These are two pictures from the very last week of the year 2024. This was the first, on top, and I like it the best. It's funny because it only took a few quick minutes, and lucky for me that I was able to say STOP! So, thus I have been able to save an interesting study, one which reveals something that I really wanted to express.
I've always heard writers say that it can take several pages in a writing session each day before they come upon what they really need to say. In Painting too, though the time frame may not be the same, this rings true because an idea only comes forth realistically when a painter begins working. OKAY, this might not work for everyone whose working process is more calibrated and planned out, but it does work for me in the kind of images I'm after.
I like this top one especially because I see a future in it. How else can I put it? I see something elusive, something that's deep inside me yet at the same time, I recognise it completely like a long lost twin from whom I have been separated at a young age. But maybe too, it's like those lucky people who fall in love easily and seem to always be finding their 'other halves' at the next lunch counter.
In any case, for an artist (like me), it's not an object of desire, it's more like another piece of the jig-saw puzzle hitherto hidden deeply within me only to surface suddenly and find a home on my own personal visual map of life. But it' not a cerebral thing, it's profoundly emotional.
I wrote this yesterday but this morning I found myself thinking further about this idea of how deep feelings inside of us can rise to the surface and steer our work in unusual directions. I’m sure this happens to everyone in all walks of life but I only address this for myself. I think artists must be like the miners of yesteryear, the ones who put on their steel hats with small lights and dug with a pick and shovel into the earth for months and years before hitting anything of value. Lots of dirt but few rubies or sapphires.
All this came to me while practicing piano last night as I was thinking about how my own feelings seem to only be changed through taking right actions as the Wise Buddha guys from the East have always told us. This is to say, practically speaking, that I can act my way into right thinking but I can never think my way into right action.
This has taken me long years to understand and to also implement into my own behaviour. And still, I don't always get it right.
It thus came to me that only through a long experience of working at a craft or vocation can I be really sure that these ‘feelings’ coming up are of any real value in the long run. This subconscious process is arduous and comes through lots of work for these are not just random emotions flailing about me like butterflies on a walk through a field. They come up like volcanic eruptions, and they can be powerful and even dangerous in the wrongs hands. Just witness all the murders, and ignoble acts that go on in the world each and everyday. But unlike those, these are creative emotions for my own work that can be trusted as personally legitimate for me alone to use freely and with no harm to anyone else.
So, I read that EL NINA is making another return to the Asia Pacific region. That makes four out of the past five years that it has reappeared. This means, of course, lots of rain and storms along the Eastern Seaboard of Australia. It's cooler, which is great because 28 degrees is a far cry from 33 degrees celsius. So though it makes painting excursions to the beach slightly more complicated, I don't mind, as anything is better than that awful hot, dry summer that's been on the menu for eternity here DownUnder.
This one below, a subtle variant of the first, came immediately afterward, it's OKAY, but I cannot fall in love with it like the one on top. It's another idea, but one with less 'space' in it. It does have space, yes, but just not an 'infinite' space like exists in the first image. Maybe this is a personal take that cannot be communicated. But for a painter like me, space is the place, like they say. Once in a blue moon, even such a small picture can elicit the vast dome of sky overhead.
But Hey! As my Uncle Morty used to say up in Yonkers; "Another day, another dollar!"
Evening Prayer Brunswick heads, 26 December 2024. oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
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