Doubt and discipline

 

12 December 2020

Doubt and discipline

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 December 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was one of three from the other night. They were a little different, brighter and lighter in every way, but I liked this one best. The sea was super flat, full of bright light, and silver blue. A difficult sea to paint, so smooth it made me think of a glass slipper. But I appreciate the vast varieties of weather conditions that oblige me to find solutions for such different colours and forms each day. 

Last night a fellow painter friend of mine complained to me that she felt that although she has been at working as an artist for some 40 years now, she still feels that she doesn’t know what she is doing. Curious, because in my mind, she has always been a tireless worker, always at it, day and night, and yet like for so many artists, a rich and successful career has eluded her. Nonetheless, I was surprised to hear all this yet again. I had always also marvelled at her discipline because next to her, I’m a bit of a slouch, a sloth even. 

But I laughed gently, because I had heard all this from her many, many times before over the years. I replied that most artists, writers, musicians, etc, etc, who cannot make this confession, may have more gumption than integrity. I went on to add that having a great career is not the same thing as having possession of a great craft or vision.

But maybe I was being a little generous. What I had meant to say was that an artist (unless they are Picasso), who never question themselves, and who appear to know nothing of the gnawing doubt deep inside one’s creative skin, must surely make insipid Art. So thus, I pontificated to allay her fears. I may be a bit harsh but there must be truth in it because I think throughout history, nearly every great artist, writer, musician, have themselves confessed to all that.

I added that I think just to face all this emotional insecurity is the first step to seeing it all more clearly. Then, it’s just a matter falling in love with one’s work again because actually, all this confusion is really just a lapse of love. The way out of it is to jump back into the work, the craft; the nuts and bolts of art, not the airy fairy feelings around it. 

This doubt can be the key to a happy daily routine in most cases, irregardless of the work produced. I also reminded her of Sisiphus too.

Somehow, I think, even after the usual route of going to art schools, many of us still manage to hide our deepest insecurities as we venture out into the world of studios and galleries (and no need to dwell upon the cocktail parties, receptions, and exhibition openings that await the luckier ones amongst us). What little I have come to understand as an ‘unsuccessful’ painter (and college drop out), is that art doesn’t generally come out of the class rooms, but out of the recess periods, like as kids, and when we were always at play. And besides, (full disclaimer: I’m not really a believer in art schools anyway) but that said, I don’t discount the fact that art schools are still great for networking and getting laid a lot. 

In truth, I used to feel that by slogging it out on my own it would make me a better painter and that eventually I would get somewhere, but in the end, it just made me lonelier. Then I gradually accepted that I was kind of a loner anyway despite being someone who is generally pretty sociable and actually likes people. And of course, I had chosen to stay in France to study with Leo, my teacher.

But back to my friend; what I didn’t tell her was that I used to actually feel that there was some wisdom in this idea that the greater the doubt, the greater the artist. But now I’m less sure of it because sometimes creative people are just so overwhelmed with lack of confidence that they are terminally irresolute. They may never seem to find a way out of their own foxholes. But either way, maybe I shouldn’t be making such broad pronouncements. Life is a hard slog for us all no matter what our professions, either chosen or imposed upon us. Aren’t we lucky to just be painters in the first place? Maybe one just has to work hard, but also look equally hard at great art. Like Henry James once said:

“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion, and passion is our task -- the rest is the madness of art.”

I also told her that I have read of a few great painters who’ve claimed that only in their twilight years did they finally began to understand what Painting was all about; when their teeth and their hair was falling out, as both Delacroix and Goya had attested. 

All fine authentic artists have certainly said similar things I’m sure. But to contradict myself ever so slightly, I might note that one could say that humility isn’t always the litmus test of an artist’s quality. If one looks at Picasso, whose ego was as great as his very best things, overall, his greatness was still but a fraction of his giant ego. With more humility he might have continued making really innovative works, as great as Guernica, for example.

Titian, on the other hand, had both hubris and genius. It is said that he dropped a paintbrush while at work on one of his portraits of Pope Paul III in Venice, he stopped, and he waited impatiently for the old Pope to get off his chair and pick it up for him before resuming his work. Doubt can be a healthy thing for everyone no matter what their vocations. The thing for me is that while I am working here at the beach, doubt is rarely present. This is always the proof that the routine is everything. For me anyway, the routine has created the craft, and the craft has created confidence.

Stefan Zweig

10 November 2020

Stefan Zweig

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 November 2029, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the second of two paintings done the other night on election day in America. Naturally being in the future here on Australian time I was already on the edge of my seat, and I think it affected my otherwise lovely sky. But unlike my shaky uncertainty over the US election, this study came quickly and with a deliberate confidence. My friends in America all say that these times are precarious, but aren’t all times precarious? Doesn’t it all depend upon where we live and how we live in our own situation? Being an American myself, it’s easy to agree, but I’m also Australian, French,  and Irish too, so my slant on life is also quite nuanced.

I’m not trying to cute, but it’s a hard fact of life that if one lived in Haiti even during the relatively ‘peaceful boom years’ in the Clinton era in America, life would be miserable with or without money. So everything is relative like they say.  But that said, the advent of another four years of Trump would be nasty for the whole world over.

Personally, I feel really grateful that any anxiety I might have felt in this era concerns itself primarily with the insignificant dramas of just painting painting a picture here on the North Coast of Australia. Unbelievably, I’ve even developed glimmers of hope in this fragile task. This has come about because I think I’ve finally learned to just let it go of all the needless worry and doubt about things over which I’ve had so little control all my life. 

So outside of us, in the world at large, where all its random tragedies and precarious restraints can hold us in paralysis, we’re told nonetheless, by the wise buddhists of the East, that freedom is always just inside us. A tall order! And it’s easier said than done, because terrible suffering is so evenly distributed around the globe to both the rich and poor, the healthy and less lucky. So at the end of all this, I wonder to myself; isn’t it just through my own very personal struggles where I’ll find pleasure or pain? 

A few  years back I discovered Stefan Zweig in a small bookshop in Paris. I liked the title and the intriguing cover design, so I picked up his wonderful memoir, The World of Yesterday and ran through it like a marathon in two days. This book moved me and has stayed in my memory ever since. It’s a story of his exodus from Austria in the 1930’s before Hitler’s invasion. A beautiful book, an elegiac but spry account of the terrible uncertainties arriving like a tornado for the Jewish people. He writes vividly of the disbelief that so many of his friends and relations were feeling in front of a storm that was already hovering over them. They were frozen like deer in the headlights. “Do we go, or do we stay?”. He writes of leaving many of his family behind as he fled to England. Sadly, after so much horror and misfortune in his life he later committed suicide in Brazil where he had settled and written many more books. I’ve read a few and they are all authentic postcards from another age.

I think of him now as I’ve often thought about so many Holocaust victims and survivors with this rise of Right Wing White Nationalism in the USA today. As bad as Trump is, he’s but the ring leader surfing the tsunami of racial hatred that’s lurking in the swell just underneath. It not only harkens back to Germany of the 1930’s but even further back to the beginning of humankind. Alas, we haven’t learned much. But anyway, though we’re not quite there at the Nuremberg rally, but we could be in a blink of an eye. 

What I loved and learned about in Stefan Zweig’s autobiographical book is that no matter what happens in life one must try to maintain a curious and reasonably happy mindset. That he eventually killed himself years later in Brazil doesn’t discount what he had written earlier. I got from him what I get from all artists, writers, and musicians; that to live creatively is a wise but lucky choice.

This study was from a week ago, though not fabulous, it works comfortably. I think of it today as a happy sky because we voted Trump out of office. Apparently, he and his henchmen are already trying to steal the election by claiming it was rigged, ha ha. But the world knows that he lost. In fact, we all know that even he himself knows he lost. Ignoble, moronic, and somewhat like Hitler, he’s a conman and he’ll do whatever he plans to do but it won’t make any difference. If Hitler and Jerry Lewis had a baby, it would be Donald.

Whew...so anyway, this is an optimistic painting which I took away last week from the beach. Although it’s not brilliant, I’ll take it. I think it’s a fitting bright sky for the election outcome. 

While I was painting a group of kids had come by and circled around me as I worked. They were polite and curious, peppering me with lots of questions. At the end I asked them all what their favourite colours were. A girl said yellow, a boy said blue, seconded quickly by another boy, then red and pink were thrown out by the younger ones. Then, they asked me for my favourite colour, and I said, 

“Because I’m a painter, I love them all! Today, I liked the pink in the sky and the blue of the sea, but also the yellow of the sky above”.

Somehow, that seemed to make sense to them, though myself, I wasn’t even sure why, but with kids, everything seems to usually work. As they were leaving, I threw out the colour green because none of them had cited it. “Oh yeah, I like green” said the eldest girl in a red bathing suit, a perfect colour compliment I thought as they left down the path.  

a pale string of light

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 October 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 October 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

  

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 October 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

So, before a week of gloomy weather set in about ten days ago, I was having a pretty cruisy time out at the beach with these small boards. Since then it's been miserably wet. But hey!

This batch from two weeks ago look interesting to me, but its this last one at the bottom that I really like from the 12th of October. I certainly wasn't aware of painting it in the moment because I was making about three or four a day that week. But in it, there is a pale string of light that separates the haze from the orange sky just above it that simply amazes me. It's so delicate and magical that I wish I could remember even painting it. 

Sometimes, just a small thing like this can make me crazy because it means that I'm seeing better when I look out at the motif each night, and this means that my craft is also improving. This is a really interesting thing for someone of a certain age. Parallel to that, on the tennis court I'm also improving and playing better than I ever have. It tells me that the Greek Muses work overtime everywhere, and they are polyvalent too. This too amazes me because this Sunday tennis crew has a lot of really strong players in it. I'm the weak link out there but I know it, and besides, they put up with me because I always bring fresh balls. 

So, I can get pretty excited by the smallest things these days; a quick passing shot cross-court or the thin trace of light that illuminates a bit of haze over the horizon. All these little things make the day richer.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 October 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

 

San Giorgio in Australia, cont

16 August 2020

San Giorgio in Australia, cont

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

Again, because the real ‘star’ of my pictures is the sky, I'll always defer to it. And since it also defines the ‘light’ of the painting, I'll also naturally begin there. The sky is after all, just air and gaseous tints of colour created by varying degrees of humidity added in. Consequently, being made of no visible substance it changes its shape and colour due to incoming weather. I basically had to learn how to treat this perplexing element in a new and inventive manner. 

Fortunately, there have been lots of teachers over the past few hundred years from whom I could avail myself in this adventure. The Dutch, of course, whose light and airy seascapes still shimmer in technical perfection were an option but their pictures were mostly painted in studios and over many sessions. I wanted to cut to the chase and place my faith in the improvised combustion of speed here at the beach. 

The seascape genre is an old tradition, but obviously, I still believe it has some mileage left in it. The Fauve painters (Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Marquet, among others) in the early part of the 20th Century proved this in the South of France where they injected pictures it with new colourful spontaneity. Up north in Holland, Piet Mondrian, before he became a Modernist celebrity, had a giant love affair early in his career with the Dutch sky and he made gorgeous and inventive pictures, but I think they were painted in his studio from sketches. The Swedes and Finns too, made austere and lonely-looking pictures at the sea.

But closer to home, the Brits also gave us not only Richard Bonington and John Constable, but J.M. Turner, who seemed to achieve a supernatural renown by just waving his brush magically across a blank page. His remarkable watercolour technique was a spontaneous response to the dense and damp atmospheres of both Margate and Venice where he painted the sea and skies incessantly. With the barest hint of colour he could carve out whole chunks of space in the tiny pages of his notebooks.

Regardless, there is still room for more of us because I think this grand history of art has always been secretly in love with the sea and sky. 

Personally, one thing I needed to sort out when I began at the beach, was that there are certain colours that don’t easily render the lightness of the sky. There are whole tints of colour that just don’t give much buoyancy to the air. At the beginning back in early 2018, The reds and yellows I was using were too earthy and not suitable for the sky. In France, except occasionally when in Cassis, I didn’t paint the sea and sky very much, so I wasn’t sensitive to this. I frequently used Alizarin Crimson for pretty much everything on the red spectrum, and at a minimum it worked. And yet, it also possesses a slight ochre component to it that grounds it to the earth. So when I came here to semi-tropical Australia and faced this equatorial sky I needed to rethink my colours completely. After trying various crimson hues, I settled upon Quinacridone Magenta from an outfit in Melbourne which suited this task. Here, the airy sky at the sea wants to move upwards into the violet-blue of the atmosphere but even a hint of an earthly tone will prevent its ascension. I wanted my pinks and violets to rise up effortlessly in order to resist gravity. So, I offloaded several pigments and adopted newer ones and because of that, a new aerial path opened up for me here.

So although both these studies possess a thickish impasto of Crimson Red and Cadmium Orange, hopefully they still show off that deep rose bloom that certain twilight skies exude here to the delight of both beach walkers and amateur painters alike. 

For me to make any progress, even in these simple studies, continuity became the key to mapping out my own personal itinerary. To go from a small study of San Giorgio in Venice to a beach on the Pacific took fifty years. One would naturally have the right to ask; What has the painter learned? That would be complicated to answer briefly, but one thing I do feel when looking back on my life, might not be dissimilar to what Oscar Schindler felt, when at the end of Spielberg’s film, he breaks down in tears while telling his loyal Jewish accountant that he could have done more,,,, indeed,,,, he should have done much more. 

If one is already lucky enough to be able to practise their craft on a somewhat regular basis, that’s most fortunate because the pictures that come up will usually keep teaching the painter through thick and thin. If they are lucky their style and content will naturally sharpen over the decades and progress will also forge new ideas. Like any artistic life the point is to improve. I like that I've been guided by a flexible compass throughout this series, and it has helped guide me forward and backwards to places of both known and unknown insights.  

When it came to painting, my brain was hard-wired with stress ever since I was a kid. So to find any sanity I had to learn to let go and relax because every picture I attempted always seemed to be a kind of final exam and that made me really crazy. Fortunately, I’ve learned to chill, and to trust my own squiggly map. It’s like I’ve not only been given a second chance to return to the child’s playroom, but a chance to revisit the scene of the crime and find peace too.

San Giorgio in Australia

16 August 2020

San Giorgio in Australia

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

We have settled into some lovely winter skies now and these two pictures reveal my deep affection for them. This one, and the one on the following page, done a week later, look like they might have been painted on the same night. I’ve found myself pushing to take advantage of these rosy skies by using more pure colour with less white paint from the start. In them is more ‘body’, more substance than I would typically use for the sky. This makes them feel a bit more ‘muscular’ than usual. 

I remember working this way at the very beginning of my earliest days when learning to paint outside in the world. I was in Venice and made a small study of San Giorgio back around 1974. Like for every painter, this was an important chapter in my life because I think that one’s early pictures usually always reveal a raw innocence, perhaps a bit wonky, but authentic all the same. It’s why one should never throw away early paintings as awful as they may appear to an impatient and demanding beginner.

I also remember that the orange brick church began to appear across the same little white kind of canvas board I was working on at the time in much the same way as I approached these two recent studies. I felt in these two as if I were conjuring up an image from my laptop’s Time Machine that stores a complete memory bank of my painting life. 

In these two, once I put the colour down it was not touched again. All the values were fixed, like set in concrete once I put them down. There were no corrections or sensual brushstrokes to cover any misteps I might have made. 

In this series at the beach, contrary to my painting habits of the past fifty years, today, I always begin with the sky which I jump into first, so consequently, I lock myself into this ‘light value’ that’s responsible for holding the entire surface together. Thus, in this manner I‘ve nominated the sky to be my referential point of ‘light’ for the duration of the painting. Once that’s done, there is no changing it. And by doing it this way, I’m reversing an entire lifetime of habit, because out in the landscape I had always begun a picture by indicating the strongest accents of the motif à la Cezanne. This was in keeping with a traditional method that the Italian Renaissance painters defined as ‘Chiaroscuro’.  The ‘light’ appeared as if by magic through an accurate placement of brushstrokes marking the accents which then ultimately defined the values of the drawing or painting.

In the early Renaissance, fresco painting techniques had created a rather light-filled painting surface but with the advent of linen, and almost all the way up until the early 19th century, painters had been trained to add ‘light’ to the dark ground of the surface. These variants of brackish tar tones were used to protect the wood or linen from the slow decomposition of solvents used to mix pigments. Later on it became fashionable to cover all this with variants of red or ocre tones. Many painters today, still work in this manner. It’s only in the past 200 years or so that the French Impressionists turned everything on its head by painting on a white surface again. And this white surface re-aligned painting back to the early Frescoes in Italy. Only in the Far East where artists generally worked on light-coloured paper did painting escape the trauma of dark grounds.

Forsake the rose and blush thyself

8 June 2020

Forsake the rose and blush thyself

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

Whoa, it’s getting cold! Beautiful skies, though I regret the shorter days. It was windy and chilly for this painting from a few nights ago. But in just a few weeks the sun will soon begin its slow arc back up towards the equator. Nice! But to think that in France in this moment, they're picking fat red cherries and eating them right off the trees in the Luberon kills me. 

This study was the first of two from a few evenings ago. It had rained all morning but cleared somewhat by the late afternoon when I arrived to a virtually deserted beach. A large wild-looking red cloud awaited me so I quickly set up and managed to jump into this picture. Interesting, I like the unusual colour harmony  with its cool green sea under an even cooler violet sky, but it works in a curious way. I like especially the free-wheeling sweep of pink sky overhead made of barely three or four brushstrokes. I wish I could pull that off more often because it’s as spontaneous as it gets.  

Someone came over and saw it the other day propped up on my kitchen stove and remarked to me that “it seems so French”. I was unprepared for this particular take on the work, so I stammered slightly before finally saying, “well yes.... I guess so......maybe because,,, I lived there for so long,,,, but also because I learned to paint there”. That was all I could come up with at the time, but it was true.

I was a little taken aback because I couldn’t detect whether or not it was a compliment or a slight. I was surprised by the question, but funny enough lately, I’ve actually been thinking about how schools of art, and schools generally, can form a student’s cultural education. Isn’t it usually after the original innovators had already arrived and made their revolutionary mark on culture that ‘schools of’ sprout up? And doesn’t it also follow, that afterward, the followers and devotees make all sorts of rules and dictums for the subsequent adherents that are sure to follow? This somehow seems natural because there never seem to be enough ‘geniuses’ to go around, at least enough upon whom to fit these crowns. But this is not just reserved for the world of culture, but also to politics, economics, religion, etc, etc... I mean, basically, aren’t we all just sheep?

Throughout the history of all the arts it seems to have always been this way. We've all been influenced by masters, teachers, and great works that have touched us. The trick was for me was to learn to take what I needed and simply leave the rest. Easy enough, if one knows what one needs. But in my own life it wasn’t always so clear about what was going to be good for me. One exception was when I met my teacher Leo Marchutz in Aix. I somehow knew enough that he was the real deal, so I stayed to study with him until his death in 1976.

But because I was a little obtuse, it was usually only much later on when I would understand what it was I needed from a particular experience. Life for the curious-minded is always unexpected, but for the clueless and the curious like me, it was always more complicated.

No longer art students, it seems that for many of us, we bound forth naively and quickly find ourselves far away from our teachers, mentors, and family influences. Yet just as suddenly, we’re alone in our solitary studios, full of questions, and at times, full of despair. 

But all this isn’t a bad thing if it pushes us to discover the right questions which we'll need to ask about ourselves; like, what do we need each day to develop our own authentic voice? If we didn’t, we would likely remain trapped in a prison full of someone else’s ideas. But that is the curse and the blessing of having strong influences in our lives as art students. If one calls oneself a painter, then this thing, we call painting, must become a habit to finding our true selves. Almost all great artists pass this wisdom on to students. 

In the end, for me to be a painter, is a worthwhile activity even when I fall on my face. This has to be my identity, and it’s something I use as both a shield from life‘s cruelty, and a sword to defend myself against it. It may sound awful, or just melodramatic to say this, but there comes a point when every artist must be strong enough to free themselves from their teachers. Like the Buddha himself once said: “if you see the Buddha, kill him”. 

In the end, I have to ask myself: Can there be room inside my own creativity for other authors? Can a bus have two drivers? “Watch the sunset!” I remind myself when I take all this too seriously, or as Shakespeare said: “Forsake the rose! and blush thyself!”

No matter what kind of pictures a painter makes towards the end of his or her life, one would hope to have found glimmers of one’s own real and authentic nature. Maybe painting, as a craft, despite all its ups and downs, is a kind meditational thing, like when people go off for forty or fifty years of their lives to live in a community or monastery ‘to find themselves’. And why not? It’s a good thing to do during a lifetime. I mean, I think it’s a vital thing for anyone to find connection with creativity, because we all need to counteract the cruel craziness of human behaviour sometimes just outside our door. Personally, I prefer studying both piano and painting, which is great luxury because they need time. Isn't anyone lucky to be studying what they wish to investigate? If more people were fortunate enough to practice a creative craft of any sort, the world would be a much happier place I think.

It took me a long while before I could understand this urgency of art. This for me, was like awakening to the urgency of life, the older I’ve become. Doesn’t the practice of anything creative force us to get real with ourselves? The sooner the better I think now, having slept through so much of my life. This search for authenticity has become increasingly vital as I follow my own curved arc through life. And the thing is, art cannot be faked because it’s out there for everyone to see in the work. Is it any good? Was it ever any good? Did one paint pictures to explore themselves or to fall into the trap of seducing the public?Does the curved arc of an artistic life end with a pot of gold like at the end of the rainbow? Or was the pot of gold spread evenly out over a long squirrelly path of curiosity?