Pictures are made of bridges

20 March 2022

Pictures are made of bridges

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

Seeing colour is a cumulative endeavour, an acquired habit, as it were. Where I see a peachy yellow cloud, many civilians (non-painters), might see what they consider a generic brand of grey as if from a tub of paint, perhaps something with which to paint a US battleship. Therein lies the problem; for Grey in Nature, in this way, doesn’t really exist at all. Grey is the result of any relative complimentary colours mixed together and it’s also but a ‘perception’ created by the eye.

Colours are so interconnected in Nature that purity cannot exist because all colours are inherently ‘broken’. Except for colour created from a light prism, in Nature, nothing is ever pure. At dusk, when I work at the beach, colours are a variation of pear grey, peach grey, plum grey or grape grey, and they mutate continually along with all the other colours as they deepen into the colder tones of night.

But during the bright daylight hours, colours are washed out by the strong sun, and being the vampire that I am, this bright intensity is less interesting for me but this it’s a personal thing. Someone like Van Gogh, who worked outdoors in the blazing light of Provence, made sumptuously colourful and vivid pictures. But he was Van Gogh. In his letters to Theo he also wrote eloquently, cogently, about all these issues of Grey, and how it functions in the colour wheel. The rest of us just limp on as best as we can. 

Theoretically, a working painter, over time, should develop an increasingly nuanced understanding around the nature of colour, whether they work out on a motif in Nature, or in a studio. So thus, empirically speaking, the more one works with colour, the more one learns about it, and consequently the more one learns, the better one sees, hopefully.

A painter can bring to a session a mind full of memories and images, or none at all. But what one does bring is embodied in so much of what one has been seeing and painting for many years. Painting as a life’s work is a cumulative endeavour and if one isn’t getting better at looking and seeing, then maybe they should take up needlepoint or just find a new optometrist. 

I know a few wonderful painters whose work, sadly to note, went backwards at the end of their lives by retreating from their youthful originality and innovative greatness that had once possessed them. This happens but it’s unusual. André Derain comes to mind.

I so love his early work as a ‘Fauve’, when he painted alongside Matisse in the early years of the 20th century, and when their paintings 

exploded onto the Art world. It was an original school, a group of unruly and diverse painters that sprang up like wildflowers in the South of France. Sadly, to his detriment, I think Derain lost the bright colours and courageous invention of form after his Fauve period. Later his paintings done in the Var, not far from the colourful world of Cezanne in Aix, Derain somehow retreated into a dull somber place in his pictures as if he had become colorblind. 

A shame, yes, but for me personally, a warning that as a painter, one must remember to always be moving forward like a shark into the unknown ocean, not into the backwaters of the known. As much as I love these afternoon outings to the beach, I am acutely aware of the risk in my own endeavors. I am hopefully mindful that I’ll need a new motif to present itself on the next horizon line to wisk me away to somewhere new and unknown. But that’s for tomorrow. But that said, I am also aware that this study here from last week, might be telling the world that I too might be going backward. Ha. I cannot know this over the short term, I’ll need to ride up higher over the longer arc of this beach series before I know what’s next. I’m on for the long haul, not persuaded by much in the short run.

But I like this study anyway for its sensuous response to a large cloud in full bloom over the horizon line. I also know my own Achilles Heel in this Painting business is that I have a soft spot for creamy sensual textures that evoke the Past. That’s my secret dilemma, one that pulls me continually back to a painting world where an artist indulged in pure pleasure, not carnal but poetic.

Because I see that pictures done like this can go backwards as well as go forwards depending upon both the sky and my mood, I don’t worry too much about it as long as the learning curve gradually moves up and outwards towards an image that is paradoxically thrown up at the canvas board as if from an image projector deep inside my library of desires.

 

Macy’s Day Parade at the beach

5 September 2021

Macy’s Day Parade at the beach

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

I arrived a little late to an already buoyant sky full of colour, and while looking high above me at these expanding clouds I was suddenly filled with a surreal nostalgia at the memory of being a child underneath giant balloons at the Macy’s Day parade in New York. Enchanted all over again, I found my small frame stretching upwards, over and over again in vain, hoping to touch those oversized rubber cartoons that hovered just out of reach. 

And here, years later at the beach, I find the same pneumatic bliss watching clouds mutate from one gentle and friendly form into another. I set up my easel quickly and began work. I made three studies which all began 

brilliantly or so I thought but I lost them just as quickly, one after the next.  

Sadly, left to my own devices, I’ll overwork everything due to my lingering perfectionism still living inside me. “Just one more touch here,,,, there it is!” I think to myself as I work, but then, in no time at all, I find myself still locked in the same picture and searching for a fire escape. When things go badly in a painting I’ll yearn to be anywhere else than to have to complete what I’m working on. Like authors, painters too, need to find endings. And like composers, painters too, must also find resolution through the chaos of harmony.

In this series I’m finally getting a handle on how to stop just at the peak of a painting where brushstrokes are no more and no less. I imagine it must be like the wise comedian who leaves the stage at the peak of applause, or perhaps like they say, the wise cook is he who cuts out the flame before the milk boils. All this because as some bright fellow once said, brevity is the soul of wit.

In any event, this picture was the first one I battled with and had thought ruined, but at least finished. But to my great surprise it doesn’t look half as bad now as it did when I packed it up the other evening. It’s certainly a curious painting, I’ve never done another similar to it though I’ve certainly always wished to. It only took about fifteen minutes and looking at it now, maybe indeed, I did actually find an ending for it. I stopped when I did, and I sense now that it was at the right intuitive place. What else could I have done?

I can also see that there is a light airiness in it which appeals to me. One can come in too heavily when rendering clouds by giving them too much ‘material’ worth, too much ‘weight, as if they were hills or a stony mountain range that recede into the distant sky. But of course, these clouds are made up of gasous vapour and their shapes change pliably in slow motion almost like watching someone do Tai Chi. And most remarkably for the painter, they can change colours almost as quickly as an octopus. 

A side trip to Holland

15 August 2021

 A side trip to Holland

These photos have been sitting on my desktop for the longest time and have been disjointedly staring back at me, all the while filling me with thoughts. What I wanted to express about them is that even in these fractured-looking details, they possess a unity unto themselves. 

I took these close-ups at the National Gallery in London, a place I love hanging around when I’m in town, where else? Just in a few details reveals a whole hidden world of something sacred in a sensual form and both so pleasurable and easily digestible at the same time. Immobile, they hang stationary on the walls yet they entice one like glamorous women at a cocktail party who cruises by without ever looking up, leaving a scent of perfume These silent portraits, it’s as if we’ve been given a peek into a world to which we’ve been forbidden access. 

Somehow, oddly enough, it makes me think of an acorn from an Oak tree. The acorn when dropped off and separated from the tree, if lucky enough, will become another tree. Maybe a bird will scoop it up, fly somewhere, then poop it out on fertile ground somewhere else. But already in that acorn is everything necessary for it to become another tree, virtually identical and new. There is an organic process at work that allows for this to happen for all things in Nature including in the animal world. There is both unity and chaos in Nature, but also in Art too, when it’s really good. 

And just as something in the acorn that understands it will become a tree one day, and so too, did something deep within Vincent Van Gogh, also grasp that he was destined to become a painter. How could it have been otherwise?

So, in each portion of this early portrait there is already a whole expression, complete in pictorial unity. 

I find this fascinating and it’s just one of the many mysteries surrounding Vincent Van Gogh and that’s manifest throughout his work. For me, perhaps the most endearing element of his entire oeuvre is his empathy which he so readily expresses in each and everything he ever created.

He once said in a letter (I forget to whom) “Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how many portraits ought to be done..” 

Like all things Van Gogh, there is still, despite the somewhat awkward illusion, a sense of the unity in these details. Like a few other lucky painters he appears to have been born with an innate understanding of light. In his early portraits done of the peasants of the Borinage region of Belgium he seeks a traditional style of painting from an earlier period, one where light came out from a dark background, most notably in Rembrandt’s style when painters used a dark ground.

That Vincent received such divination is also one of the great miracles in the history of Art. His love for Rembrandt was fundamental to his development and he made endless copies after the Dutch master whom he revered, not only for his exceptional painting abilities but also for the deeply spiritual aspect of Rembrandt’s entire oeuvre. I think Vincent was born with talent as some lucky ones are, but like many artists, he had to fight like a salmon upstream to become a painter. Unlike many lesser artists, his instincts were really good and he developed them by studying really great paintings in museums and in books. Not only did he have a nose for greatness but he studied really hard. He worked, so very diligently, that in today’s world he would be regarded as an over-achiever. He was always at it, which we understand from all of his correspondences. His earliest drawings filled his letters to brother Theo in Paris and revealed a remarkably innate and accomplished talent while he was teaching in London. 

My teacher, Léo Marchutz in Aix, once talked about his own secular divinity regarding Van Gogh in the following manner:

Though he (Léo) was raised as a secular Jew in Nuremberg, I never heard him speak of things either religious or spiritual, and others have confirmed this to me also. By all appearance he was not religious at all, nevertheless, a lot of his own work was centred around the New Testament curiously enough. Léo was speaking to me about Van Gogh one day, specifically just how Vincent, during the last 3 months of his life, had painted a size 30F (92 X 73 cm) picture almost each day in Auvers-sur-Oise, and adding, “if that is not some proof that a spirit, or God, whatever one wants to call it, took hold of this poor man and wrung 90 paintings out of him in this period, one picture a day (at least) right before his death, then I don’t know what to call it”. As usual Leo had a way of understanding things that were both compact and direct.

Castles burning, memory and mayhem

5 April 2021

Castles burning, memory and mayhem

 Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

This was the first of three that much to my surprise came easily the other night. It was a big sky, full of clouds and ablaze likes castles under siege. “All these fireworks going on in the sky like JESUS arriving by chariot” I thought, Whew,,,, So melodramatic, and just the kind of sky I dread, but I set up and waited for it to calm down a little as the sun drooped into the horizon behind me. 

All this went though my head as I set up and stepped gently into this first study. Usually, clouds become malleable as twilight approaches and the sharp edges of everything soften to leave puddles of colour. Hoping that to be the case on this evening, I managed to find a way in and my worries soon left me. This was the first one and it took the longest. The two that followed came easier and by consequence, were maybe less compelling because they required less angst of me, and angst, as any creator knows, can be a great inventer. This reminds me of something Degas once said; “If drawing weren’t difficult, it wouldn’t be fun”. I’m not sure if I ever agreed with this, but never mind, Degas had enough talent to say such a thing. Nonetheless, by the time I had picked up a third canvas board, the sky had become a gentle giant and it allowed me free reign to do as I pleased with it. For a small busy image like this it’s even more vital that everything works fluidly together. All the tiniest threads in a picture like this one must act like lilliputian bridges connecting every bit together. Hopefully, when it’s seen from a distance it looks seamless.

 

This study was the tighter one, the other two are wilder and more free-spirited than this. If I have a reproach, it’s that this may seem to harken back to something that’s already been done somewhere in the past. From where, I don’t know, possibly from Impressionism? But anyway, don’t get me wrong, I like it actually. I can’t even believe that I painted it because I didn’t know I possessed that much patience for this kind of picture. It’s awfully finicky and it’s such a complicated drawing, one that must be done at the speed of light when the colours are mutating at the speed of snails. It’s perhaps more suited to a watercolour than an oil painting, one which most painters would painstakingly prepare in a studio rather than at a windy beach.

Ideally, I would always wish to make pictures with a new angle, as fresh as parsley, just picked from the garden. I’m always looking to surprise myself first, to create a thing not planned for or imagined beforehand. Maybe, it’s akin to an apparition or something I had not yet foreseen in my dreams long before arriving at the beach. I’m always looking for that picture just over the horizon line of my own imagination, a thing not done before by me or anyone else. A tall order, but hey!,.. You gotta have dreams. And being an excellant daydreamer, I’ve learned a ton of how they work. There are whole levels and grades of dreams. Like on a bookshelf, some are readily available within an arm’s reach but on the next shelf a little higher up are placed the bigger dreams that I need to reach up for. But still higher up on the next shelf are dreams possibly attainable with a handy step ladder. Higher still, up on the top shelf and out of reach, are where the unattainable ones reside and stare down at me with sympathy.  

But I know this is all part of how we live our lives. I myself, don’t generally worry about it very often, my focus is always on just the shelf in front of me and in painterly terms, it's  to find some truth in the next image even if I have to steal it from the motif like I’m Prometheus. 

I work way too quickly to worry about being original at the beach and yet there are times when I am more conscious of what I’ve doing on a particular evening, and only then am I able to see it in an chronological context. Where did this come from? Is it new, or interesting? Is it new, but ugly? Is it the same old, same old, maybe, boring, but well constructed? and painted well? I’m always looking for an adventure in these pictures, either exterior (like when I was young) or interior (now that I’m older).

At the end of the proverbial day, it is what it is, and because I cannot control what goes on while working out there, I merely set up and try to find a way into an image, any image. The trick is opening up to an adventure, any kind of adventure. 

My first real adventure one was buying a Triumph Bonneville in London when I was 18, and riding it through Europe to visit museums. This was certainly the biggest adventure I‘ve made, perhaps ever. But then going off to study in France for my junior year abroad was also a big adventure for me, and it’s where I made some wonderful outings in those first years. Everything, I understood later, was like in a film by Eric Rohmer. They were always so understated yet so rich even when little happened. But I was young and thirsty for anything to happen in this new foreign life. Indeed, anything was bound to happen in my imagination because I was in France, a place where are all dreamers come to congregate at some point in their lives.

I remember in my first year in Aix I would often get on a bus going anyway just for the fun of it. Usually it was a Saturday and I was free of class but sometimes on a Sunday too, although those days were quieter and when families were at home and shops were closed. I used to feel a certain spiritual dread on Sundays bicyling aimlessly around town with nowhere to go. Everyone else appeared to have a purpose, a family, a life even. For me, it felt like my own life hadn’t yet started.

I would arrive at the bus depot at the Rotunde in Aix and simply get on the next bus going anywhere under a two hour trip one way. By bus, with a student’s card I went to Marseille, Avignon, Arles, Cassis, several small towns in the Vaucluse, all places I would easily drive to much later in my life. But by bus I was slotting myself into another system outside my control and I suppose that this was what I was subconciously was searching to do, to be out of control.

Occasionally I met people but my French was too halting to share anything interesting. In those days few spoke English. Older people were always the most accessible, but other students too. My only rule was to avoid other Americans because I wanted to learn French. Also, I didn’t want any point of familiarity, I wanted to be on an adventure, everything new, everything strange, whatever came, I was up for it. Youth.

One trip to Avigon was memorable because a trio of high school girls picked me up all wearing the same blue striped Breton sailor’s shirts. We bought a few Pain Bagnats and some fruit, grapes I remember for sure. In the Autumn one always ate grapes in France. We spent a lovely afternoon in a garden somewhere near the Palais des Papes on a cool sunny afternoon with a moderate Mistral blowing. When it became too chilly I said goodbye, and they escorted me to the bus that took me back to Aix. Nice, nothing more but nothing less either. Pure Eric Rohmer.

Some days in some towns, I would hardly speak to anyone, I would wonder around vicariously looking at the buildings. But I always went into churches. They were the most familiar things on the day’s itinerary. Mostly, they were dark and dreary places with the same pungent damp odeur of so many churches I had been in. The paintings too, were dreary and dark. I never stayed long in them. 

Eventually, this sense of spontaneous exploration slowly eroded for me after I began to settle down into painting life there. Lucky are those who still make treks and go hiking to keep it real for them. But after a life of movement, here and now at least for the moment, I prefer the adventure of Painting, the solitary non-ambulatory activity of looking, seeing, mixing colours, and painting with brushes. It’s an inside job, this work.

Because I never carried a camera in those day I have no visual souvenirs to jog my memory and nor did I write in a diary at the time so I am left with just vivid but sparse memories today, fluid and biased from all these years. Now at least, memories are securely stored in these small studies..

Painting is, or should be an adventure into the unknown. It cannot be a painted copy of a photograph (which has its own historical life) nor can it really be anything interesting unless the artist has gotten lost in the process before finding himself to finish it. Gettting lost and finding a way home is a prerequest to an adventure. It has to be an adventure and one cannot, or should not know what the end will be until the end reveals itself. Any musican or writer will confirm this, but thankfully, any dentist or heart surgeon would be aghast at the very thought of this notion regarding their own work. It’s the difference between all these vocations and professions For artists should never really be too certain where they are going. But if you think the surgeon cannot explain what he’s going to do to you, then jump out of that operating room as fast as you can.

God’s skin, hope and desire

30 July 2021

God’s skin, hope and desire

  Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 July 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

I was looking at this picture from the other night and suddenly realised that I had finally come close to an image that fulfilled my deepest wish in this painting racket. At the same time, I also came to understand that it may only please a small portion of the world at large, but hey! Every artist secretly hopes their work will resonate with even just a few people. Is this not also a painter’s right? 

Chilly, chilly south winds arrived a few days ago. I had a few really delicious sessions this past week, and increasingly I feel like I’m getting somewhere new. Many of these skies are so delicate that I often treat them with lightly scrubbed washes to ensure their luminosity. It’s something of a throwback to my early days when I was under the spell of Cezanne. But recently, I see that I am ‘lathering them up’ like a barber might do for his clients. I’m using more paint at the same moment and it’s changing the way I deal with my understanding of light. 

Now, I admit, as a habit, I will sometimes leave just a fragment, a scintilla of virgin white on the canvas board to indicate the brightest part of the ‘picture light’ as a whole. This is a nod again to Cezanne. It completes one half of that notion that came out of the Renaiassance in Italy known as Chiaroscuro. Despite it’s rather ancient connotation, it still aptly defines what drawing is, but not necessarily how it works.

Isn’t it curious how Cezanne can be found in the same breath as this idea from the sometime sombre Renaissance? When one thinks of him one thinks of such brilliant light and one so unlike the light that came up as if out of the crypt of a black ground in a 15th century studio. My habit of leaving the palest of spaces to highlight the brightest spot in a picture isn’t just an empty nod to Cezanne but an ingrained habit that I would be hard pressed to give up, it’s an intuitive habit for me now after so many years. So lately, when I say that I’m using more paint it implies a subtly different way of designing the light in a painting because I’m actually now starting with the light of the picture ‘chiaro’, in great contrast to many years ago when in the landscape I always began with the dark accents, the ‘scuro’. It’s the light of the sea, so radically different than a landscape painted in the interior that has changed my approach to a picture. Today, I’m able to come in with thick creamy brushstrokes of pale light at the very start of the picture. 

I remember a story about, (who else today, but Cezanne). Apparently, when he was painting still lives, (apples, and pears?) but maybe also portraits too, he would place a black top hat on one side of the sitter and a white glove on the other. He worked excruciatingly slow, so slowly, he claimed his eyes would ‘bleed between brushstrokes’. The purpose of the top hat and the white glove was to remind him of the extreme limits of black to white in Nature, night to light, hence, Chiaroscuro.  

This picture here, was the last of three studies from several days ago and as I said previously, I feel that it embodies that ephemeral, flat quality I’ve been after here in this series yet strangely, at the begining of this series how I could I even know that? That evening was much like many others except that at the end of the session these planes of colour had flattened out serenely in an orderly fashion just the way I like. Although it’s rare that any sky conforms to my wishes this phenomenon manifests not so infrequently here. This peachy pink sky reminds me of a French market on Saturday mornings when apricots and peaches, pears, and plums, all exhibit a textural colour so close to what I was loading up on my paintbrush for this picture. 

Again, looking at this pale sky from a few nights ago, also makes me think of a small anecdote from a book entitled, The Memory of Fire Trilogy, by the wonderful historian, poet, and Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. He wrote that when the Conquistadors arrived in Central and South America, they had naturally brought the bible with them and tried to convert the local people living there. When they showed it some of the local Indigenous tribes there was general astonishment. When they caressed the thin pale paper while holding it up to the sun, they declared to their conquerors that it was the ‘skin of god’. 

Though it came to me many years before my obsession began with this sky here in Oceania, I’ve never forgotten this description. It must have been in the back of my mind all these years. But it was even rarer for me to approach this metaphor until a picture like this comes up in a session and depicts such fragile, delicate light as if I’m painting a butterfly’s wing.

Finding the Renaissance term of Chiaroscuro in this small modernist painting is likely to be a bit of work, but I assure you, don’t be fooled by the pale apricot hues, for the light in this sky is tethered firmly in place by the deep dark sea.