A world with crows

9 September 2021

A world with crows

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 September 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Clear and windy today, a cold front moved in from the south and seeped into the house early this morning. But what a great bloom the other night at the beach! I made three studies, all interesting, but this is the one this one I like best. It’s a little sloppy and there are even some tiny flecks of white from my brush which had caught the spray from the wind. I only realised it the next morning when taking the paintings from the boot of the car. Too late to do anything about it now, but actually I don’t mind, it gives the study a raw and carefree feeling which I kind of like. Yes, I’m a slightly sloppy guy for sure, especially when it comes to painting. But honestly, I really hate anything too precious in art except for a few things like Piero della Francesca, who is quite perfect in a godly way. 

But I like this study because of its extreme simplicity. There isn’t a hint of any desire for verisimilitude in it. I try so hard to bring oxygen to these things, but even more, to bring life to images that border upon Non-Objective painting. This study, like graffiti on a stop sign, seems to casually say; “take me or leave me, I don’t care either way”. But if there is integrity hidden beneath this gentle irreverence, then hopefully there might also be an allegiance to the truth of the motif.

Nature can appear so banal at times that we can too often take it for granted, both its beauty but also its perils. Personally, I think one needs to live with a vivid imagination to fully experience both sides. In fact, I need to be slapped in the face with the raw power of it from time to time. I’m not a rock climber but I’m fascinated by those who explore their own boundaries and take risks to feel life more intensely. 

But these boundaries come in all shapes and sizes from silent tea ceremonies in lush bamboo forests to climbing Mount Everest. Many still go further by leaping from tall cliffs with winged suits to soar through valleies. In my day I thermalled with eagles in wispy clouds in a hanglider. But at the other extreme, now, I just paint on a dune at the beach in front of towering cumulo-nimbus clouds. 

Of course one needs time for all these activities. something many people lack in a busy life of work and family. But I think for many of us, our curiosity can wane as well with age. I mean, it can be really exhausting to be excited all the time. Taking care of children shows us that to us all the time yet at the same time they show us how amazing all the small details of life really are. Kids have the habit of wonder. How did we lose that?  

This makes me think of a podcast, from where, I forget, but it was a casual interview between a journalist and the Irish writer John Banville at his home in Dublin. They were both into the whisky and the talk was freewheeling. At one point loud crows outside the window are heard and the journalist remarks, “Imagine a world without crows”, to which, after a long pause, Banville replies; “Imagine a world with crows!” 

A marvelous observation which only an astute and imaginative mind would come up with. But I understood from this exchange that he is also someone close to nature. I was so taken by it that I immediately went online to order one of his novels.

This is the way that a supremely sensitive soul approaches nature, but certainly anything artistic too. It’s what I hope to see in the sea and sky each evening when I arrive at my little dune in the late afternoon. Can I open myself wide enough each evening and be ready for when the sky offers herself up to me like a virgin bride? 

I do think poets, painters and musicians are actively forced to push themselves outside of conventional ways of seeing and hearing nature. The danger is that we can become so inured to the sights and sounds of it that we barely even hear it or see it for what it is. Like auto-correct on my i-phone, I push back incessantly against its insistence in order to say what I need to really mean to say in these pictures and paragraphs.

In this painting, the ultra simple design might be a visual leap of imagination for viewers, perhaps more so than for other pictures in this series. Like John Banville’s remark about the crows outside his window, a painter might ask a viewer to imagine the sea at dusk as just a few parallel stripes of colour.

  

Mantegna’s cap

30 March 2021

Mantegna’s cap

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 2021 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the first of three pictures from the other night. It is unusually austere but sensual, and it reminds me today of Montegna’s magnificent Portrait of a Young Man, in Napoli at the Capodimonti museum. I agree with everyone who believes that he was one of the greatest painters of the Rennnaisance. His portrait is very small, maybe only around 25 X 15 cms tall and its seen in profile. He wears a rose-coloured cap virtually identical to this pink sky, hence my association. I can often fall in love with certain paintings but this intimate portrait by Andrea Mantegna, I place in a special drawer in my memory. How does one fall in love with a work of art? It’s easy for some of us. I mean it’s certainly as easy as falling in love with another person and certainly less problematic too. But the feeling is the same if you are a painter, because you are pierced right through the corps of who you are. A great work of art is the top-of-the tree, as Australians here would say, and it will always grow taller for you, and neither will it will let you down or deceive you, nor even talk back. Whether it be an opera aria, a film, a book, a picture, or a small Mayan figurine, the love of an artwork can be a perfect and everlasting union. But obviously it’s not for everyone. Some people love their cars to death, polishing them each weekend while others worship their dogs and cats more than even their spouses. It’s a deeply personal thing and that’s the way it should be. Isn’t that what is so wonderful about an object of beauty? And like a girlfriend or boyfriend, our love interests come in all shapes and sizes, with or without tattoos. It’s only our imagination that creates such attraction, this lust, or affection, or both. It’s a true democracy of feeling and we’re all free to love what and who we love unless we’re in Putain’s Russia. But even better, we can make of it all what we wish. It’s like a giant food hub like those one sees in Singapore where our choices are almost limitless and where the varieties on offer can make one horny or more hungry by just having a peek.

So, that said, I house an enormous affection for this small study of mine from the other evening. I think it’s actually my very, very favorite painting out of several thousand done from the beach here. In fact, because I’m not the jealous type, if it had been painted by someone else, it would still not dim my infatuation for it, not even a bit. That it was painted by anyone anywhere, and that it exists somewhere out in the world is already an extraordinary thing. Why? Who knows? Let’s just say that it rings my doorbell. And yes, I fell in love with it. But it’s not a possessive love that makes one uptight and full of carnel desire. It’s a spiritual one, like how one can feel for their very closest friend on earth or maybe even their parents whom they cherish.

As a painter, I sometimes traverse culural time zones in a flash with the ease of a child’s flexible imagination. I flit about easily between pictorial things and intemporal places. It’s all in my head of course because all these artefacts from so many periods of history are long gone: pre-Columbian, Cycladic, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Africana and Asian art Everything in my time-bending cultural mind is completely fluid as the painter I seem to be in this 21st century. It’s sometimes confusing because it asks me what it means to be authentic. That’s always a great question to ask one’s self in every circumstance in life. Outside of a therapists office, how often do any of us contemplate our histories, both personal and collective? We sit upon a treasure trove of riches going back 10,000 years or longer, and yet we don’t seem to use it as either artists or philosophy students. Why not?

Lucky for me, this humble motif at the beach seems to be my own private philosophy tutor. By day it’s just another humdrum-looking tropical beach but by early evening it’s transformed into something beautiful, like watching a woman dress for a night out, it’s magnificent thing to behold. And just like a person whose life is enhanced by a partner, I too, can be transformed by this motif at dusk, and it completes my own sense of well-being, 

I admit that it’s such a small picture to get all worked up about, but then I think it must be not unlike how any engineer might feel when the project he or she has worked on has left the hanger and now flies overhead transporting millions of passengers to far off places around the globe. Is it pride one feels, or love? Or both? Does it matter what it’s called? Isn’t it that sensation that arises in a person who has discovered both of these feelings all wrapped up in a bundle like they’re a proud parent? Painters too, can feel like parents sometimes. 

So yes, I really do have an emotional connection with this picture for some curious reason and it may even seem odd to hold such feelings for an art work but I would add that it’s not just a picture or the motif, but more specifically it’s a space in which an artist has fallen in love. It has meaning. I’m reminded of one of my very favorite films from the 1990’s called The Object of Beauty wherein a poor deaf maid working in luxurious London hotel steals a small Henry Moore statuette from a room. When asked at the end of the film why she had taken it, she replied to the police through a translator that it had spoken to her. And that, is what Art is all about for many of us.

I’ve spoken of my emotional attachment to this small picture, but now critically speaking, I’ll address why I think it works. As a painting it’s as inventive and concise as any painting I’ve ever admired anywhere. Though I may come off as pretentious, this small thing is itself quite unpretentious. I daresay that a young child with talent could very easily have come up with such an image because it’s simple idea has been reduced down to just a few stripes of colour. They are however ones that correlate to nature via the motif at the beach. My only regret with it is that I cannot seem to ‘scale it up’ to a larger format successfully in the studio. I cannot seem to get close to the same spontaneity of it but I hope in the near future that will change for me.

Donor class

16 February 2021

Donor class

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 February 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“My god! what are you doing with all these paintings?” A friend on Facetime exclaimed upon seeing hundreds of paintings lined up like old vinyls in the bookshelves of my living room. 

“Well,... I do sell them when I can,...though lately it’s been slow.” I replied quietly. 

I tried to explain that for me, the most important thing is to keep painting no matter what else is going on in life, sales or no sales, in or outside of this tragic world (but to be honest, little has been actually going on in my life inside).

“It keeps me focused and alive, but it also anchors me.” I added.

What I didn’t go into was that it was really keeping my hopes alive that despite everything, from my low bank account to my empty love life, there still existed open possibilities for the tomorrows to come, for as any painter knows, hope, is the Holy Graal in this stoic art racket. But all this was too complicated to get into so I shut up and pushed the subject back to her.

The reality though, is that despite this digital world of quick solutions, Painting is still a vocation, and it’s crafted over many centuries, it’s an alloy of patience and dedication that, let’s be frank, is seen by most civilians as a slow, indulgent and pretty foolhardy activity. So, sadly, like other artists, I may end up with thousands of small unwanted pictures. 

Regardless, this picture from a few days ago was the first of two done from a hazy sky. I had not appreciated it until I looked at it the other morning. It’s a deceptively simple picture at first glance, and it might even appear terribly plain, but I see in this restraint a discreet truth about the sea and sky. But I’m also a real sucker for those wide and gentle stripes as if loosely decorated by a tipsy pastry chef. In fact, it’s a picture made up of just five simple sensual colours; a deep Ultramarine Blue, a warm Cadmium Yellow, a silky soft pink and a muted lime green. High overhead, a thick band of washed out Prussian Blue snugly holds everything in place. An sky as lovely as this makes me wonder if such plain celestial grace could ever be as stellar as a dazzling woman wearing such a seriously pink scarf?

Sometimes I really think I should have been a wedding cake designer. I have this thing about pastel colours that gently collide into one another and where paint slithers over itself in esculent carefree pleasure. In this study there is this delectable something about bleached peach when colluding with lemon yellow, then lightly pasted over a wafer thin sky. Above these bands is the palest of blue which arcs high up and over my head. Anyone who spends time at the beach, they’ll all tell you, it really does feel like this, I promise.

The flat sea below has crackles in the paint which whisper of old patinas, but this is actually caused by small occasional incidents during transport which I don’t seem to be able to discourage. This effect may evoke the past but it’s really over the horizon line, where infinity blurs into the hazy future. This is a very small picture with large ambitions, it’s a mouse that roars, and I like it.

So funny enough, all this talk of so many pictures lined up in my bookshelves with no place to go, reminded me of an article in the NYT I recently read. It was about a Canadian fellow who had been such a prolific sperm donor that he had surreptitiously ‘fathered’ hundreds of now grown up children. A few years back, when laws opened up which had previously restricted access to old adoption files, many of his grown children tracked him down. Within a year, this guy found himself with a huge ‘family’ and he eventually developed relationships with almost all who had reached out to him. They have even organised family reunions to further develop their sibling relations. 

When I read it I thought to myself; “Holy cow! what a lucky fellow!...” and though I’m sure that Alexander the Great father thousands of children in ancient times, what a weird thing is this modern age. Indeed, there is so much life with so little responsibility, an instant family tree!” It’s like 300 BC but without all the violence involved. I suddenly found myself envious.

Then, today, out of the blue, a curious notion came to me, clearly a nutty one, but germain all the same. I suddenly imagined that by turning out so many small studies over the past few years, sometimes as many as three or four a day, I could perhaps see myself as a kind of ‘cultural sperm donor’, like one spreading my wares equally to large and small walls in vacant homes all the world over. 

Perhaps like this happy fellow who wanked out so many infants to grateful mothers everywhere, I, too, I’d be just churning out thousands of small images, spreading them with equal success out into the world and onto barren walls everyone. Furthermore, I reasoned, as would Walter Mitty; was I not also doing all those empty walls around the globe a great service?

Realistically, I mentally noted, that out of so many small studies, how many would actually survive the perilous journey to a happily furnished home? Some, I hoped at least, would be fortunate enough to live long healthy lives. But others, I presumed might be deemed unworthy and die young. Might others be smothered by debris in the back room of some third rate Antique Shop in Paddington?

But would not the luckiest of my small pictures shine in large and happy homes? And mightn’t they all be full of light and framed with good taste? Alas, others might end up in unhappy homes and hidden away on sad and dingy walls in somber hallways and spaced poorly between cornices. Worse yet, others might be held captive and hung on dreary wallpaper in ugly homes with a loathsome family.

Though others I hoped, might thrive in small homes, much loved and looked after, in spite of deaths and divorces. But others indeed, may well spend the rest of their lives entangled in cobwebs in stuffy attics and dark cellars. But, sadly still, others will go up in flames. Even worse for the painter, the last few may well be forgotten but found one day hanging tragically from the end of a long rope somewhere in East Anglia.

But a  few others, for whatever reason, I presumed might also still find themselves caught in the middle of legal haggling in Estate disputes and argued over within shabby bare walls of Probate Courts both here and abroad. But I’m sure, as I reasoned further, that there will certainly be a few weaker ones that will be loved for sentiment only. They will be accepted and adored despite all their flaws and perhaps even for all the wrong reasons. But hey! 

But lastly, and with hope and grace for the poor painter, there may still be others out there who are cherished and admired with distant appreciation for all the right reasons by a critical and reverent set of eyes. 

Van Gogh’s deep reality

23 September 2020

Van Gogh’s deep reality

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 September 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“I think that if one has tried to follow the great masters attentively, one finds them all back at certain moments, deep in reality, I mean one will see their so-called creations in reality if one has similar eyes, a similar sentiment, as they had. And I do believe that if the critics and connoisseurs were better acquainted with nature, their judgment would be more correct than it is now, when the routine is to live among pictures, and to compare them mutually. Which of course, as one side of the question, is good in itself, but lacks a solid foundation if one begins to forget nature and looks only superficially. Can’t you understand that I am perhaps not wrong in this, and to say what I mean even more clearly, isn’t it a pity that you, for instance, seldom or hardly ever go into those cottages or associate with those people or see that sentiment in the landscape which is painted in the pictures you like best? I do not say that you can do this in your position, just because one must look much and long at nature before one becomes convinced that the most touching things the great masters have painted still originate in life and reality itself. A basis of sound poetry which exists eternally as a fact and can be found if one digs and seeks deeply enough.” 

Vincent Van Gogh to his brother

There is always such clear wisdom in his letters. Van Gogh had the great gift of compressing complex ideas into far simpler ones and rendering them more digestable. I like when he describes how “the great masters” of the past can be found, “in certain moments” and in “deep reality”. This is wonderful, and I think it’s true for all original painters or poets of any period. That “deep reality” of which he speaks is connected to nature in one way or another. And he goes on;

 

“..if the critics and connoisseurs were better acquainted with nature, their judgment would be more correct...” 

What I think he means is that what is essential (in this case an oil painting) is a profound understanding of the way both nature looks, and operates. I think he speaks of the mysterious manner wherein nature can appear both abstract and solid when seen through a holistic vision that is already sufficiently abstract in the painter’s imagination. It isn’t just about looking at ‘scenes in nature’ only to then reproduce them through technical virtuosity like back in the 19th century Salon. I also appreciate what I think Van Gogh correctly insinuates in his letter, that if critics and painters actually went out to live and work in nature they would better understand how it functioned. In France, but for few exceptions, The Barbizon School of Painters was perhaps the first movement that pushed artists out ‘en masse’ into the wild landscape around the Fontainebleau forest. Up until then Paintings were made in studios far removed from the grit of the earth. Van Gogh was deeply influenced by many of these painters. Me too, when I first came to France. 

But Van Gogh also implies that one’s understanding deepens the more one ‘digs and seeks deeply’ enough. It isn’t just about using one’s eyes, but by creating something that derives from the visual intelligence aquired through looking long and hard at the way that Nature operates. This boils down to Light, Colour, and Form.

Though I approach art as a European, and closer to Van Gogh’s sensibilities, I’m still a painter, not a teacher or an academic, so I cannot vouch for anything more than my own personal understanding. For nature is a big word in today’s world and it’s one that can trigger any number of responses in the Post-Modernist world of Art in which we all live, and where at the same time, everything is up for a nuanced interuptation. Personally, I can neither speak for African Art or South American Art, nor Asian, although I love them all, and I’ve seen lots over the years. I came into the Painting world through the portal of Europe culture so my eyes are therefore conditioned through a European set of lens. 

This picture from last week was the last of three studies and it’s one that I liked. It had been a lovely bloom, though understated, as if it had been run through a strainer. I was able to follow it cautiously into the night. Unlike the first two, this one has a lot of paint on it because I battled with a few substantial changes as the light dropped away. But, I like its simplicity, it has a carnel vibe to it because it reminds me of a rare steak under a muted sky the colour of Béarnaise sauce. I say this with mild nostalgia as someone who ate meat in my previous life. Here, it appears just thick enough to compliment the red sky just beneath it. The sea had gone dark, an ominous deep violet which appeared almost black as dusk settled in. 

It’s not the sort of painting that might appeal to someone looking for a naturalistic seascape because it’s surely not very picturesque. I think one needs an imagination to see it not just as an abstract picture, but simply as the sea and sky themselves at dusk. It came to me after years of looking at the motif in all seasons. This kind of devotion to a motif is what I think Van Gogh was basically writing about. Of course, we share many of the same sensibilities because I was essentially a student of his, one of many I think. Because of that, I learned to see the landscape through many of his own paintings. The key thing for me was to absorb what I could from all my teachers, then go out in search of my own landscapes by exploring nature’s deep reality. In this series at the sea, hopefully I’ve mapped out a path in the sand with my own footprints. 

There is little more to say except that it pleases me like a marathoner who has finished the course in a reasonably decent time.

 

An architect

10 March 2021

An architect 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 May 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What motivates me is work on disappearance, on the limits between a presence and an absence of the architecture. 

Dominique Perrault (1953- )

This morning I was able to get into town for some errands. Everything still a mess and most shops are closed while people still clean mud from everywhere. Mullumbimby, was already a quiet town but today it had an unnaturally eerie and sad air about it. Piles of soggy furniture and rugs lined the streets everywhere, whole families were still out cleaning up. It’s awfull. I spent yesterday helping a friend mop up his house. The weather has been unstable since the floods, but I got out the other day. Yesterday looked blocked up in the West but clear to the East, so I took a chance. 

I like this quote from the French architect Dominiquue Perrault, in a concise little book entitled The Architect Says, which according to the editor, is full of “quotes, quips, and wisdom”, as advertised on its front cover. It’s one of those diary-styled books of easy consumption and comprised of one quote per page. It’s the kind of book one keeps on the bedside. I keep mine on a low oversized, coffee table from Bali, a gift from my sister-law. They are the go-to lounge tables here in Byron Bay where traffic is heavy between the two places. 

But I like what he says especially in regards to this picture from the other day even though I’m not even sure to get his cryptic meaning. I only understand it metaphysically. I wasn’t familiar with him so I went on online to forage. His most famous work (among so much) is The Bibliothèque National de France, and from that I deduced that he was speaking of empty space and its rapport to the material substance of a solid building structure. So then, I wonder, is he talking about relationships of spaces like we do in paintings? Not sure, but somehow, I can equate it to this picture from the other evening. 

Architects appear to me like one very large family wherein its members possess all sorts of secret histories and intimately nuanced understandings that are communicated silently through some private channel configured only amongst themselves. They even appear to use an arcane and singular language all their own; a vocabulary of proportion and mass, one that’s privy only to themselves, and guarded by an aesthetic status to the exclusion of everyone else. Actually, I’ll confess that I‘ve always felt excluded from this cryptic circle and I’ve felt full of envy when in its presence.  

Their grammar speaks of space, light, and volume, I think maybe in the same way that some painters still do. But their concerns are bigger and bolder, and more important than just flat surfaces with colour imposed upon them. They appear more concerned with grand schemes and seem to worry about how we as humans, writ large, cohabitate amongst ourselves in rural settings or in cities. If judged by Art Fairs today, my mild regret, or rebuke, would be that painters on the whole, seem less serious than architects, certainly more insignificant. They even seem more frivolously narcissitic and irreverent than the serious and consequential gang that both house and home us all. I’ve come to see painters like poets, important, but left somehow behind the real art form of the 20th century; films. Alas, mostly what we do, when we do it poorly, is solipsitic and without meaning. But when it’s sublime, it’s divine. Painting today, is what so many of us creative types do to dig deep into ours souls, exploring the hidden parts of us that we don’t really need to explain to anyone else. So it has a purpose, still. But it’s not part of the zieguist that it maybe once was a few hundred years ago. Some painters have crossed over to make films like Man Ray, David Lynch and Julian Schnabel, to name but a few, who have all made two careers for themselves. But the art world is so vast that honestly the only people who seem to make a regular income from it are the galleries. It reminds me a bit of the records labels that sprang up in the 20th century that spread popular music around the world and made oodles of money. Unless they hit it big, the musicians would scrape like most painters. But hey!

So being a painter, I must now wade back into this discussion and either put up or shut up. I was thinking of this picture from the other evening to illustrate my thoughts about Monsieur Perrault’s quote. For me, this painting reveals a delicate range of light, one that permeates a surface of the image with the barest hint of matter. This notion of ‘presence and disappearance’ is what really appealed to me about the quote. In painterly terms, this sky is an attempt to capture something as fine as light itself, so fragile it might shatter just by staring at it too sternly.

In opposition to that, the sea is solid like a building, a deep dark violet mass that contrasts sharply with the light airy sky overhead. There is an Emerald green strip at the very forefront that acts like a door mat in the first plane of the picture and it allows the viewer to peek into the image like it’s a room. It helps to create a chilly distance all the way up and out to the horizon line. 

It’s a cool picture no doubt with little warmth, save from a hint of the pale pink of the clouds which are in fact, just bits of the unpainted white canvas board showing. And this is a great example of how our eyes always will compensate for a missing colour hue. They appear pink to us due to the cool complimentary colours around them, and this is Nature as teacher, and she is as practical as a great parent. 

Though the sky appears almost empty like a vacant lot between buildings, it’s still space, but it’s made of air and water vapour. It’s an atmosphere composed of diaphanous clouds that stream across it like loose ribbons, they’re so pale and translucent one could too easily misread which is cloud, or which is sky. That effect is what made me think of this architect’s description of presence and absence, even if I’m not completely sure of his own meaning.