picture draws the viewer in, while an unsuccessful one pushes a viewer away.

For instance, I was once walking with a friend on a busy boardwalk by the sea. A young woman wearing just leggings skipped past us. My friend remarked that Leggings were the greatest thing that Fashion had invented in our own generation. I didn't say anything, but all at once I saw just how differently we understood sexiness in a woman. Indeed, the majority of men seem to love leggings too because the woman's outline is promptly available for all the world to admire and judge so instantaneously. 

I realised just how differently I looked at women (and art), almost 180 degrees actually. I am clearly in the minority on this because for me, a desire is evoked when a women strolls the boardwalk not in leggings but wearing a French dress from the 1940's. But hey! Isn't it great that we're all so different? 

So as a painter, especially in this series at the beach, I'm mostly interested finding that exact moment at the very place when the parameters of an image might suggest the fullest expression of the sea and sky. It's a place of yearning to be sure, one not unlike some of the symphonies of Mahler.

Here is a more recent picture from the 18th of April 2025, that might further speak of my search of this ideal lyricism. Of course every painter must work from his/her own ideals. These are simply my own. 

 

Addendum: Because I'm a dreamer, my secret desire as a painter is to leave a viewer astonished. Yes, yes, I know, I know,,, lots of artists desire this as well, and so they should!

After all, we creators like to think that we are all gods and maybe we're all just too foolish enough to attempt it in the first place. Me, maybe even more so because I apparently want to explain it too. 

 

Hidden in plain sight

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 April 2025, oil on canvas board, 

30 X 25 cm

Here are two studios from a few nights ago. It had been a vivid bloom but short-lived due to the waxing moon that threw everything out of kilter. It will be full in a night or two, then I can get back to paint. The weather is still wonky with rain but in April it's usually like that.

The study above, as one can imagine, was painted when the bloom was at its raging peak. The sea was blood-red but then turned purple as it habitually will do in the after-burn. Eventually it will go deep blue again before nightfall swallows it up all.  

The study below is less sexy but is far more compelling for me. It wasn't less fun, just more interesting to me. After all the melodrama of a colourful bloom, A sky, on an evening that is influenced by the light of the moon, will usually fall back into a serene placid state, as if exhausted by its own histrionics. 

It's a curious light and one that still holds a lot of subtle colour. Because I love Art Deco, I really go crazy for any opportunity when I can use pink to counter a broken black. 

This isn't quite it, but hey, there's always tomorrow. As the warmth of this pink sky climbs high into space and fades, a deliciously pale Prussian Blue/Lemon yellow forms underneath taking its place. So I'm fascinated by these colours, and I'm determined to exploit them whenever I can. In the studio I have several large canvas's (150 X 150 cm) that I'm struggling with with since last year. I never seem to get them right.

Perhaps an image like this less exciting than the more colourful pictures but like a scientist in a lab with his microscope, I've discovered 

a whole world of rich and delicate nuances to explore. All of it hidden in plain sight with such simplicity.

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 April 2025, oil on canvas board, 

30 X 25 cm

 

A big hearted sky of a woman

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 April 2025, oil on canvas board, 

30 X 25 cm

After almost a month's hiatus I finally managed to get out for a painting session two nights ago. I had not been there to work since the cyclone last month. The gentle dunes upon which I've painted for eight years were chopped off by the storm and now it drops to the beach just a metre in front of my little studio space. Feeling exposed, I now paint from the edge of a small cliff visible for all the beach walkers below. I feel like a lighthouse. Whew... it's  very 19th century, and reminds me of a painting by Gustave Courbet of the artist as hero on a precipice.  

I'll have to get used to it. It's so different from the comfort of being unseen. But anyway, it was a marvellous sky as seen in these three studies from the other night. I think they reveal a shift in the weather so hopefully I will be able to get out there more regularly from now on. These past months have been so rainy that I think we've forgotten what sunny afternoons look like anymore. 

I also confess that since the US election and inauguration it's been a dispiriting period for everyone I know. It's hard to believe that one person can stuff up everything, including the rest of the world, so quickly. Of course, he got a lot of help from his cronies. Yes, we never imagined that it could happen in America. We'll see. More than ever it behooves us all to be creative and positive in every way we can because life goes on regardless of what's flung at us at times. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 April 2025, oil on canvas board, 

30 X 25 cm

I loved working the other night, it replenished my spirits just to make a palette full of colours and be on the hunt for rich harmonies under a big bloom of a sky that seemed to last forever. 

I like the first two very much, but this one below looks uneven to me though I'll post it anyway. Paintings don't always look the same way after a few days, weeks, months, years even, so I'm always cautious about judging them too quickly for better or worse.

I often think that I have exhausted this motif of anything new from which to scratch something out of. But then under the right kind of sky I discover that I could fall in love all over any expectations I'd have with a newer version of an old girlfriend, I'd also be more selective about what I'd want from this motif. I would want a clear 'bloom' of a sky to work from so as to explore a newer, more non-objective kind of picture. I'd look more for a flat picture plane. But as for the girlfriend, old, or new, I'd really like a kinder version, one with a big heart, as big as the sky actually. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 April 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

 

Moon! Albert Pinkham Ryder

Moonrise, Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 February 2025, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

 

This is from last month because I haven't been working out at the beach for a long time. The cyclone that roared through three weeks ago was a distraction and it ripped the sand dunes apart so I have been working at home. Whew.... lots of rain ever since has also altered my schedule.

But hey! Gotta stay productive as Uncle Morris in the Bronx always said.

This small study (above) is a curious thing because I don't usually go near a full moon. It's because it can come out looking tacky and basically sort of dumb or sentimental. Generally I don't even attempt painting it because it has already been done with great care by so many competent painters. 

But I like the idea of a full moon painting if it's done with a personnel touch, not the Claude Lorraine kinds of knockoffs, but by the dark horses of Art history like Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder, two of my favourite painters.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1890, The Philips Collection, Washington D.C.

I have always loved this picture made somewhere on the Massachusetts coastline. He was the most prolific of all painters in this genre of 'the full moon' in American history. There are dozens of versions in various museums around the country. 

He made something lugubriously original out of a simple full moon magically rising up over the sea. This is a fantastic image and beautifully crafted. 

He was an odd recluse (like me!), but far more talented. But what the heck, I can still put my work up anyway. Normally I normally evade Moonrises because they kill the 'Bloom' of colour that I need for my own point of interest when I get out to the beach.

But in this small study of mine, I had somehow forgotten that the full moon was scheduled to arise when I went to work that afternoon. I usually check the app on my phone that spells out the moon phases but I forgot to check. Fortunately, as seen in my small study, it was cloudy, and the moon barely shone through the mass of clouds over the horizon so like they say, fake it if you can. 

Anyway, I sort of liked it until I posted it too closely to Ryder's sublime painting situated below it. Yick,,, is all I can say about it now.  

Denmark and Vietnam.

 

From the NYT last week was an article about a Chilean artist whose exhibit took place recently in the back room of butcher's shop in Copenhagen. (!) The subjects of the 'exhibition' were three piglets who were being starved to death. The theme was to voice discontent about the industrialisation of the entire unethical food industry. The small critters were given just water to drink as they headed into a deathly decline that was to have lasted about five days. But surprise, the upside to the story is that they somehow 'disappeared' when a door was mysteriously left ajar for a short time. They thus were spared of their cruel fate. 

Personally, I think it was 'coup monté' rigged by the artist himself because (I believe), that he was in fact a lover of animals and he only  wanted to make a stinky statement about how animals are treated. One cannot argue with that.

The artist, Marco Evaristti, (bless his heart), in the photo below, either really believes in this cause or is just cashing in to make some publicity. I think it's the former, and I even think he saved the piglets himself, but hey, what do I know? 

(Disclaimer: I haven't eaten red meat or pork, or anything, except for about a dozen chickens since the Spring of 1980.

But I applaud the artist, if in fact his idea was to save the piglets in end. The Food industry is disgusting. 

In 1971, when I was a freshmen at Denver University, a group of anti-war protesters designed and distributed flyers around campus declaring that they would napalm a Golden Retriever at a specified spot on a certain Saturday. Naturally, it cause an uproar as everyone went apoplectic. 

"A dog! really?"

On the day on which it was supposed to happen there was a big crowd and also the campus police, but possibly even the Denver Police on hand to make arrests. Of course, it was just a hoax just to see how riled up people would become over the killing of a dog when at the same time, Vietnamese were being slaughtered by the Nixon regime. 

I wasn't too involved either way, my cynicism had already been too well established in both heart and mind by that time and I just wanted to get the hell out of America and into a cafe in Paris.

And today, it's also a pretty insane time and I think it behooves us all to make our own decisions thoughtfully based on fact not fiction today.  

Small is perfect

An installation view of Jennifer J. Lee’s 2023 “Square Dance” exhibition at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York.Credit...Heidi Bohnenkamp Photography

The Art World’s Next Big Thing: Tiny Paintings

Works the size of postcards and bathroom tiles are challenging the market’s appetite for grand scales.

While the artists who make them vary in style and approach, they seem to share a somewhat old-fashioned view of what art is for: individual communion rather than collective spectacle — only one viewer can stand in front of each of these pieces at a time.

The scale echoes that of the source, squinted at on an iPad screen or laptop. Some of Lee’s most evocative works are around the size of a shower tile. She compares looking at one of her paintings in a gallery to peeking through a keyhole: “I love being able to beckon someone to look at something.”

 Small paintings are also intimate, seductive and unpretentious. As Middleton puts it, they “creep up on you.” While the artists who make them vary in style and approach, they seem to share a somewhat old-fashioned view of what art is for: individual communion rather than collective spectacle — only one viewer can stand in front of each of these pieces at a time.

Mia Middleton’s 6.3-by-6.3-inch painting “Bill” (2023).Credit...Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson

Today, some artists and dealers are looking to cultivate sustainability by staying small. “Why can’t we have a middle-class existence? Why do we have to make hundreds of thousands of dollars?” asks Lee. “All I’ve ever wanted is to keep going.”

Lee’s 4-by-4-inch painting “Untitled (Train)” (2023).Credit...Courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Of course. a painter like me would love this article, but even more, I love this movement away from the gigantic works of Art that engorge museums and galleries world-wide and making them feel like airports and shopping malls. Enough, I say! 

Not only do such large Disney spaces seem overwhelming, but they further legitimise an idea that Art is somehow entertaining which it really isn't. There are many over-sized pieces like Jeff Koon's 'Puppy'  and Anish Kapoor's polished steel 'Cloud Gate' which are extremely successful public outdoor sculptures, and of both, one could possibly describe them as 'entertaining' to experience, but I wouldn't unless they are under 15 years of age. For me, they answer an audience's thirst for amazement, or even to be surprised into enlightenment. But entertainment, no, I don't think so. (disclaimer, I really like them both and very much in their outdoor context, but I might feel differently if they were parked indoors. Why? I couldn't say, just a hunch. 

That said, there is an intimacy in looking at small things because like someone said in the article, they draw the viewer in closer. Personally, and though my paintings are not quite as small as some of these, I've always dreamed of exhibiting a few dozen of them on white walls with at least a meter of space between them so in order to give the viewer a a reflective moment. I like space guy, and I like it everywhere, and in every context, so naturally I appreciated these views in the article. 

I really this tiny blue face by Mia Middleton. I think I like especially because it is so small, but tragic too. And as some of us know, small and tragic seem to go well together for some odd reason. Just sayin.

But then, (the elephant in the room), is the greater issue about why Paintings are losing their appeal to the public, writ large. Are we painters destined to also be flung out of the castle and into the dark landscape of illiteracy like our brethren poets? (Say it ain't so!)  

The biggest culprit appears to be our obsession with i-pads and smart phones. Have we all lost our souls to these tiny but miraculous devises?Do we have the time or even the ability to focus on an artwork? Maybe, if it's a poor artwork or one of just little interest to us, that's fair to assume, but are we not possibly moving away from art as a form of contemplation and visual reflection? I wish I had an had answer to all this. 

Satie and Monk

 

So, I am finally beginning the last of the six Gnossiennes, a series of piano solos by Erik Satie that started six years ago. There are short and sweet. I am still working through the last one which is tricky, but towards the end of learning one piece I like to begin even fifteen minutes a day on the next one, a few bars at a time so that when I really do dive into it I'll have a momentum.

Of course, I have to keep up all the others in my head,,,, or my heart, as we say. I cannot still get through them all without making mistakes, alas.... But hey! That's the way it is for us amateurs, for to study, is the whole point. 

Th last one is very, very quirky, quinky even and discordantly melodic, in a word; original and other-worldly. In fact, it's like this picture done here in the studio in Myocum just about ten years ago.  

Untitled, 7 September, 2015, oil on plywood, 180 X 120 cm, Myocum N.S.W.

Few of my friends seem to have appreciated this painting despite my own enthusiasm, but it doesn't change anything for me because an artist makes what he or she needs to make, irregardless of others. 

Yes, perhaps I do live in another age, one from an era wherein the creator lived in a small bubble seemingly excluded from the comings and goings of the big world churning around outside. Then again, I'm not a POP artist, someone who 'needs' to please the general populace. No, in this moment I seem to live in a world created from my own intuitive needs and desires. I wonder if it's not unlike an exotic flower found in some remote spot in the world, a place so inaccessible, that only great aficionados will make the effort to tread. I may be exotic but I do not consider myself 'great' or indispensable to the world at large. I'm just a painter working alone with my own ideas at my own speed.

I suppose one could say that Erik Satie has been a model for me ever since I first heard his piano pieces back in University. Both he and Thelonious Monk made a huge impression upon me in that time of my unhappy life. Their music was so wildly and strangely personal yet at the same time, so classical, traditional even. Something in them inspired me, lifted me up but at the same time also left me feeling that I was lost and I'd never catch the lifeline that all artists throw out to young aspiring ones. 

Later, when I went to France and discovered that I might have a talent for something in the Arts I grew more confident perhaps for the very first time in my entire life.

Of course, I hope not to die broke in a tiny cold water studio flat in Paris like Satie, nor go off the spectrum like Monk, but still, because I've always been an outsider, I think I embraced my own eccentricity enough over the years to practice something authentic in my life. But funny enough, over these same years, the Buddhists were teaching me to forget about achieving anything in life by ignoring the whole point of life. What's the point of anything, they quizzically asked me? So I eventually learned that just to be authentic in every action I took each moment was enough. Though not easy, it made sense. Learning any craft like Painting or making music, is still really hard but like Degas said a century ago, "If if weren't hard, it wouldn't be fun." Easy for him to say.

Unlike the picture above, this image from nine years earlier was done in France. It has something of both Satie and Monk in them. Can you feel it? 

Nothing Special, Dieulefit, August, 2006, oil on plywood, 180 X 120 cm