Ominous skies, cautious times

17 March 2020

Ominous skies, cautious times

             Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 May 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In this time of uncertainty there is nothing better than to keep painting. This picture, as someone noted to me, looks as ominous as the nightly news. A Southerly swept in today like a witch. This study does indeed feel a bit ominous but it has nothing to do with anything except how the motif appeared to me the other night. No need to add more dark drama than necessary these days. I like it because it speaks of a moment at the beach when a turbulent sky roared in overhead within minutes and left me frantically trying to pin it down before the rains came. When a picture refers to a particular space of time and mood, no matter how sloppy or rough-looking, it has at least a small chance at authenticity. I guess for that I like it enough.

And roaring in like a storm over Europe is the new virus where cases are cropping at an alarming rate. In Lombardy Italy, in particular, old people are dying in hospitals and apartments all over the city and people everywhere hysterical. They are talking of lockdowns whereby people cannot leave their homes. A friend in Milan is as petrified as a friend in East Sussex UK. I suppose it was inevitable that a pandemic would eventually arrive upon the world scene. Here too, cases of this new virus are popping up everywhere. What to do? Keep painting, I think to myself. Life, like a making picture, has an unknown end.  

Prometheus

19 July 2019

Prometheus 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

So now after two years of working from this beach motif I begin to understand it a little better, and yes, even respect it. In a quaint sort of way I may even worship it. It’s not a curse like Ahab’s pursuit of his Moby Dick, just more of a divine puzzle that beckons me further and further into its secret labyrinth of misty colours each night. Will I ever arrive? Not likely, but I’m getting closer to something in myself, and isn’t that why we paint?  

Chilly nights! I’ve been making a fire each evening with some wood I recovered from a neighbor who had a large pile of fence posts. She kindly offered them to me and I quickly realised that it’s a hard Eucalyptus and very heavy. It only takes four or five small pieces in the stove to keep the house cozy for a whole night. And it’s a marvel to watch.

This picture came easily the other night. It had been a pristine sky all day long so I was hoping for a great big Bloom which did arrive but was sadly cut short due to the full moon which killed it. I had set up quickly in the still chill on my small dune and jumped into this painting, the only one of the night. 

I deftly worked the surface like a cosmetic surgeon, patiently working my brush into rich peachy colours and stretching whole sections until I found an even harmony, always attentive to the overall effect of its proportions. 

But unlike the surgeon, I wasn’t interested in superficial beauty, I was after the true character beneath all the pretty colours on the surface. It appears unusually fragile, like the scent of orange blossoms wafting through my window in the evening breeze. Looking at it now I'm surprised to see an air of impermanence in it, something I couldn't see the other night when packing up. As everyone knows, (or will soon find out in due time) Beauty is short-lived, but being an artist, or just creative, is the one way to short-circuit Nature. Though many try nips, lifts, and tucks, Mother Nature will have her way with us towards the end. But there is a solution. Align yourself with Art in any of its forms, for therein lies the truth of eternal beauty. One can vicariously bypass the whole system by simply just being creative. My unsolicited advice to anyone who panics over losing, either their youth, or beauty, is to go visit any large museum and see for yourself what it is, this timeless thing we call Art.

And when I use the word beauty, I refer to John Keats in his poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn whose last two lines are the following:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."   

So, I packed up in the dark the other night and hung around a while waiting for the moon to rise over the black horizon. On the beach around me, the 'Moonies' were arriving despite the chill. They were scattered about with blankets and anxiously awaiting the moon's arrival. Like everywhere, these full moons at the beach are always a big deal around here and they seem to bring out the pagan in us all. 

There were maybe a hundred people milling around in between lots of happy dogs and children all darting about. I noticed a pod of about twenty people huddled together at water's edge, their tiny phones were lit up and flashing randomly like fireflies. But when a speck of orange moon suddenly appeared on the horizon line, all the small white lights began rotating in unison making large circles as the moon rose heroically over the sea. I thought it was something one might see at the Paris Opera. 

On most nights here, even in the dead of winter, this fragile twilight is offered up freely to anyone who wants it here at the beach. And me, like Prometheus, I get to steal it from the Gods each night.

Needs another title

14 June 2019

needs another title

        Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

“Truth is in Nature, and I shall prove it.”

Paul Cézanne

And so declared the man who re-invented Painting after so many sluggish centuries in Europe. Nowadays, I know that art students today wouldn’t go near him because he is a relic from the Paleozoic age. Even me, as a young painting student 50 years ago thought he was slightly Palaeolithic yet when I found myself living in the luminous hills of Provence I was suddenly awakened to his age-old truth.

Art trends today move easily through our elite culture at the speed of the light, so even now, I’m not sure what is the latest fashion but I will declare for myself that painting as a craft will never die out. It may evolve into a myriad of forms; ‘non-objective’, ‘abstract’, what-have-you, but it will survive forever as long as people still need to express themselves in paint. One only has to walk into a children’s art class to see it’s force.

 

But what I really wanted to say is that Nature is almost always misunderstood in this context of Painting. It is most especially so in our time. What does Cezanne mean when he says that ‘truth is in Nature’? What can we learn from it, and does it have any value for us as painters today?  

For me, Like all Art, Painting is always about relationships. Put simply, how do all the parts connect with each other in a picture? Is there a light that holds everything in place? Do colour harmonies clash with errant mayhem? Or with serendipitous intent?? What creates form in a picture? Is there a kind centrifical force tht holds everything in place? With this affirmation, Cezanne asks me these questions in order for me to sort out on my own work, not to copy Cezanne because all really great paintings also evoke these questions for us all. But I had help with this by looking at lots of different painters. From Paolo Uccello to Giorgio Morandi, to even Jackson Pollack. In my early years I learned that Painting is always about how different parts relate to the whole of a picture. And if so, light, or luminosity, must be an important glue. Then I learned by trial and error that Form was held in place by light as if by a central magnet.

It is often said that we like children’s painting efforts because they have a natural and unadulterated sense of colour and design. In a square or rectangle shape, a child intuits its spatial limitations and will include everything that is needed, arbitrarily or not. If they go overboard and fill up a picture with too many items and forgetting the sun, no problem! They’ll place it in wherever it fits. No drama.There is an order in the disorder, but naturally so. A young child generally makes a harmonious and natural unity with elements he/she has collected from seeing and watching the visible world. The child re-creates reality from memories that have been processed and stored like it’s their favourite foods. Of course, I have know scientific research to back any of this up, but it seems true from my own experience of watching kids paint. 

Also, and without any evidence to prove my point, I think most kids at a certain age seem to get this idea of how the parts make a whole picture. I think they also naturally possess natural and uncontrived sense of colour harmony. Sadly though many eventually lose it over time when they begin to conform to a conventional reality imposed by others, sometimes even by the teachers. The relationships aren’t just rocket science but rocket fuel, because when a painter understands this as an adult, they are as free as a young child again, and ready to set off to explore Nature and Art like a tourist.This time around they might even have an old map from childhood to help them navigate their intuition. 

I suddenly bring up all this because of this picture from a few nights ago. It is maybe the most childish picture I’ve done since elementary school, and I love it for that. Maybe the other night I was just lucky to feel free and foolish enough to forget all these pesky things I’ve learned about Painting over my lifetime. One not only needs to paint foolishly at times but be fool enough to think they can paint at all. I can still be so uptight! Honestly, I have often felt like a prison guard watching over myself, and it’s something I’ve really hated about myself for years. When I see painters who let go wildly, and though I may not like their work, I can feel envious.

But in this study, the sky had slipped into a mass of bright red-violet like I had cut open a beetroot and shredded it for my evening salad. The sea mirrored it even if I gave it a more earthy-looking tone. It’s quite wonky, but the effect of the whole thing as a complete unit must have been really strong for me to have come up with this. As child-like as it is, it is truthful to the motid the other night because I was lucky enough to find a way into the picture and make it all work as if in parallel logic. This is what the child in me painted, left to my own devices. 

So when Cezanne speaks about truth being in Nature, I also understand him to mean that as I work from a motif out in Nature, I allow myself to be guided by my eyes, garnering all the necessary information I need to create an image that suits my own imagination. In my own case, the colour harmonies here at the beach are also spelled out clearly in the motif at a specific time of day, so I only need follow them as the sun I drops at dusk. However all these elements may work out in the motif, it’s in the picture, where everything must also work, through the sacrifice of unnecessay elements that impede the pictorial image as a whole unit. Nature feels less like a dictionary and more like a thesaurus, one full of choices to suit the painter’s moment and temperment in front of a motif. When it works, it’s quite fabulous. I’m able to reconnect with a faithful reliance upon my own style which was developed originally when I was still a child.

Handshake with the past

6 May 2019

Handshake with the past

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

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

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

In any event, an image like this possesses a kind of ‘hybrid nature’ reminding me of the confusion that lurks in my mind about the nuanced fluctuations between past memories and these present sensations when painting.

It's the immediacy of the moment, yet at the same time, a handshake with the past. One in the present moment, the other, a compilation of all the images I’ve ever seen and loved, as if stored on a flash drive of visual memories. 

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

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

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

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

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

The anguish and delight of the lighthouse keeper

 

27 March 2020

The anguish and delight of the lighthouse keeper

              Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 March 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 

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

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

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

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

Menu du Jour

 

4 May 2018

Menu du jour

       Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 May 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“Everything you can imagine is real” said Pablo Picasso. I had never heard of this quote before and I only came acoss it recently. Even if I don’t completely understand it, I rather like it somehow, but only if I could be sure that I really understood it. In any case, it’s worthy of investigation. If true, wouldn’t it get to the very heart of Art? But if it doesn’t, couldn’t it equally take us all down the road to madness? And what is the function of ‘can’ in this phrase? Does it add anything?

Today, there are just way too many crazy people in our world to take this remark at face value because delusion seems to be on the menu du jour, I will simply clarify for myself, that Art deals in fiction, while Science and History must invariably deal in fact. 

Roughly one hundred years ago when Picasso made this remark, I presume that he was referring to the Art world almost exclusively. But Art has evolved so radically since then, broadening out like a tsunami and washing over the entire 20th century. Today, Post-Modernism still casts its shadow over our open landscape; cultural politcal and artistic. 

I understand what he means in the simplest of terms. As a painter, I get it. So did a fanciful painter like Bosch, and though separated by centuries, Picasso seems to say: “Imagine something in your mind, then create it.” It’s not too complicated, but not always easy to grasp either. As a slogan though, it’s pithy, and indeed challenging, speaking directly to the mind of any creative person. He says; imagine it, then do it, like Nike says on its billboards. 

I hate to be so pendantic, but being an American today, obliges me to note that it’s crucial to remember that Picasso was referring exclusively to things artistic, not cultural or poiltical if I understand him. In a roundabout way, Picasso’s observation helped to contributed to the conspiracy theories with which we now live with today. My response is to turn my back on it all and keep painting in my own small corner of the universe. 

This image from two evening ago is rather unconventional, perhaps unpalatable for those looking for the reassurance of reality in a photographic sense of the term. My pictures on the whole don’t seem to neatly fit on the shelves of the Art world because they are often either too ‘abstract’ for some but not ‘real’ enough for others. If I thought too much about this dillema I’d be in a pickle, so I choose to just keep forging ahead. This small study is a curious thing and it speaks to a child within me who is direct. I can feel those gaseous clouds breathing life into the surrounding sky. From the beach, I remember that they appeared to be large inflated creatures from my own childish imagination all rotating rhythmically in a kind of pneumatic bliss. And like a child, I painted them quickly without hesitation. So thus, it begs the question: Is this small painting imagined? Or is it real? And does it matter?

I think it was certainly a real experience for me while painting it. Certainly, the child from long ago imagined it thus because otherwise I wouldn’t have painted it in the way I did. Unlike a procedural painter who plans the process out in advance, this kind of painting I make here at the beach has no concrete plan. My only wish for any of these pictures is for my subconscious imagination to align with an understanding of my craft during sensorial session. It’s never guaranteed but indeed, practice, though never really perfect, can be really insightful for the artist. When a session painting comes to life within minutes of beginning work, then it’s a prayer of sorts. Is that what Picasso meant? 

Tolstoy at sea

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 August, 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

                      Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 August, 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm     

    
 

After what feels like a long absence from work I managed to get back to my small space last week for a few sessions. I brought a saw to trim some loose branches around the 'studio' which I've carved out of the mess left from the cyclone three months ago. Trees died and needed to be cut away from this little perch of mine now on a small cliff above the beach. It's only about three metres but feels higher. It will take a few years for the sand dunes to recover so until then I'll look like Gandalf to the beach walkers below.

I was happy with what I managed to come away last week. A few lovely blooms appeared and gave me something to easily work with. I think the top one came second as dusk began to settle in. I'm heartened that after a long hiatus I still see something worth painting. I'm glad I still find it an interesting investigation. It's not drudgery or boring for me as I was afraid that it might feel. In the end, it's still a great therapy session for me because I find that I have an uneasy truce with the world in this time. I know I'm not the only one.  

But hey! We're all stuck in this together. Some with deeper despair than others. 

Time to get back to Tolstoy, a great writer and a marvel of humanism. I picked up one of my favourite novellas by him, his very last book entitled The Forged Coupon. I've read it dozens of times over the years and it amazes me each time. The only difficulty is remembering all the various character's long Russian names. 

I marvel at the sobriety of the prose. Its clear-cut narrative moves smoothly through the story like an elite marathon runner. There is nothing redundant nor out of place, it's about as perfect a story as can be. If only painting could be that simple. 

Whether one builds an automobile, a laptop, a home, or an etching, merit in art always comes from a maximum number of relationships. When everything works together seamlessly there is the possibility for excellence. My paintings may not be excellent or great, but in them there is an aspiration for it. That is enough for any artist I think, because an artistic life is a long one full of possibilities. 

Green Dolphin street

12 February 2019

Green Dolphin street

      Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 February 2019, oil on canvas board, 20 X 25 cm

This whole week I’ve been listening to Green Dolphin Street, the iconic piece written by Bronislaw Kaper, but made famous by Miles Davis. It’s a beautiful melody and I’ve been fooling around with it on the piano. Like an infectious pop song it’s kind of been living inside me for days. 

Last year when I got back into practicing regularly, I realised that I was falling in love with the piano again. For decades now I’ve had an on and off again relationship with it. Poor thing, she’s so loyal, and for some crazy reason after all this time she still loves me like a Yellow Lab. But like a Don Juan, I’m always looking over my shoulder at the shinier objects out in life and I drop her for years at a time. Full of remorse, I always return to her every few years with an increased passion and my tail between my legs in shame. Like any love affair, it requires discipline but forgiveness too. I had always imagined that I could pick up music with ease like I saw everyone else doing it without putting in the work. But fortunately, as with all my relationships, I did eventually grow up and I learned to listen more carefully. Gradually, I’ve found more harmony in all my affairs, inanimate and otherwise. Therapists would have a field day with a guy like me. 

But contrary to the Painting world where I must usually draw something over and over again until drudgery reaches dedication, the piano nudges me quickly into immediate delight with its sonorous repetitions and its tentacles of a loving God, not the whip of a ruthless Pharoah. To compare the two art forms isn’t difficult despite their distinct differences. 

They both share a giant universe in which harmonies explore distant galaxies of emotion. If a drawing is a musical idea, then harmony would be the home within which it lives. And if harmony is about how colour relationships interact with one another, then melody would certainly be the drawing which gives it structure. How important it is to have a great melodic line? Most musicians will tell you that it’s everything, for without it, one might swim in a sea of feeling, seemingly forever in bliss.

There are wonderful composers who take us on long voyages by just going back and forth between two different chords changes. 

On the other hand, there are boatloads of sensual paintings out there which are full of wonderful colour harmonies yet lacking in drawings firm enough to hold them upright. So, although they may deliver great feeling, one could also drown in them before getting back onto solid ground.  

Without a drawing, a painting can go anywhere, or nowhere, all at the same time too. It’s the painter’s choice. If nowhere is interesting, then sure, why not? Personally, I think it would be hard over the long haul to ignore the need of drawing (which is really a pedestrian word for Form). Form is a thing, Formless is no thing, and it’s virtually impossible to render. I, myself, despite my pedantic going on about it, love the whole idea of nothing but I haven’t yet figured out a way to give it a form. There are however, many successful artists who have, and they flit about the edges of both these ideas with great success and long happy careers. But for myself, I think that over the long haul, like for a 747, cracks would eventually appear in the body of work. 

This very small study came from an overcast afternoon a few days ago. Critically speaking, I’m not sure what to think of it, but I like its overall feeling. It speaks to a particular kind of cloudiness that ressembles the worn stone floor of a church, cold and clammy and nothing like the hot muggy Australian afternoon when it was conceived. It had been cloudy all day but as can often happen towards dusk, clouds lift up just enough to reveal the Prussian Blue backdrop before nightfall. 

An image like this also reminds me why I never use black paint while out here at the sea (which surprisingly, btw, lots of people do). I don’t use it because even just the tiniest bit it on a palette can infect the luminous nature of an overcast sky behind which the sun hides, but still also pulsates with colour.