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.