Shéhérazade

2 March 2023

Shéhérazade

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 February 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When I arrived the other night, the sky was so densely packed with colour that I simply looked at it and I felt like it had already been painted. All I needed to do was copy it like in a numbered picture book for kids. Everything was so ordered and the colours were so clearly delineated that it felt like I just copied it. Would that make it inauthentic or too close to verisimilitude? 

Each year I make a series of postcards at a great little print shop in town. Lovely people who know what they are doing with colour is a god-send. This one might make a good one. I sell them at a few places around the shire, but for me it’s just for vanity and some publicity. I’m still a big fan of snail mail in all forms but the price of stamps here is over the moon so I’ve had to curb my enthusiasm. And yet, I love to imagine these sea and sky pictures stuck on fridges from Taiwan to Pittsburg and Paris to Milan, I’m still an analog kind of guy.

I have been listening to Maurice Ravel off and on now for weeks on end. I can get into musicians this way. Tonight on France Musique, I listened to the soprano Christiane Karg sing Shéhérazade, a languid and darkly mysterious piece evoking the antique fable where just for once, a woman comes out on top. Suddenly, seeing this picture while hearing her sing put in me in a strange mood. It’s as if this image was painted expressly for this version of Shéhérazade. Even if it wasn't, how could it be I wondered? 

I’ll be honest, almost every interesting facet I’ve ever learned concerning music has come from  France Musique. In a recent podcast about Ravel’s life I learned that he was a teacher. Already an accomplished composer and celebrated pianist himself, he just really loved teaching music. Not unusual, but hardly normal for a composer with means, but time constraints also. One thing he wished most for his students, was for them, as artists, to find their own original voices. He valued it highly and he believed it was that one quality that made a good artist a really great one. As a painter, who could argue with that?

I’ve always liked Ravel, so I began working on a small piece he wrote called Prelude 1913. It was simple enough to imagine learning it. It was originally written for students to play as part of their entrance exams into the Conservatory in Paris. As I understood it, they were given this piece only an hour or so before the exam and expected to play it in a giant hall before the judges. It’s but a tiny fragment of a musical idea, just around 1:15 minutes long yet it embodies a host of ideas that seem to spring out of it like wildflowers. And like a pulse, after just a few measures into it, one can already hear Ravel’s own heartbeat coursing through its bloodstream. Any great artist or painter, writer, or composer, reveals themselves within a just the first few measures, brushstrokes, and sentences. It’s what makes them uniquely singular.  

And this is especially so for the painter, where a brushstroke acts like a fingerprint pointing to back to the painter. Even just a small fragment of a picture by Van Gogh can reveal his touch within the painted brushwork. And just like Ravel, or any original composer, classical, Pop or otherwise, a small detail of Vincent’s handiwork is quickly recognised by any astute amateur of art.

As a consequence, over the past year at the very end of each day, I’ve gotten into the habit of playing the Prelude 1913 before getting into bed each night. It’s the last act before sleep. After I’ve locked my doors, shut off the lights and brushed my teeth, I sit at the piano conveniently situated on the way to my small bedroom. There, I run through it a few times, stumbling here and there, because I’m really a crap pianist. Some nights it feels like a life sentence. I know it by heart of course, but knowing it well doesn’t mean playing it well. I struggle because it needs a soft touch and that requires a great supple strength in the fingers, something I lack. I often imagine I’m wearing a catcher’s mitt on my left hand. 

Listening to any bit of music one loves is an endless emotion. It has an easy way of getting under one’s skin and vibrate through one’s nervous system.  Imagine at any given moment around the earth, the billions of different melodies that people sing in their heads all at once. It’s one of those distinctive things that make us all human even whilst under the worst of circumstances. In fact, isn’t it a lot like laughter? 

Forgotten hero

14 April 2023

Forgotten hero

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 April 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The idea of portable oil colours had been kicking around on the continent for a while before the invention of the ‘tinny tube' of ready-made pigments. Painters up until the arrival of the tube with a screwable top had been using pig bladders sewn up to make them function as small portable pockets of colour. Yuck!

The squeezibly practical tin tubes came on the London market in 1841. The inventor for this bright idea was an American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand, who was living in London and painting portraits. His US patent soon brought him wealth beyond measure when the paint maker Winsor Newton began selling his tubes full of their own oil paints. Alas, with this income, Rand invested in an exotic idea for an Aeolian Pianoforte(?), an idea that never took off. So sadly in debt, he sold his patent to Winsor Newton and the rest, as they say, is history. Rand went back to America where he continued painting portraits but with little apparent success. Despite this, he was a happy man with a large family, as it was noted in his obituary a few years later. I like that happy-go-lucky American spririt that pervaded entreprenuers in those early days. 

Here in the 21st century, don’t we all seem to take everything for granted? Needless to say, Rand’s idea changed everything for the painting world. Would we have had the wave of Impressionist pictures or the millions and millions of amateur artists painting today? Imagine the effect this had upon the work of someone like Vincent van Gogh, born merely twelve years after this invention? Somehow, I cannot imagine Vincent filling pig bladders with Chrome Yellow or Ultramarine Blue on the night before his outings in the fields around Arles. 

And the funny thing about it, is that no one has yet improved upon it in almost 200 years. Yes, the cheaper versions are now made of flexible plastic, but nothing has changed about its use. Personally, I am forever both indebted and endeared to Mr Rand here at the beach where I come most nights to make order out of all these colours housed in little tin homes and squeezed out like toothpaste on the palette. 

This picture was one of two from the other night. It was a wonderful bloom,  and just being out at the beach did me a load of good. These beach afternoons are in an uneasy truce with the Autumn weather. There are whole weeks when I‘m cooped up at home. But rain is good, so they say when it’s been dry, and which it has. When I do get out to paint I often feel like I’m visiting my therapist. But despite the uneven météo, some days are super clear and they bring on some great blooms too. This one I managed to catch and reel in like a fisherman. I’m not sure what to think about. It certainly reveals the melodrama that spills into the night, or maybe just all the melodrama within me.

Looking at it now it suddenly occurs to me that there is has no black in its DNA. Indeed, none of the paintings in this book has even a tiny scintilla of Mars Black, Ivory Black or any other black. I know lots of people use black in every genre of painting, but why would anyone use black of all colours, in a seascape? But hey!

In these pictures I never need to get close to black, but if I ever did, I'd use Prussian Blue with some Alizarin Crimson and a dash of strong Chrome Yellow, give or take the proportions, and adjusting it like a festive cook in his kitchen. 

And speaking of black, unlike the sartorial soberity of so many of my fellow collegues in this art game, I never wear black. I’m a light-grey kinda fella, for I like to be no one and nowhere, invisible in fact,,, socially speaking.

Black is defiantly Post Modern though. It’s also pretty Goth too, so there is humour in there somewhere if one has the patience to find that. Years ago, When I lived at the Chateaunoir outside Aix. A ‘serious poet’ moved in for a time. Every 10 days or so, after washing his laundry, he hung it out on a line between two immense pine trees in a small clearing above. Everything that on it was black. Though slightly faded, there were black socks, black underwear, black tees, black dress shirts, black shorts, black slacks and black jeans. It was weird, like living next to the Adams Family.

At Sea, reeling and feeling

2 August 2022

At Sea, reeling and feeling

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Chilly nights, these nights! I jumped into the first picture just as the sky was turning that habitual pale lemon hue after a short winter blue afternoon. Against this, like smoke almost pasted over it, was streaming a hint of lilac mist like la bevy of lost doves. I kept it simple not because I wanted to, but because it just came out quickly and was done before I even realised it. But suddenly, the sky began to heat up like an electric hotplate and then all hell broke loose.

Four rapid pictures, one after the other came in quick succession. They came easily. The whole session felt effortless because of the sumptuous ‘Bloom’ that had been building up slowly then suddenly exploded, and its effect seemed to last forever. It doesn’t always happen like this but when it does it’s spectacular and I don’t want to miss a thing. When I finished up there were still a few beach walkers in the fading light and even fewer surfers in their wetsuits.

I include three out of the four but in fact I liked them all. I’m certain that it’s because of my immense pleasure in watching them come up out of nowhere, filling up the empty canvas boards as if by magic. Sometimes, this mysterous fact catches me off guard even if I am the author. But the two on the following pages were more of a struggle and I persevered without thinking. I had faith in this fantastic sky that was just pulling me along like a I was a drunken sailor happy on leave. 

Like most painters, I’m wise enough to know that a good painting session is only enhanced by the battle, and that’s only if you win.

So I packed up in the dark, feeling like a fisherman with a big catch and left the cold beach, alone, but happy and with a full heart. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A giant hug from Earth

7 October 2021

A giant hug from Earth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 October 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

To my great surprise, two nights ago, several small studies rose up and out from the sea as if it were a field of daisies, violets, bluebells and bellflowers. And the sky made a magnificent ‘bloom’ also, but I almost didn’t make it out to the beach. I had been in the studio all afternoon and was full of myself in doubts about everything I was trying to do at the beach and in my whole life that I didn’t have the heart to go to work. Imagine brain surgeon saying such a thing?

Like dominoes falling dark thought about everything sprang up just like the flowers.  

“What more I can I possibly generate from the this motif anyway?”

It may have been precipitated by a remark a friend had made earlier in the day,

“You should move on from these little paintings and work on your big ones in the studio.”

I knew he liked the things I was painting in the studio much more than what I was doing at the beach but, “Hey!  My pride growled, “Who was he to be telling me anything?” Although at the time I didn’t seem to be bothered by the remark except that I had had a difficult painting session on the night prior, one, which without words, pretty much told me the very same thing. It’s one thing when some else makes a critical remark about your work (or life), but another thing altogether when your own work speaks directly to you through itself. 

But in the end, Really, all I needed was a great session, a big beautiful evening ‘Bloom’, blushing wildly and unabashedly for me alone to replenish my curiosity anew for this motif. I really needed a big hug from Mother Nature. After all, it is for me alone, and similar to this diary, the results may or may not please others but the real pleasure of ‘doing’ is all mine, mine alone. I am responsible for myself, no one else.

And this takes to something that I experienced in the studio a few days earlier. A remarkable discovery just for me alone. It was getting late so I decided not to paint at the beach. I had put on France Musique and reclined on the chaise lounge in the studio by the large window. Once in a when I’m there I like to stay and watch the setting sun hide behind the forest as dusk descends quietly. Last night I noticed a star appearing through the trees and leaves. It was quite high and I began to focus in on it. After a few minutes I noticed how it appeared and disappeared because of the wind, but also by its own slow movement as the earth moved through space. The star, a bright one, began to align itself to my focus as I squinted to see it more clearly. As I watched the star I began to perceive that it actually had the specific form of a cross. I kept looking at it contiually, as it appeared then disappeared between the gentle sway of distant leaves. But by now, it always re-appeared as ‘the same cross’ each time to my astonishment. It was a cross, but one with extra smaller rays going out at different angles of ‘the clock’, 1:30 o’clock, 4:30 o’clock, 7:30, 10:30 etc, etc. It reminded me of the gold stars painted on a deep Ultramarine background that ones sees often in Italian paintings everywhere. Giotto I think even made them in the frescoes of Padova. I was simply astonished to witness such an example of science melding with memories of the Early Renanaisance. And I realised that this cross was of pure light as if nothing could have been lighter in value, nor anything in the spiritual sense to sully it. 

 

I made a drawing of it yesterday in my diary and indeed it looks like something extrapolated from religious iconography. No matter that it disapeared momentarily, it would quickly reappear immediately by taking its unique shape. They say that all snowflakes are unique, is this somehow related to that mysterious idea? Would this cross also have its own visual DNA make-up, one unique in the universe?

After a while I noticed another star appear through the forest, slightly smaller but it too, seemed to possess its own unique shape, different from the first cross. It was shaped in the form of a trianglular cross resembling the iconic Christmas tree in a simple graphic form. Again, it was made of a splintered kind of pure light, and every time it disappeared behind the distant tree leaves it quickly came back into view, it would always only return as the triangle. I began to look up at the first star, and again after focussing and squinting my eyes, it too held true to the same shape of cross as before. I began to look back and forth at each star, each time they retained their unique shape. I was dumbfounded like an infant who discovers the switch to a lightbulb turning it on and off again with curious alacrity.

And like the infant, by the end, as I sat in the darkness of my studio, I reasoned that these two stars seen through the filter of the tree leaves far off in the distance must also posses their own original shapes much like snowflakes. But unlike the snowflake, I should be able to see them again on any clear evening through the filter of leaves to confirm my discovery. I was astonished.

This is a curious picture that appears slightly illustrative which I usually frown upon but there is something in it I like. It’s certainly got a lot going on in it. What I like is   the light that separates the large rich yellow stripe from the pale layer above it. The light is actuelly the white of the canvas board that I left. That kind of nuanced transition interests me more than pretty much anything at the moment. 

Veins of light

22 March 2021

Veins of light

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Heavy rains have again returned off and on which complicates things yet I did manage this small thing in between a few squalls the other night. 

When I arrived at the beach it didn’t look brilliant and I initially wondered if I could find something to grab hold of long enough to make picture as I could see rain menacing both to the right and left of me. As I unpacked and set up a palette, indeed, some patches of pink opened up almost as if I had commanded “Open Sesame!” Faith or superstition? More like just dumb luck I think but I took it gracefully.

A parallel to rock climbing is always my go-to analogy in this business of painting at the beach. Arriving at the motif, I will immediately assess the wall of fragmented and uneven clouds above me, looking fo a point of entry. If it isn’t opaque there will usually be some veins of light running through it to provide me with a idea and a few handholds. Without light there is less of a chance for colour. Alas, the maxim is alway: no light, no colour. 

Like the climber, a painter is a child of patience, mostly. Without it, one could be reckless and cannot proceed as easily with care. But in failure, obviously, the climber has more far to lose than the grounded painter. And yet, arriving at the summit, the climber and painter both feel an enormous relief and a great satisfaction too.

Despite the worry of rain, I love these afternoons when low cotton balls of colourful cloud gently roll overhead like bales of hay offering a jolt of warmth quite separate from the cooler tint of clouds higher up. Happily, on this night, there was both light and colour. The result isn’t exactly fireworks, but maybe there is enough subtlety within these harmonies that might lead me to newer images in the near future.

Swiss Time

8 March 2021

Swiss Time

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I think this study took about 15 minutes, and though it’s not terribly exciting, it works in a certain way. It was a great exercise, but then, aren’t they all? Like a battery, there’s enough truth in it to power it forward, maybe even forever, but we’ll see. It is of a specific place and time, one that gives it a particular feeling about that exact moment in the afternoon and this for a painter, is reassuring. This painter will be long gone and forgotten but no worries, as we say here in OZ, for what remains of him, will be a melancholic relic of his own ecstasy.

I’m a fool, but not a big one, I fully understand that these small studies are of little value to anyone beyond the walls of my own home, because let’s face it, there are already way too many small pictures on millions of walls around the world. Think of all of them in just one country alone, a place like Switzerland. How many cute chalet walls, celler taverns, and gasthofes must share their wall space with cuckoo clocks and small seascapes from Sorrento or snowy depictions of the Materhorn seen from sunny pastures full of cows? Goodness! And inversely, what about all those views of the Materhorn that adorn the hotels of Sorrento and Anacapri? 

But yes, little pictures of all subjects are cranked out for hotel and motel walls the world over. I wonder, does anyone ever look at them? Older couples may get into lumpy beds beneath them and fall fast asleep, but young couples will have wild sex for hours underneath them in large king-sized beds, and sometimes even, one of them will find themselves looking straight at the Matterhorn in absolute ecstasy.

But for me, the point isn’t to cover walls, but to find simple joy in these painting sessions. Because that’s why we should do any work or sports we’ve chosen. I heard a guy at the tennis courts the other day say that he never played any sport except to win. I thought to myself, how strangely different we all are, for I only ever played any sport for fun and the enjoyment of it. 

So what happens to these studies is always secondary to the challenge of making them. This is a very un-American notion, I know, but hey, I moved to France early on and adopted their highest esteem for the Arts (and artists). This may come as a surprise to many in the public, who like Swiss bankers, might only think of the financial upside (and downside risk) of each activity we perform in life. But even some artist like me who take this long view, may also be foolish enough to believe that making Art (writ large) is right up there with one of the greatest things to do during our short and insignificant lives here on earth.

I used to imagine that all my self-worth was contingent on commercial success or whether or not people liked my work. I soon realised that people can like and admire the work but still not buy it. It’s better to learn that early on in life I soon came to understand, though not early enough. My pictures may never find walls upon which they’ll find a home, so what? They’ll be homeless. So again, my validation always come from how this artistic life allows me to live better in an oftimes difficult world.    

And because the Painting experience is the joy, not the result. If one makes a living, so much the better. A friend once told me that an artist must embrace poverty but that only sounds heroic when one is young, and life appears long, deep and wide. Being poor and older is another story, doable, but still another story.

I think it was Bernard Berenson who once said that Painting is an impossible vocation if one desires fame and fortune. He said that the only way to make it work was to either come from wealth or marry ino it.  He cited Tiepolo (the elder) and Guardi, as two Venitean painters who embraced this idea and made it work for them. Of course they were also brilliant too.

I had a headstart when my parents died early and left me with a small inheritance. Because I decided upon an artistic life and I had fled to France early, money was a means to an end not the other way around. Free time was both the ends and the means to being able to paint. Shortly afterwards, I luckily bought a large empty space downtown in New York in the 1970’s and I was able to stretch it out my bank account slowly into a life in France until like bubble gum, it eventually popped. Money after all, provides one with time. So what we most of us do with it? Waste it? Kill it? Squandor it with inattention? I’ve done a little bit of all these things actually. 

With attention, or with inattention, bank accounts rise and fall and they can fill up but empty out just as easily. Isn’t it how we spend our time that’s more important than how we spend our money? Most of us, if we're lucky, choose to either have more time, or more things in our life, but the lucky few usually have both. The majority of people around the world live hard lives in poverty and with almost no choices. But for those lucky people who do have choices, isn't our time the most precious gift we possess? So isn't a Swiss watch piece a grand metaphor for both time and money, yet not for leisure?