Lost and Found @ Marcel Proust

2 April 2021

Lost and Found @ Marcel Proust 

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

Here is the first of three pictures from the other evening; this one of large lumbering clouds as thick as a family of polar bears huddling all together, is lit up as if with theatre lights of soft pink and yellow that glowed like stage scenery, and on this evening, the cloud bank resembles an arrangement of giant peonies. The sky was just beginning to turn and I was hopeful for a few studies.

Lately, I’ve been reading letters from Marcel Proust to his upstairs neighbor on the Blvd Hausseman in Paris. This correspondence makes up a book translated from the French by the clever Lydia Davis. Reading this small volume is easy, like taking a short cut through the thick forest of Swann’s Way which I read in English after failing to get through it in French many years earlier. It had rested dutifully on my bedside table like a medicine too arduous to swallow despite knowing it would heal me. I gave up after about fifty pages because I was and still am, somewhat weak-willed under the weight of a French paragraph. But years later, I find myself here in Australia, far enough away from the limelight of heady distraction, yet thirsty for Paris all the same, so I tried again in English with the lively translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis. This time around I read leisurely as one really should.

But this small unique book of unusual banter is a warm surprise for any fan of Marcel Proust. It’s a concise collection of mostly trivial and anectodal musings that move at a sprightly pace. Curiously, we do not have any of his neighbor’s letters written back to him but this could actually be a good thing because after all, who wants to be in the ring with Mike Tyson?

I really like these letters because he gets to the point quickly whilst never losing that loitering visual style, as descriptive, as it is long. Lke his cousin Henry James across the ocean, Marcel Proust could also go on, and on, and on. One either loves him for it, or quits. I sometimes wondered myself whether or not I would become trapped in it, flattened between pages and lost forever like an artic explorer. 

There are many hardy readers who make it through all seven volumes, and I am faint with admiration. On Reddit I found a reader who went through the whole set in a year reading ten pages a day. They made it sound like a long journey with beautiful vistas and stunning mountain ranges but also boring empty plateaus that go on for hundreds of miles. Other readers describe how it brought them closer to God. But in any event, it is an event! it’s an adventure in artistic stamina for both the writer and all the rest of us who trail behind like a mass of marathoners through all the borroughs of NY. The artist in this case gave it his all, just like Nadal and Federer, and Van Gogh and Gauguin, though the latter two never saw the prize money. But we the readers give it our all too. Without the real lovers of art there would be empty museums.

I don’t want to go too far astray in all this but just so you know, lots of people have been also eaten up by all sorts of art work in museums and lovely homes everywhere. Like long novels there are also innumerable, over-sized, and intricate pictures into which intrepid amateurs of painting visit on a regular basis like it’s dialysis treatment.  I can think of artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegal, the elder, whose large pictures take some of us on journeys from which we never return at least in the same psychic state. And again as I always have to ask; isn’t this what art is for? One might need to be a brave soldier to make art but to love it requires a hallowed heart I think.

For me, when I think of reading Proust, I often imagine that I’m watching long thin sculls from the edge of a river bank gliding effortlessly through glassy water, each crew moving in a languid precision and slicing the water like a butter knife. It can be hypontising just to watch as time seems to switch off. And this too is about Painting or any creative act I’m sure. Can the painter and viewer both give up the stopwatch long enough to allow the work to meander freely on its own accord? Can one let go and have faith that they’ll be scooped up towards the end of their artistic endeavour and be delivered safely home again yet some place different? 

What I also loved when reading Swann’s Way was that I felt like was on a luxurious ocean liner of long ago, like I was taking a year off to see the world through the lens of 1st class life. But the same time, I also parachuted into the pages of the slow luxuriant and idle world of Hans Castorp living high up in the Swiss alps. Both protagnists lived parallel lives but one searched for the meaning of life through illness, the other through pleasurable romantic indolence.

But here, in the 21th century, our lives seem to have sped up so quickly that many of us can no longer sit still. It’s like we haven’t yet learned that an easy cadence is not just reserved for the wealthy but also for those who seek out refuge in an oasis of art. Marcel Proust has taught me emphatically that at least in the imagination of my mind, there is a vast landscape, indeed continents to explore in just painting alone, and it can be done at a leisurely pace. We can (we must) put aside our smart phones and such, even temporararly, if we truly desire to find some peace away from a relentlessly invasive news cycle. I know, from experience.

Of course, no matter how much they like to complain, it’s so much easier being wealthy. What do they say Time is Money? So theoretically, the more the money, the more the time. To use all this time to get lost in any form of art is a worthy cause I think, but I’m biased of course. Ironically, the Rich of today seem to love the frenetic pace of working more to make even more money. In yesteryear, of course, they possessed all the time in the world because basically they could afford to. But they could afford to, because everyone else was running around below deck to make sure that enough coal was shovelled into the giant steam engines propelling this affluent life they lived. How else could the Grand Bourgeoisie calmly repose in chaise-lounges on the decks of so many boats drifting toward the 1st World War?  

Left to their own devices, Proust also reminds us continuously just what busy-bodies the Grand Bourgeois were really like. Today, in contrast, the wealthy fly faster, and higher in their private jets, and they seem to love making more and more deals. Are they any less insecure?  Do they reside in a state of calm curiosity? Boy, I certainly hope so, but what I read about them in the NYT, I kind of doubt it. Suddenly, all this makes me think of the marvellous story by Eugene O’Neill that I loved in school, The Hairy Ape. 

But again, back here on mortal earth, and again in this surreal 21st century, it’s been a strange few days recently, I occasionally slip into that French ‘existential angst’ for no real apparent reason. Life is pretty good despite COVID. I’m getting a lot done in the Painting world and my piano study always improves and gives me joy. But it occurred to me that all this might be because I live a life of solitude. There are days that slip by me when I realise that I haven’t had a converstion with anyone else. I’m reading a contemporary book, Orphic Paris, a kind of diary by the poet Henry Cole, who resides in Paris. On one of the first pages is just one quote by Verlaine: “A man alone is in bad company”.  Should I worry?

A painter gets it right or dies

   

12 September 2021

A painter gets it right or dies

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

I remember pulling this study from the boot of my car the other day to bring it into the house and when I quickly looked at it, I thought to myself, “Once in a great while, a painter gets it right.”

It was an early Spring afternoon with a slight fresh breeze and a few people up and down on the on the beach. This was the first of four painted from one of those hazy soft skies, the kind that gently obscures the pale clouds at the very end of the day. When I arrived to set up, I had noticed this small, raspy orange trace of sunlight that appeared to be glued onto the delicate sky and just ready to be painted. Then I remember thinking before putting these brushstrokes down, specifically in these words:  “YOU’RE GONNA STUFF THIS UP!” 

One doesn’t get a second chance when one stuffs up such a fragile image like this, but if one does, they must keep going until another solution is found. In these paintings from the beach, I personally hate going further into an image just because of mistakes I must try to fix. It means reconfiguring the picture completely into something else as I've already noted many times in here. It usually works out well but some images I really, really like so much that I don't want to hurt it. It's like licking an ice cream cone that you want to keep forever. Invariably though, you do what you have to do and accept that it becomes a different painting for better or worse.  

So in this one, I still took a long pause momentarily before putting down these small whispers of orange just as I imagined seeing them. There was no space for thought, just intuitive movements like those made by an excited child. The picture was done in about fifteen minutes. 

Writers always talk about the ‘crumby first draft’, and I always think to myself: Boy are they ever lucky, because a painter who works like me doesn’t have the luxury of a first draft. He must get it right or go off to suffer an ignoble death in some dark hole in the ground. Eventually though, he'll rise again like Lazarus and return to fix it, finding the courage to turn it into into something completely different. One needs not only a lot of talent or grit for this sort of thing but divine intervention too. As I noted a week or two ago, only the Dutch were very good at this sort of thing but they’re now dead. 

Anyway, I've sort of come to appreciate these obstacles because left to my own devices I might be just churning out sweet sunset images for a Hawaiian calendar. 

I've learned to be flexible late in life even though they say the opposite is true for older guys. But at least in this painting gig I'm able to adapt to the circumstances quicker than ever before. So, in every painting session, even though I know I’m not cool  or calm enough to be a poker player, I've learned to adjust to the next situation. Naturally, this helps in every corner of life, but in these quick images at the beach it's especially fortuitous to be nimble. 

What I really like about this small study is the complete unity of expression, a feeling as if the motif were both seen and felt all at once, ingested even through my imagination and then gently exhaled upon this modest canvas board with the light touch of a magic wand.  

One cannot see the thought process involved in its fabrication for it was hidden even from the painter. It makes me think of how much I appreciate the frank conviction of a child’s painting, one which originates in their spontaneous imagination, only to then be pushed out with sudden glee. 

This is one of the most fragile images to come out of this series. 

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9 September 2021

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Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

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

But I like this study because of its extreme simplicity. I try so hard to bring oxygen to these things, but even more, to bring life to images that border upon the Non-Objective painting. Like graffiti at a stop sign, it seems to casually say; “take me or leave me, I don’t care either way”. But if there is integrity hidden beneath this gentle irreverence then hopefully there might also be an allegiance to this motif, one through abstraction, that is loyal to both form and colour.  

Nature can appear so banal at times that we can too often take it for granted. One needs to alive with a vivid imagination to fully experience Nature. In fact, We need to be slapped in the face with the raw power of it from time to time. Sadly though, it's usually when  we've fallen from a rock face and feel the rushing air filter through our whole frightened body before dying upon the rocks below. 

But this 'experiencing of Nature' also comes in all forms; from silent tea ceremonies in lush bamboo forests to climbing Mount Everest. Still, many go further, by leaping from tall cliffs with winged suits. But on the other extreme, a few of us just paint on a dune at the beach which, on a safety scale, is  about .000, so actually, I'm amazed that more of us don't engage in this risk-free activity.   

There are those however who do not have the regular habit of being amazed by this vibrant world that surrounds us. Have they forgotten how to be naked in spirit? I think every child starts out in life dazzled by the world around them yet sadly many of them lose that awe too early on, even though undoubtedly, many also re-connect with it later on. I like to believe that at least the poets and painters are among the hikers, and skiers, and all the Naturalists, who cherish Nature, and show the rest of us new ways of experiencing it. 

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

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

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

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

In this painting, the ultra simple design is a visual metaphor of the sea and sky under certain weather conditions at a very particular time of day. If its craft is sufficient, then it has a chance of working. If not, then it fails for any number of reasons. Like John Banville’s remark about the crows outside his window, a painter might ask a viewer to imagine the sea at dusk in just a few parallel stripes of colour.

  

 

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.