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?
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