Dreams and reality on Chesil Beach

16 February 2023

Dreams and reality on  Chesil Beach

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 February 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

There are lots of people who find more reality in works of fiction than in non-fiction and I’m one of them. I wonder all the time about how this understanding relates to Painting. I’ve just finished On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan which I really liked. I came to him late so it’s no surprise that I’ve only just discovered his novel, a copy of which I plucked off the bookshelf recently whom a friend had gifted me years back.

So I finally got around to reading it, and as they say, better late, than never. But I’ve been late to so many things in life that I’m not surprised. I’ve been late to many other authors, but late to many musicians and composers too, even late to a few painters as well. But I’ve been so late to other key parts of my life; late to discipline and hard work, but also, just late to work, period. And I’ve been too late to love, but now I’m way past my expiration date on that one as well. But significantly, I arrived much later than I would have liked at sobriety’s front door. In any event, I’m not alone, for there are lots of other latecomers like me who show up to life like we would at the cinema and miss the beginning but stay till the end, even through all the credits.

But in this life, there also just are too many no-shows as well, because life is really hard after all. It’s could be a long or a short distance, this life, depending upon so many factors. It’s a complicated and rugged terrain between our birth and death. There are just too many cracks that can swallow us up whole. Even under the best of circumstances when life starts out well for some of us, all bundled up in a cute pram off Regents Park. Storms can pass through too easily sweeping many of us unlucky ones into the gutters of King’s Cross later on. There are also late bloomers, and late doomers too, who spend their adult lives teetering on the edges of bar stools or tipsy on comfy divans off Park Avenue. But for way too many poor souls around the world, life begins and ends on a dusty barren bit of land in the middle of nowhere. Who can say where any choices have been made, freely or otherwise? But however one awakens to this great reality which some call God but others like me, just call just call sanity, it’s still all quite varied and deeply mysterious the more one ages. Some say that God is the mystery, and that only through mystery can we know God. Why not? Others, like the Sufis who say: “When one calls out to God, God comes running”, so even if I don’t believe in a religious God, I like both of these adages. But then many of us, for one reason or another, and regardless of our age, we never awaken to any sort of mystery at all but sleep through life, most of them consciously or not. For me, being a painter, that is a shame, regardless, for life nonetheless, seems to be a great parade. For a long time I used to watch it from the sidewalk while secretly wanting to be part of it.

But inspite of my somnombolic habit, like everyone else, I love really good authors, not the cheap-reads, but the ones who take us to an existential space where we can be confronted with this great parade of reality, one where we all fall down and try get up again. This is the creative space of art where imagination both creates and disrupts, and where authors (and painters) show us how they too, fell down and how they got up again. This for me is where invention turns life into fiction, then art. 

So from the very first page of this intimate book by Ian McEwan, I was transported back in time, to a Britain I could not have known. McEwan has the gift of narration, and not unlike a great painter, a love for detail and mood, for it’s a postcard of postwar Britain. 

He paints a picture of a complicated and unified order that is on the verge of a social collapse. I had seen lots of great British films, the edgier ones from the 40’s and 50’s that foretold the social unrest of the 60’s to come, but I had not read too many books about it. The 60’s in every way, was the collision of several great forces that challenged the social order. The usual suspects were all involved: politics, economics, and culture, which all collided to spearhead a tsunami of changes. Painting of course, also changed dramatically like everything else, as it went POP! This isn’t my favorite artistic movement, but hey! I much prefer the collective hives of figuration practiced by painters around Britain and running parallel to POP. These were painters who stuck with figuration and pushed it into darker places that appeared to mirror some of the films at the time that spoke to the social and economic upheaval in Britain. Personally, I like many of them like; Leon Kossoff, Frank Auberbach, Francis Bacon, Josef Herman, Shiela Fell and Eva Frankfurther. But on a brighter tone, and partly POP, at least in his beginnings, was Howard Hodgkins. The famous David Hockney’s art work naturally went full sunshine when he went to live in California. And why not? It’s no fun being bleak, I know that from personal experience. 

In the world of Painting, like a work of fiction, a narrative is equally important because it’s about how content (idea) is transformed into a picture, hence my issue with POP ART. Is it through style or technique? Does it lay-in-waiting deeply inside a painter’s soul for the right pictorial idea to surface at some point in his or her life? Is it too obvious to ask to what degree does our upbringing and surroundings mould us, as either writers or painters, or anything else for that matter?

I suddenly think of Guernica, Picasso’s grand oeuvre and plea to the world about suffering and the terror of war. It’s subject is specific and it’s Cubist style is employed adroitly to convey the subject matter with authenticity. It’s why it is is still around and people flock to see it though it has not changed an iota. A painter’s problem is always about how to recreate a visual world that is conveyed through an authentic voice to the viewer. And how does a painter render all this specificity of detail but at the same time avoid bogging us all down with tedium? How did Picasso create a theme of war that lives so generously in a grand operatic space like Guernica when he was actually living in Paris at the time? The answer to this his ferociously fertile imagination. 

Ian McEwan, on the other hand paints his British social landscape with the eyes of Chardin, full of details that dazzle the reader and place us firmly on the soil of Interwar Britain in a tightly spun visual form of verisimilitude in such great contrast to a picture like Guernica.

Like McEwan, a good painter depicts the visible world at large by first pulling it all apart only to piece it back together again through abstract means uniquely personel to the painter’s style like Piccasso at his best. When re-assembled through the device of sacrifice, he hopes it will be whole and fresh by the end of the process. The result is not a copy but an entirely new and believable world for the rest of us to imagine for ourselves. So like with a painterly skill, Ian McEwen also pulls me into his pictorial drama immediately within barely a few sentences, as if with just his few brushstrokes. I was taken in by the authenticity of his 1960’s much the same way that as I’m pulled into Picasso’s topsey-turvey world of horror in the late 1930’s. Both equally speak to me. 

And what is it about truth and fiction in this space of memory and invention in which we all live together yet so separately? How does a book, or painting in these cases I’ve cited, possess the power to transport us to a particular place deep inside ourselves that we can recognise even if we’ve not yet been there? Readers and viewers, listeners and sightseers; all of us, are seduced by art when it’s successful. Diverse participants, all of us, we’re mysteriously brought together by art. But if art fails, we sigh and quickly move on and forget it because our audience can be brutal.

Lastly, it occurs to me that I’m more moved by Truffaut’s, The 400 Blows, than I am about my own lonely childhood memories of early family life and boarding school. Is it not uniquely through art that our dreams and personal histories are pieced together by a concrete form made up from so many flexible memories? Isn’t art, in all its forms, the place of invention, where fragmented memories are made whole again through the imagination of empathy? This is how it is for me at least.

Like a tiny bowl of sorbet between gourmet dishes to change the palate, this small picture is offered up as a souvenir of Chesil Beach in Dorset UK. Though I’ve never been to there, I’m sure somehow, that on certain evenings the sky would bloom just like this. It’s a nothing of a picture, a mere afterthought and yet hopefully it lives with just enough oxygen to survive its spartan life here on the Pacific coast.

 

Delacroix’s studio, cont

30 December 2021

Delacroix’s studio, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 December 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

“Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture. (1 September 1859)”Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

Among so many jewels in his studio is a small watercolour, I believe it’s just entitled The Unmade Bed, but it’s something that has haunted me since forever. I’ve had a postcard of it for decades now, the same one that has somehow found a home on every piano I’ve ever owned, always stuck to the left of the sheet music where it can be seen. It is a complicated subject made from layers of linen and yet it seems so fresh that it looks like it has just blown into the bedroom like a leaf through a window. And it’s modern too, unlike most things done in 1827, France. But strangely, if I look at it in a particular way, without blinking, for instance, so that my eyes don’t focus as usual, it can remind me of a Christ figure hanging off Mary’s lap in a Pietà painted by Titian in Venice. One needs an imagination of course, but memory, too, that’s for sure. But then, this is the realm of art where magic and mystery are twins. What is important in this regard is always deeply personal, for this private memory cannot ever be transferred to anyone else except abstractly through the alchemy of art. Marcel Proust, among others, taught me that.

E.Delacroix, Le Lit défait, watercolour, graphite and ink, 18.5 X 29.9 cm, Le Louvre,  

Then again,  I have a big imagination and I do see ‘things’ ‘everywhere’. My brother Mark has always confirmed this to me when I tend to forget it. For instance, driving to the beach to paint not 10 minutes away from home in the late afternoon, I take a small stretch of the highway, and for the past month I’ve seen a dead dog on the left shoulder. Every afternoon I swore to myself that I would come back with my truck to remove it and place it in a gentle resting spot on our 100 acres. Every day I forgot, until last week, when one evening I wrote a note to myself and put it next to the coffee grinder which simply noted in magic marker: “today! DeaD doG.”

So the next morning after a coffee I put a tarp in the cab along with some gloves and drove to take care of the ‘dead dog’ on the highway. As I slowed down to approach it I pulled into the shoulder lane and stopped abruptly in front of a faded black tire on its side with a small thin bit extending from the left side. (!)  So, anyway, I still take the highway most afternoons, and in my ‘mind’s eye’ I still do see the DeaD doG laying there.

These two studies are from the other day. They sort of remind me of watercolours, perhaps even modern ones yet done nonetheless in the spirit of the late 19th century. And yet they ‘seem modern’ only perhaps because of their composition, unlike anything that would have ever been conceived back in that period. They certainly could easily resemble ‘cropped details’, perhaps taken from larger pictures that wouldn’t have otherwise made a painting complete back when they needed more story content in a painting in those days. Yet I like the light in them, and the colours too, but there’s also a freedom in them that wants me to buck the restraint imposed by the composition. In the end though, they do actually make me think of the watercolours of Eugene Delacroix in a certain way.

It was Boxing Day here in Australia, a holiday so there were still lots of people on the beach when I arrived. I had it in my mind to try something completely different that evening. I wanted to just treat the motif with as little referential description as possible; not clouds, but maybe just large irreverent shapes that could rub up against each other on the picture plane. Yes, I’ve done this before, but this night I wanted to see them as large puzzling shapes that might naturally provoke more ambiguity. In the end I didn’t really succeed because the one on the previous page feels like it’s trying to be a landscape. I also dropped it in the sand when leaving so it’ll now be scarred for life, like having a limp. But this one appears so airy that it hardly feels like an oil painting at all. But what I really like is the pale green sea, filled with a soft light because it is so rare that it appears in the late afternoon when I’m there. 

These two images are so abbreviated they might appear fragile but they’re certainly not. They’re just delicate and they live from sheer luck that I didn’t screw them up while painting them, because unlike composing music or writing stories, one cannot erase or crumple a piece of paper to begin all over again. Like paper, canvas too, is capricious, especially so with an unforgiving oil paint over it. The mistakes are permanent. 

Although they can be painted over and either corrected or manhandled into something new and different, in my own short time frame at the beach it’s not easy, so I'm rarely up for the task. In the studio work, yes all the time, in fact that’s all I seem to do. But happily, here at the beach, it’s extremely rare that I’ve needed to perform these surgeries.

At the beach, all these ‘mistakes’ and ‘corrections’ simply become ‘issues of style’ so when they don’t work, they’ll just fail even more visibly. But when they are lucky to survive post-op surgery, they can be surprising. Painting any kind of picture is to take a journey because it's not unlike being a tourist; there’s always work to do, getting lost and getting found, and shlepping one’s luggage around foreign streets in search of a soft bed.

And like tourism, if a painting doesn’t take me somewhere interesting then I’m less interested with the result. The more successful the transcendence of the experience, the more successful the art work, I think. 

Delacroix’s studio

30 December 2021

Delacroix’s studio

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 December 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

“Draftsmen may be made, but colourists are born.” Eugène Delacroix, from his diary

I used to visit Eugene Delacroix’s studio whenever I was in Paris. It became a ritual for me in the olden days when it had been a small museum run by the city of Paris and when it functioned in its own quirky way. But sometime in the 1990’s it was pulled into the Réseau des Musées which now includes 1,220 museums all over France, a system basically designed to facilitate the smooth operation between all the museums and to allow for national funding from Paris. It was also a clever way to pillage certain smaller museums of works which it wanted for the larger ones in Paris. But hey! 

The buildings in those days had a worn feeling as did almost all of the city in the 1970’s. Indeed, the patina in Paris even had its own patina! But I liked it infinitely more than the contemporary museum of today which can sometimes feel like a sleek airport terminal. But frankly, all of Paris in the 1970’s looked a tad gloomy, the ornate buildings had not yet been pressure-cleaned so there was a brackish-looking shadow everywhere even on sunny days. It still looked like the city I imagine it might have been right after the war, but the grit to it really came afterward from the coal-fired plants surrounding it. Buildings in New York too, where I grew up in the fifties and sixties, also wore a veil of darkness around their own edgy eaves. And Venice too, had a feel of distant seraphic neglect which gave it a lugubrious mystery in the foggy dusk light. But I liked all three cities even in their states of natural decline as it were. Is this because they were part of my youthful memories which many of us either come to love or hate as we age? 

In any event, today, their bridges and palaces have been polished up to welcome the modern tourist who brings in s decent revenue, and why not? Cruising the Seine on a Bateau Mouches at twilight, which I did a few years back was magical and Paris never looked more enchanting. 

Delacroix’s museum sits in the small chic Place Von Furstemburg, a cute compact square behind Le Cafe des Deux Magots, where the Americans go to sit on the sunny terrace in contrast to most Parisians, who only frequent Cafe Flore, just a block West on Blvd St. Germain. When I first discovered the studio back then, all of Paris ressembled those faded black and white postcards from an even older verson of itself. Entering the shabby anodyne lobby one would note only the small sign indicating the Atelier Delacroix in deep blue ink attached to the side of the door. It was a discreet entrance so much like the man himself. Once inside the entrance, the aroma of Sauerkraut or Potato Onion Soup hit you immediately, and it would quickly guide you up to the 1st floor landing after climbing the stairway in a circular fashion. One stepped out onto the narrow second floor where a woman, the concierge, sold the visitor a small ticket with an orange stripe at one end from an old-styled ticket stall of yesteryear like at a carnival. Behind her was the Potato Onion soup or something similar cooking on a stove in an even tinier space. Like most places in those days, it closed during lunch hours but the aromas persisted all day long and wandered evenly throughout the small building.

Aside from a new coat paint and a general swished-up feeling to it, it hasn’t really changed much on the inside. The wooden floors still creak like thay always have. One went through part of the house, then to an outdoor walkway into the studio and down a stairway. But what a treat when one arrived; this fellow lived well after all! The studio space was sumptuous, and painted a deep flat red and full of the artist’s paraphernalia. Everything one might imagine in a Parisian studio was there: paints and palettes in glass cabinets, assorted drawings, watercolours, and paintings from his voyages hung randomly around the walls, glass-lockers that housed drawing pads and miscellenious materials, inks, brushes, etc, etc. For a young student of art from America, it was like Alibaba’s cave. And for some reason I usually found myself there at mid-morning in order to enjoy it before it closed at noon. 

For a time, I went through a period of extreme obsession with Delacroix. I read his diary twice through and searched him out in every museum I could, I even followed him to North Africa, though Matisse and Marquet, by then had also played a large part in this travel bug. His discreet bachelorhood in Paris I’m sure even had an influence upon my own inchoate solitary lifestyle already back then.

It was irrational, now that I look back on that part of my life. But don’t we all look back on our early lives with raised eyebrows? My peers in the Art world of that period were all either out in LA carving up cars and making sculptures from them, or they were downtown in New York where Punk prowled around each night and where painters worked in poorly-lit lofts with layers of dark paint preparing for the boom of the 1980’s. But there I was in France in the 1970’s, and being both a social and cultural orphan, I easily dove into life there like it was a swimming pool full of red wine.

Delacroix’s studio overlooked a large garden which was accessed by a stairway off to the side of the studio. Once down there, one can sit and ponder the 19th century in any season because a few benches have been added. 

The museum now is a very contemporary space, clean and sober, and very different to what it was like in the 1970’s. I read in John Rewald’s wonderful History of Impressionism that both Renoir and Monet would climb up the wall from the neighbour’s place next door to watch Delacroix work through the huge window. He was a giant to this young generation of nascent painters who would soon become Impressionists and giants themselves with even larger shadows. All this, one can still dream about while sitting on a bench in this small garden on any day of the week.

Tauromachie and the art of graceful death

15 November 2021

Tauromachie and the art of graceful death

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 November 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

In front of such a sky like today, I often have the habit attacking a canvas board hard and fast. It is partly from impatience but maybe also from anxiety due to the colours moving around the sky so quickly. In a certain way that edginess is a little like when I've painted portraits of people, it's their fixed gaze upon me that has me twitching and shifting  uneasily in place making me feel self-conscious. Here, I’m just painting a portrait of the sea and sky so what can go wrong?

I’m suddenly reminded of a conversation I had with a painter many years ago. He was talking about the work of Henri Michaux, who did a series of ink pictures on the theme of Tauromachie. This is a grand theme for a lot of European writers, painters and poets. Hemingway and Picasso both returned to it again and again throughout their long creative lives.  

He had just read a book by Michel Leiris about La Tauromachie, the art of bull fighting as an apt metaphor for painting a picture. The ideal death for the bull in this ‘sport’ is a quick one, and when performed correctly it is considered a great art for aficionados of the ring. The matador must get it right in the first go-round or he will lose the crowd and the bull will suffer needlessly. Its death will one ignoble, and the reputation of the matador will be sullied.

The bull fighter must insert his sword (espada) into a narrow space between the shoulders of the charging bull and directly into the racing heart of the beast. In a ‘perfect’ death, the bull will die within an instant, but if he misses, it will be a mess and he will have failed. The crowd will hate him before he will hate himself.

So my friend, who also paints quickly, described how this 'perfect death' also relates to his own process of painting when everything moves fluidly to a divine and spontaneous finish. Now, years later, I too, find myself working rapidly in front of a motif, and I again ponder the perilous goal of a 'perfect  death' hanging over me like a sword at the beach. 

A few years later, my old friend, Michael, whom I knew from both Aix and New York, took me to two bullfights, one in Nîmes and the other in Arles a year later. Like many tourists, I was both horrified and fascinated. My friend had been to many fights and he explained how everything was supposed to happen. In Nimes, when I saw the first bull come charging out and I heard the roar of the crowd, I was suddenly transfixed, and I stayed for the whole afternoon watching several fights. My discomfort was overwhelmed by my curiosity. What did I feel in front of such a spectacle of which I had heard so much about and was even prepared to reject out of bias? I still wasn’t sure how I felt after being at there for an afternoon. I had been to southern Spain a few times many years earlier and visited a few rings (empty) but I forget where, maybe Seville? More of a tourist, I was fascinated by the structures of them and the coulour of all that clay within. Because I was much younger, I didn’t yet possess the arrogance I have today around my ideas concerning the ethical treatment of animals. 

Regardless of whether we (outsiders) like it, or not, this is a grand culural tradition going back a few thousand years to a time when all forms ot violence against pretty much everything was easily accepted as a way of life. Let’s face it, humans can be pretty awful stewards of high morality. Today we still love the bloody gore of cage fighting between both men and women. But hey! Better they go at each other than at animals I think.

Anyway,  a year later I went again with my same friend. This time, we went to Arles, and when the first bull came charging out to the roar of the crowd, I found myself telling him that I would see him afterward at a cafe and I left to wander the lovely streets which Van Gogh had 

traversed just one hundred years earlier. 

As the first bull come rushing out into the noisy arena I suddenly realised that I didn’t want to see it all over again. I didn’t need to see it. I was curious the first time, but the second time around I understood in an instant that it brought me nothing more. My decision to leave was as quick, sharp, and intuitive, as that of a Matador inserting the espada into the heart of the charging beast. 

 

Maybe it’s these ancient but corroded memories of Spain or possibly the two trips to Nîmes and Arles, but I do sense a violence in this study from a few days ago. Could it also be the colour of the clay arena within the sky? Not sure, but there is something about it that evoked these old memories for me. While it’s true that this quick painting I exercise here also looks for a quick kill with one clean (or messy) truth, if there is any success or glory here at the end of the day, it is an anonymous one, solitary and bloodless.

God’s skin, hope and desire

 

27 July 2021

God’s skin, hope and desire

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 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. All the same, I fear 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 introducing something new to 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 all the ways it can work.

Isn’t it curious how Cezanne can be found in the same breath as this old idea from the sometime sombre Renaissance? When one thinks of him, one thinks of such radiance and 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 intuitively practical 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 habitually 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 a painting and still find my way into the drawing in great contrast to Cezanne. 

I remember a famous 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 on either side 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 all along 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 at the beach. 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 delicate 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 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 had 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 had come up in a session and depicted 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 below.