Occam’s Razor

15 September 2021

Occam’s Razor

It was cloudy in the morning but a chilly wind from the South polished the sky so by the other evening I was able to get out to make three pictures.

These days, everyone seems to be in an immense state of anxiety about the world. At the same time are too many versions of reality running around like chickens with their heads cut off because everybody knows better than everyone else. Like a COVID contest; Whose mouth is the loudest? Daily, after watching the American News, I cannot shake the feeling that the inmates have taken over the asylum. Quoi faire? 

But when it comes to subject of Painting (and happily so), all diverse realities are most welcome! “Bring it on!” we artists cry out to this tiresome world where the bean-counters in sharp suits rule over us all. The only revenge is to be creative because you know what? We’re all eventually going to die someday.

So, I really love this image from the 12th of September. It’s the most successful thing I feel I’ve done so far in these past three years from the beach. Graphically, speaking, it pleases me totally, it’s as I drilled deep inside me and liquid gold. Like everyone, there have been times in my life when I felt newly in love but found out after a time that I wasn’t. It turned out to be a dry well, as it were, and that feeling is so very unlike the affection I’ve had for an art work which only seems to grow with time. This is s not something I easily admit either. But there it is, once in a blue moon, something I’ve made myself, or seen by someone else, speaks so directly to me that it goes to my heart. Hitler could have made it, and I would still love it. This is why Art in any of its guises is so vital for humankind. It keeps many of us lucky people sane in this often insane world. Whether it’s a book, a painting, a song or a sonata, when something touched us it’s a most precious gift. It is so because it doesn’t happen all the time. Like a love for another, when it lasts, it’s something we cannot envision living without. And so it is with this painting from the other evening, one of three. 

My quixotic pursuit from this motif appears to always draw me back to a simple design like a template tattooed on my heart. It is almost as if I’m subconsciously trimming everything extraneously away from a picture except for the barest bone like I’m channelling Occam’s Razor. Like a homesteader with a machete, I’m cutting away old painting habits in search of a newer, more svelte look. I’m also burning opinions and beliefs too as I further slash everything that will not fit into this new rectangular space I’d like to re-invent for myself. 

In olden days, it was known as the Principle of Parsimony, and in terms of of my own obsessions it makes perfect sense. Today, I know from my travels that this austere and aesthetic truth still lives on wholeheartedly in places like Japan, a sanctified space where brevity and simplicity are almost always the preferred solution for most anything in life. I was raised in America and the message that ‘more is better’, was a kind of prayer at dinner tables all over the country. 

I think Americans of a certain race and social status were brought up to expect more of everything, so naturally more of everything was provided. I began to also see this phenomenon in the world of Art in America. Putting a man on the moon was not only inspirational, it pragmatically re-wired our imagination into believing that we could do anything. Who can argue with that? As the Art world expanded, so too did the artist’s appetite to go bigger and bolder. It also fueled ambitious ideas with more complications and material. As many of us know, American Manifest Destiny has not only been part of America’s greatest legacy to itself and the world. but equally its curse in so many ways.

Fifty year later, as many of us re-think our resources and the sustainabilty of our imprint upon earth it has significantly altered our behaviors. But in this painting world where the notion of adding more to a picture can somehow make it better, more substansive, more complicated, maybe even more fabulous, I can tell you from experience, it rarely does. Like painting hugely, oversized pictures, a classic formula in this scheme, is to use excessive amounts of paint to give a picture more importance than it might otherwise intrinsically possess. But again, this is just me, and like a teenager, I’m just sayin... And anyway, I now live in Australia where paints are so very expensive that naturally my own work is constrained by this fact so parsimony, is my rule.

But while I’m at it, as a painter, I’ve equally come to distrust excessive complications on the pictorial plane. I will do anything to avoid them, even subjecting the poor image to a vigorous assault with an old paint rag. So consequentially, in these small simplified studies, I seem to be trying to pare down both the drawing and the colour harmony, compressing them both down to the design of a national flag it sometimes seems. It’s as if I’ve designed them for some happy verdant island found near the equator. I don’t really set out to do this, but it’s true, that when I’m feeling uncertain, I’ll sometimes just carve out both the sea and sky into slices the colour of mango and watermelon. Occam’s razor indeed.

When I look at this image I imagine seeing an entire show presented in this simple format yet coloured inevariably with many different combinations of harmonies drawn from the placid evening skies and equally tranquil seas.

After walking beaches everywhere, ever since I was a kid, I secretly marveled at the way the sky settled into dusk. Like many people drawn to the sea I’ve always looked up 

towards the heavens at this twilight hour full of dreams. Since coming to Australia, and walking the beach at Brunswick Heads,  I confess that I never imagined that I would attempt to paint here. I was so intimidated by the extraterrestrial beauty of it that I wouldn’t be able to handle the failure. So I didn’t try even try for the longest time. I did draw from it, making several series in black and white but never in a million years did I believe I’d find the courage nor the tenacity to make something artistically worthy of this simple motif. After these few years I’m still sometimes astounded that I managed to stumble upon a pathway that aligned up so mysteriously with something so unbeknownst to my heart. 

The anguish and delight of the lighthouse keeper

27 March 2020 

The anguish and delight of the lighthouse keeper

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

I’ve been reading of the chaotic life going on in Europe as the raging pandemic roars through Italy where people are locked down in confinement. Here by the empty sea, life is tranquil at least for the time being. I sometimes feel a pang of guilt for the easiness of life around here when I see the awful news abroad.

This was the second of two from the other night where a thin veil of haze stretched across the sky like cheese cloth. The horizon line at one point was so sharp that it appeared to cut the whole world in two like a knife. I remember my teacher Leo say to me one day that visually speaking, the horizon line is always the strongest contrast out in nature and a landscape should reflect that fact. I’m not sure if he came up with this from his own studies or perhaps from either Delacroix or Cezanne. But in any event it’s something that always jumps out at me when I can’t figure out a landscape with certainty. It’s reassuring to note that the Earth itself commands such a visual truth. 

In this one I like the delicate swarth of dainty apricot clouds that formed like fuzz after the sun had set behind me. Though it doesn’t look like it, this picture was actually finished in the dark. I had wanted to continue, but unfortunately my palette was no longer readable, and dusk had already descended to swallow up its afterglow. The sea at that point was turning a deep blue that would in time bleed into the sky like on watercolour paper. Honestly, I’m often dazzled by Nature’s nonchalant narcissism, the kind that can bring a painter both deep anguish, but a dark delight.

And because I’m often the last living soul out there at this uncertain hour, it’s easy to imagine that it’s up to me to turn out the lights when I leave, for in this small glorious moment I’m the lighthouse keeper of this immense beach.

Handshake with the past

 6 May 2019

Handshake with the past

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Now after over a year into this little series I can feel that I’m finally beginning to learn how ‘to see’ again. It’s reassuring to be able to respond naturally to the motif with less uncertainty and more trust. My eyes are once again the principle software of my senses as I go out to follow the colour wheel at this hour of heightened melodrama.

This a curious image that I slowly warmed up to as it sat on my kitchen counter top along with a dozen or so others where these studies currently dry out. At first I didn’t think too much of it, but yesterday, for the fun of it, I placed it into a small frame which can help isolate it away from any prejudice on my part. I had initially thought it too straight forward, too simplistic, a little boring even, yet with a bit of time it began to shine for me. Too often the reverse is true, where I think I really like something but it quickly goes off, turning sour like milk. But hey! Live and like is good, I think.

In any event, an image like this possesses a kind of ‘hybrid nature’ reminding me of the confusion that lurks in my mind about the nuanced fluctuations between past memories and these present sensations when painting. It’s the immediacy of the moment, yet at the same time, a handshake with the past. One in the present moment, the other, a compilation of all the images I’ve ever seen and loved, as if stored on a flash drive of visual memories. 

So a painting like this is a rapid and spontaneous combustion of pigments under the colourful constraints of a changing set of elements at the beach. But it’s also essentially a collision between my collective memories and the painting session at hand.  

All these paintings seem to express that I’m more interested in a clumsy and cohesive unit than one that’s pieced together with weak glue and portends to be something made up of miss-matched elements taken randomly from the motif with no rhyme or reason.

This picture came quickly, one of several of the night. Although a little unrefined, it feels fresh and painted as if its colours sprang off the palette like kids running out to recess. It got to its present state in a matter of minutes, so thankfully, I was clear-headed enough to stop immediately. Another brushstroke and I would have wrecked it.

At the same time, I also feel something in it that seems to harken back to Impressionism. This I can accept, because this small series is a workbook full of things that both surprise and displease me all at the same time. I hold the long view, not the short one, so I’m not going to get hung up about individual pictures. That said, there is something else in this image that I like. It’s something flat and rather post-Matisse, a quality that is different and Modernist. So it may be a bastard child of Impressionism and Modernism, I’ve been called worse.

But it’s this flat quality that I seem to cherish, it’s also something over which I have little control, like it’s a software inside me that’s pulling me slowly along on a factory line which cannot be stopped until perhaps the end of my life. 

A dog’s breakfast, Cato seizes the thing.

12 May 2019

A dog’s breakfast, Cato seizes the thing.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 May 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

These days are clear, and sadly they’re shrinking and leave me with less of them. My weather app tells me I must have all my work done here at the house and leave by 16h to get to the beach because the sun will set at 17h 06. So until June 21st the days will be shrinking, but regardless, winter arrives. Ouch.

This study from last week is a wild and scruffy mess of a thing, it’s a feral stab at Nature and I like it. It’s ‘a dog’s breakfast’, as they would call it here in Australia for anything that’s sloppy. It had been a magnificent sky and I was feeling carefree as if the earth were spinning around me in a lazy waltz like I was in love. But I wasn’t,,, it was just a great painting session.

I realise that I’ve been at this for two years now and this small portion of a sandy dune that I’ve carved out for myself as a ‘studio’ is now a compact but ample space. I keep it clean and organised like I would if I lived on a small boat. A few meters down in the bush I have a stash where I keep old rags and miscellaneous refuse in a plastic bag, plus a 

bottle into which I pour old turps. I have a plastic Thai take-away recepticle into which I park colours from the palette between sessions. I regularly throw everything out in the bins on the road just down from the pathway. It’s a good system and I keep it operational. Like I said, a small boat. I hate to pollute even if the bushes encircling me get splattered with paint from time to time. Though I’ve always used a plastic takeaway container to store blobs of paint, I’ve  become quite frugal because oil paints here in Australia are frightfully expensive. As I squeeze out everything I can from these tubes of colour, I often think of Renoir, who, as a poor student at the Beaux Arts in Paris, according to legend, scoured and scrimped around the studio after class recovering old tubes of colour thrown away by other students. 

Looking at this study now, I wonder if others would be able to see a twilight sky beyond how abstract these study might appear here? Granted, the horizon line is a bit wonky, and it might appear more like a landscape, but the sea was actually a deep warm black as dusk settled in.

I am always amazed when I show these images to various people and they express such surprise to learn that they are painted at the beach. It happens all the time, I think they presumee that I’ve done them from photos or in a studio, or both. But hey! What’s to be done?

I’ve been reading about about the Stoics, and this study reminds me of something which Cato said just over 2000 years ago. “Seize the thing, and the words will follow”. I first read this translation years ago which I really liked. But it often translated as “Grasp the subject, and the words will follow.” It’s advice to orators. But I am loyal to the first one because it suits my way of understanding Painting. 

Being a painter, I would add a twist to it which allows me to see that when we “seize the thing (form), style will follow” because style can never precede the ‘thing seized’ any more than the horse comes before the proverbial cart. Or, put another way: Seize the form and the brushstrokes will follow. This is a visceral response to painting, and it implies a forceful act which suits my way of working.

listening and seeing

16 July 2018

listening and seeing

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 July 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

At the piano this morning I was playing around with the iconic tune Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I found myself spending an hour leisurely just moving through a few simple triad inversions to harmonise the song in different ways. Eventually  I began to slow down just enough that I could really hear each subtle shift in the melody from the variations.  

This is not unlike the process of looking out at the motif here at the beach as dusk approaches, calming down the shifting colour patterns. I’ve understood that even just casually looking out at the sky, can become for a painter, the first step towards seeing it, and this puts me into a place of reception which is my real landing zone. 

Only just recently in my life has this receptive form of patience become a kind of North Star for me. It has established a trust in whatever activity I’m engaged in. It’s the new point on my compass too, because for most of my life I’ve been a bit lost and unfocused. But patience, even now, is never a given, it’s not something that appears like magic whenever I snap my fingers because I’ve only just learned how to amicably access it. This is because I’ve been anxious all my life, and I’m an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist according to a well respected pharmo-psychologist in New York whom I saw back in 1990. It was the first time that anyone had ever addressed this part of me as an adult in such a clear-cut fashion. I was somewhat shocked, but also relieved at the same time because it was, after all, a bona fide explanation, that in an instant, reeled me in from deep space where I had been hiding out since I was a kid. His short term solution for me was Prozac, but that was really just a happy short term solution. I knew had to stop drinking which came six years later. 

But relief from much of all this anxiety had to even come many years later when I seriously began studying the piano each morning and painting at the beach most afternoons in Australia. There is a nice symmetry to these activities that bookend my days now. Little did I know that they would both land me into a place of gentle creative submission.

My method is pretty simple I generally jump on the piano first thing each morning with a pot of strong black coffee and into the hardest piece I don’t want to play. So needless to say, learning piano has really helped me lot. Horowitz describes how he learned pieces in slow, slow motion, until they were completely memorised. I took that on board immediately when I read that about him. 

So playing a piece slowly, at a snail's pace, I began learning pieces. Listening to chords in slow motion, over and over again, settles me down further like I’m on a couch following instructions from a hypnotist. I mean, what’s the point of trying to play anything if one is not entirely present? I've spent my whole life hurrying through all sorts of activities, oblivious to whether I was absent or present. It was the piano that finally brought me to heel. Then, only gradually, did I settle down enough to begin looking, then seeing a motif at the beach with patience.

So, like the piano, the beach skies have also brought me down to earth. I’ve progressed slowly from looking to seeing, a quantum leap for a painter. Somehow too, I’ve allowed myself the space to see just watch the sky until colour harmonies trigger a natural response in me. Looking and seeing are passive voices in this process of creating a picture though I’m sure it’s different for others. For me, the key that opens up a picture each evening is this kind of patient reception.

Most days it’s the same ritual. Once I’ve arrived and set up, I’m able see to what’s on offer. "What’s on tonight’s menu?" I think to myself, rather matter-of-fact. Then I set about making a palette which is the easiest part of the process because it’s pretty much the same these days.  

At the moment I use six colours: Quanicridone Magenta, Ultramarine Blue, Prussian Blue, Cadminium Yellow Deep, Lemon Yellow and Titinium White. It’s a limited palette, compact, but one that easily expands to a full-ranged colour wheel that makes both warm and cool sides of each of these colour tones pretty complete. 

This quick study was the second of six from the other night, a wild winter sky that just kept expanding and exploding. It went on for the longest time these fireworks, and I jumped into it wholeheartedly. Like each of the others, this is a warm vibrant image, freely painted with abandon. They were all okay, but this one has a certain feeling in it I like. Though crude, it’s alive, and for me that’s the most important thing. If it were a piano piece it might be something warm (and French), both light and playful too, like part of a suite by Darius Milhaud or Francis Poulenc.

At the end of each session when I’ve packed up my things and stashed a few items in the nearby bushes and when I’m sure no one is looking, I’ve taken to making three sharp claps with my hands while facing the sea, followed by three brief bows with my hands in prayer position. It's something I picked up over the past year. It's from from Japan because like everyone else who has visited that marvellous country, there is nothing quite as disarming nor as gracious than their soft bows shyly performed for just about every occasion. But then again, it might have also come from all those Zen Buddhist books and memoirs I’ve read for so long, hoping to find answers to life's problems and maybe steal something from them to make my very own. Naturally, I feel self-conscious doing this brief ritual which I admit would be funny to watch from afar. Then again, lots of people around here in Australia have quirky spiritual ticks and no one bats an eye. For me though, it’s already part of my ritual, and besides, I like the way it closes the session and reminds me that painting here at the beach is always a gift. It's a thank you for even the awful pictures that come out of the session and which are part of the plan, because these are aptly called Evening Prayers. 

Double bass

22 February 2022

Double bass

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The weather has been typically chaotic but at least not so crazy hot. The other night though was insane, a wild firestorm in the evening sky. Sometimes one has to let go and fly into directions that might have seemed previously off-limits. For example, in this study from last week, it’s has an abundance of sweetness, an overload of candy that overflows and seems to border on the pornographic. This kind of thing is a risky adventure for me, or anyone, really. Though I actually appreciate its absurd audacity, it’s the kind of picture one might find in one’s grandmother’s home placed near the hearth. In it is a charming quality that frightens me. 

But the memory of such a firestorm in the sky also leaves me at the same time, with a certain affection for it. The sky was so difficult to render in such a short time frame that I kind of forced my way through it on intuition alone. The sea came at the very end, and without it, I would have lost everything. I don’t know how I was able to get it to recede like it does, sometimes it’s just wild luck. So yes, it’s an over-the-top-image but a part in me is also amazed that it sort of works in a crazy sort of way. There is truth in it, despite everything, but that doesn’t always mean that it’s a great picture. Like the ultimate of cliches: “It really looked like this!” Yes, it’s kitschy, for sure, and yet, you know what? Sometimes one just needs to paint these kinds of things once in a while. 

Like I’ve said previously, since childhood, everything in life has always felt like a final exam, even just playing tennis or keeping a diary. There is a perfectionist hidden within every chapter of my life. Though I pretended otherwise, every important action I’ve ever taken had always felt like a death sentence hanging over me. Remarkably though, I somehow found a way to live with it. I just lurched from one problem to the next, resolved or not. Needless to say, I was a wreck and running on one cylinder.

Providentially, a solution came to me from a piano teacher at a school of jazz in Aix I had seen just a few times before moving up to the Drome back in 1999. Previously, I had been working on my own and spending time trying to figure out music theory on paper. I was attempting to learn a few Standards on paper and dutifully writing everything out in hopes that I could understand harmony theoretically which now seems ridiculous to me today.

So on the first lesson the young guy came in and I told him I was learning All The Things You Are, a favorite of everybody’s by Jerome Kern. I tried to play what I could but mangled it thoroughly. He brought his giant contrabass and set the metronome to an easy pace and asked me to play with him. I didn’t have the changes memorised so I again mangled it. No worries, he told me, memorise it, and play from the chart for the next week. So I left the lesson excited and terrified and went home and worked on it all week. 

The next week we jumped into it quickly, and of course I faltered but tried to keep up. “He didn’t stop for nothing”, as Dizzy Gilespie used to say. “No freight train, nothing” He kept going and going, until I settled down enough to gradually get into it. He basically pushed me in the water and waited for me to sink or swim. It was a great lesson and it changed my life in so many small ways thereafter. But it also took patience, that magical thing that had eluded me all my life. 

So a small crazy study like this reminds me not to judge myself too harshly, just keep it moving I learned. Remember the chart, remember the double bass that stops for no one, ever. Had I not moved away from Aix, I would have kept working with him. Sadly, I don’t think the little school lasted too long but it was just at the crossroads for me and I’m grateful for it.

So now years later, I’ve been on the piano every morning just because it brings me joy. I've never been very comfortable in the early mornings so this routine essentially prepares me for the day ahead by protecting me from all the craziness and irrational violence out in this world. I’ve never been able to keep that stuff at bay and consequently I’ve always been anxious. This was the root of my perfectionism hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. But this piano study has moved me, soothed me, and changed me forever.