Foolhardy with form

 

24 August 2020

Foolhardy with form

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

Despite my messy painting habits, this study from the other night reminds me that somewhere deep inside me is a hunt for form and it reveals my continued desire to make order out of this unruly motif. If not symmetrical, then at least I seem to want something more balanced. In my old Greek spirit there could also be lurking an obsequious desire to please Phidias, whose keen sense of divine harmony has lain dormant inside me until now.

It’s as if I yearn to somehow reduce all of Nature right down to the snug size of a small canvas board. I wonder if this desire haunts other painters as much as me because no matter what the abstract proportions are, this reduction is truly where the magic ferments. Despite the sheer dimensions of something unknowable, like the sky in this instance, form is within reach if one's vision is as good as one's craft. 

But what really permits me to attempt this feat of scaling down the sky must be wholly due to the fact that it’s been done before by so many other painters. I cite J.M. Turner (yet again) because he managed to plausibly compress his own colossal skies and squeeze them into pages the size of small sacred prayer books. 

In order for a painter to re-create the unruly nature out there (yet born within his own imagination) an artist must find the practical means to naturally reduce the infinity of this unruly world such that it fits neatly into his own prayer book. It takes a certain geometric magic no doubt, but it basically comes down to the craft of painting. One has it or one hasn't yet learned it. It's not for the faint-hearted, for like any craft, it requires lots and lots of failure which can leave a bloodied field of dead and wounded pictures.

"Be persistent!", was the best advice I ever received from artists, both alive and dead. All it took, they said, was just "lots of failure and buckets and buckets of humility".  

I think it also requires a foolhardy belief in oneself to become a painter because Art is a cruel game, and any budding artist must possess enough fortitude to breach the gates of this realm which can slay wimps faster than a sharp sword. 

This study from the other night is an example of my own desire for order and form. And, I admit this, in contrast to all the obvious signs of disorder in the rest of my own parallel life as a bachelor. 

Only lately have I come to see that it may be precisely for this reason that such an ardent thirst for order shows up right now in my painting life. Despite all this grand talk of an ordered form, I’m still as messy a painter as I am in every other area of my life. My home and garden are in such disarray that I haven’t invited anyone over for tea in years out of embarrassment.

But funny enough, there are many days when I arrive to find the sky looking so polished and clean that it looks like a butler had been out there all day. Those afternoons when messy clouds are absent I say to myself with hubris: “This is going to be a piece of cake!”

But, the downside to clean and well-formed skies like these is that left to my own devise, and in front of such visual clarity, it’s too easy to resort to painting what I've already done many times beforehand, for this is the curse of a clear and happy sky.

The truth is that without a challenge I'll never change. Every artist, indeed, everyone, needs hardship or they'll never grow into a craft. Isn't there an ancient myth somewhere that warns about the terrible ennui of getting everything too easily? 

Immodestly, I admit that I like this picture, it's not great, but I feel grateful that it isn’t just like every other one that was started from a clean and polished sky. Its tactile construction and its colours are appealing. What I really appreciate are the transitions on the painted surface. In this one I love the way the layers of colour in the upper half of the sky seem to glide over one another other, barely touching. In fact, this is why I still work with oil paints. 

 

The French have two wonderful words for this effect; frôler and effleurer. Of course, because they’re French, they are often used to great advantage when speaking about gentle kisses, and caressing a loved ones hair like it's the wind. But that's exactly what I mean here in this sky. So despite its small size, this bleached area of light, high overhead, that fences in the top of the picture, also beckons the illusion I'm always after, one of an empyreal region that's just beyond my reach. 

Trees wearing red rubies

11 June 2020

Trees wearing red rubies

     Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The nights are chilly and a big Southerly polishes the black sky full of stars. These sessions are chilly too, as I never seem to be dressed appropriately because winter is definitely here now.

This painting was kind of a surprise for me because I knew while I was working on it that it was eliciting a strong feeling from deep inside me. I really love this super pale hint of Prussian Blue broken with lemon yellow at the very top of the picture. It rises up out of the warm highlights of light over the deeper yellow beneath. “Yes!” The painter in me exclaimed to no one: “That is it !”  Something about the warm sensual colours and the gentle overall feeling spoke to me but like in a foreign language; French!

This gentle transition from one hue to another is the whole reason I still come out to paint the sea at this dusk hour. “All that for just this?” the sceptic, who knows little of aesthetic joy might think to themselves, “Mais oui!" I respond emphatically! I’ll further confess that I stole these soft passages in his 5th Symphony, the Adagietto, because you see, Art, unlike the leopard, not only changes its spots, but its species as well.

It’s weird to watch yourself painting an image that comes from a motif way out there, yet while at the same time it evokes up from within me a visual memory that’s really old and friendly, a feeling not unlike that of Proust’s Madelaine cookie. But in this case it was prompted not by taste but through a visual sense.

What I see is that this study from the other afternoon brought up memories from long ago, ones that I had described in my diary from when I lived at the Châteaunoir in Aix. For the past year I’ve been transcribing these diaries into my laptop, a laboriously slow process, and one that has filled me with many delicious memories that spring back up like one of those tall inflatable stick figures at a car wash.

Two memories came to me in this instance. I remember when living there I would walk most evenings into the forest usually with several cats in tow. And often, around sunset in autumn and winter particularly, when the sun was setting, the last red rays would scatter everywhere and randomly throw small red marks upon the forest trees. Suddenly, the oak and pine trees were wearing red rubies likes medals pinned to their bark for as far as I could see. 

And this triggered another memory, like it piggy-backed upon the first one from southern India, where the women would paste cow dung onto the trees for drying which they would then use for cooking. In that dry landscape, all the trees that lined the road were painted with pale pink polka dots like Yayoi Kusama had been there the day before. Remarkably, looking at this picture brought all these memories to the forefront of my imagination.

Transcribing a diary from the 1980’s made clear a few things to me. Firstly, is that I saw that I was so much more grateful and full of joy than I ever remembered being during all those years. I had erroneously imagined that I was eternally depressed, but despite that sadness and sense of solitude which I had felt in those years, the diary tells me otherwise.

Secondly, I realised just how golden it is to have youth on one’s side and also to have one’s good health too. This human body is a precarious life-force for most of us and to have good health is to have a greater advantage for living well. So, I was young and healthy even if I drank too much wine.

So tonight, I come away from this easy amble down through memory lane with an appreciation that if indeed there was a golden era back then, then surely today it is also just as golden, n’est-ce pas? And In twenty years time hence, when I shall indeed be a really older man, will I look back and not marvel at how grateful and happy I also feel today? Will my future self not smile at the providence with which I am abundantly graced today?

And so thus, this small inconspicuous study from the other night brought up so many things for me and I find that quite remarkable for just an average, normal painting session. 

Builders and electricians

18 June 2020

Builders and electricians

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In France many years ago, I dropped in on a painter whom I used to know. Instead of an education at the Beaux-Arts, he had studied economics I think. He was smart and somewhat of an intellectual even. Despite a French education that shaped him with a rational thought process I appreciated that he became a painter way outside the system from which he came. 

I visited him one Spring afternoon, he was in his garden when I arrived putting some last touches on a picture. Our usual banter immediately turned to Painting, but on this day we spoke of a programme which we had both heard the previous evening on France Musique which had highlighted the relationship between Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. They are popular and iconic composers who are played often throughout the week. At the start of our conversation, I said that although I like Debussy very much, I was really crazy about Ravel. We began talking about them both, what pieces we liked, etc, etc.

I said that Ravel feels to me to be more like a comfortable armchair straddling the end of the 19th century and early 20th century Romanticism, one in which no doubt, Brahms had certainly napped in before him. Debussy, his contemporary, on the other hand, seemed to be steering music into the 21th century on a skate board. For some reason, I wasn’t even surprised to hear him tell tell me that Debussy was the superior artist. It seemed in line with his cerebral taste and education. Though this discussion was at least thirty years ago I've never forgotten it. Like most things I found interesting during my daily life, I noted our conversation in my diary at the time. I would summarise his thinking thus: 

“Unlike Ravel, Debussy’s musical ideas were not weighed down by an excess of emotion.” He asserted that because of this, Debussy was the greater artist.

Our discussion that day was, as always, very precise, almost mechanically logical, the way they can sometimes be in France, often even, to the point of didactic exhaustion. But on the other hand, this was one of the things that I truly loved about living in France, a country of thinkers, and lovers of not only Art but of eloquent debate. It’s a kind of a giant cafe, a home to a collective cultural brawl that’s filled with hyper-reasoned participants, unafraid of verbal skirmishes. Don’t forget, France is the land where Cyrano de Bergerac slew his opponents by tongue, after all.

Our discussions about Art were also part of our own particular brawl and also the glue that held our unlikely friendship in place over the years. We shared a certain legacy over the years that was born in a fertile French soil, and allowed our discourse to replenish year after year despite our differences. And yet in this instance, I found myself annoyed by his arrogance and it rubbed me the wrong way. 

Any avid listener to France Musique receives a large dose of both of these composers on its programming on a regular basis, so I had listened a lot to both Ravel and Debussy since arriving in France back in 1973. But for me, I had learned to love artists (of every field) for lots of different reasons. With aging humilty, when it comes to greatness, I don’t generally attach my feelings to a hierarchy of that greatness anymore. I had  learned over the years to critique a particular work of an artist, not the artist nor their reputation themselves. It keeps me out of a lot of trouble, and it’s for sure, more diplomatic. But it’s also cleaner, a more precise way of exploring and evaluating the Arts over the long haul of history. I’ve found that in things artistic, all roads should never lead to Rome, but away from it, to a squirrelly destination full of diversity and surprise.   

Paul Cézanne is generally considered to be the father of Modern Art, and like Debussy, he ushered into the 20th century a new structural form which broke away from centuries of pictorial thinking as if a dam had burst and swept away most of what was already housed in the Louvre. To a great extent there is much truth to this metaphor. 

Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, isn’t considered in the same light, and he, like Ravel, was steeped in the painting structure of the 19th century, one that arrived through both Rembrandt and Delacroix, among so many others including many artists from Japan. Yet Vincent Van Gogh almost single-handedly, opened up the palette to more light than the world had ever seen or experienced beforehand. He was a new lightbulb. If Cezanne was the builder, then Van Gogh was the electrician. But according to Emile Bernard who knew them both, Cézanne had heard of Van Gogh and even thought he was a mad man who made crazy paintings. "Il est fou!" He had declared. So, you see how opinions are not facts in Art. And anyway, I'm also someone who distrusts the word genius and I try to avoid using it at all costs. But I do use the words: Greatness, Great, Good, OK, and Awful, among others, to describe Art in general, but people too sometimes.

It has been many years since that conversation with my old friend but I’ve never forgotten it. It was a learning curve for me, and I still remember being taken aback at the audacity of it. Today, even more humbled with age, it shocks me even more. 

So, all these years later, have given me the clarity to see that greatness comes in various colours and different forms, even newer tastes with which I may not yet even be familiar. And although I can be ruthlessly critical of particular works, it’s rare that I slag off an artist’s whole oeuvre, or his, or her person. I’ve also learned today, that even thinking like this is an odd form of narcissism. At such a distinguished level of artistry like Debussy and Ravel, where craft melds with vision, comparing two iconic composers is like trying to compare Cézanne to Van Gogh; an apple to a pear. 

Meanwhile, at the beach came this frosty coloured picture from the other night, the second of two studies. It’s getting chilly at the beach these days as we approach the winter solstice, and the sea looked to be a cool silver blue. I’m still not sure what I think of it but there is something Modern and flat in it that tells me I'm on my own right and authentic path. In time, it might look more interesting or less so, it might also be a dud. 

In this moment how can I know? It’s long story, this painting racket. A painter just continues forward, one picture at a time, one day at a time. One thing is sure though, I accept that I’m not a great painter, so I don’t need to waste time worrying about that form of narcissism. To be a good painter is already great enough because no one will ever paint just like me. 

Drunken Noah

2 June 2019

Drunken Noah

       Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2019, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

These are glorious skies that grace us each afternoon, and chilly nights that follow. Two studies from the other day, this was the second. I'm not sure how good it is but the session was full of colour and it was really pleasurable despite the chill in the air. 

I had a sudden insight the other night but it seems so obvious that I feel almost too foolish to admit it. On the drive home from the beach the other evening I was ruminating about all the chaos and disorder going on in the world at the moment when I suddenly wondered if maybe the whole point of ART is to counterbalance it all with order. But of course, the world has always been spinning out of control and it's mostly due to human misbehaviour.

I mused ruefully that perhaps in a world where darkness represented all of humankind's cruelties and greed, then wouldn't light surely be its opposite? Could it also be possible that artistic endeavours everywhere, might function also as healing properties, like angels circling playfully around this volatile world of humankind?  

I'm not trying to be fanciful, nor am I naive or idealist, it's just a proposition that aired itself while driving home in my old car the other night at the start of winter. 

I was actually thinking about Painting but then it occurred to me it’s really about creativity isn’t it, Literature, Architecture, and all sorts of music and dance, etc, etc? Everything, the whole kit and caboodle. If we believed that Art (unlike Nationalism), is a kind of bridge to something reasonable and beneficial to all society as a whole, then couldn't it be seen as a kind of bonding glue to connect us all?

Yes, this sounds so obvious, it's almost so silly that I hesitated to follow it further. And yet, on a personal level, when I accept that Art has fused me back together and made me whole again again, it made me wonder whether or not it's been doing that ever since humankind first began being creative instead of adversarial. 

But even further down into this rabbit hole, I also wondered just how order and disorder, are expressed through any artist? Around me (and in the world) I notice many artists who want to break the world apart in their art work through disconnected imagery and disrupted subject matter. That's cool, if it works. We all have to do what we all need to do after all, otherwise, why bother with any of it?

We may as lie on a beach in Jamaica drinking rum all afternoon. 

Why then is it that my own desire yearns for the complete opposite? Are their lives so composed and whole, that it permits them the luxury and freedom to express such formal collapse in their art? 

Me, on the other hand, I'm always trying to put things back together, to bond elements whether they be in a picture or in my life. I seem to be trying to tie everything down like I’m on a small boat in stormy seas. 

In my own case I'm pretty sure I know where it all came from, this old sense of dread and fear of being out of control. I came out of a dysfunctional house, full of disorder and violence, so I understand why I'm always searching for some kind of ordered calm, both in my personal life and in my creative one too. Are these pictures a kind of  psychological response to my place here in the world? I've always been searching for a comfortable foxhole, actually. I was a Drunken Noah, in love with sleep because I couldn’t handle the world war.

 

I’m also the guy that's looking out at the sea and sky at sunset when colours want to peel off in any number of directions and I’m the one trying to catch them all like they’re butterflies in a field. But I am trying to make sense of a motif so that its pictorial incoherence can be legible for others to read. If a painter’s job is to convey an idea, or a feeling, then mustn’t it be legible for others to also feel and experience? We're no longer infants anymore, I mean, what would be the point conveying gibberish to each other? 

I feel like I’m walking out on a tightrope with all this but hey? I like heights.

Yes, I know, I know, stop making sense, it's a clever catch phrase for a POP generation, but eventually we get to an age when we really must begin making sense of things or we start to go crazy, possibly conspiratorial and nutty because we're no longer grounded. But then, I’m not God, who knows the answers to any of all this? I’m just a painter, a drunken Noah of sorts, trying to save myself through small pictures. What could go wrong?

But another thing I realised the other night in the middle of all these thoughts is that I am finally practicing what I should have learned so many years earlier, that it’s the daily work, that's the ticket out of out of confusion for anyone who trying practice a craft. Had I known that earlier I would have saved a lot of energy.

This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever stayed so long on a motif week after week, month after month through all these seasons here, because it continually offers up something for me each new day. If it didn't I wouldn't be coming back for more. But to be fair, there isn’t a great variance to these seasons especially on a simple motif like this. But the steady attention to it over time is what I had missed most of my life. And yet, it’s everything for a painter, how could I have missed this? 

Being an artist isn’t about all my fantasies, the endless rumination and dreamy ideas that make up a painting trajectory, it's about the concrete work produced on a steady basis, and yes, a routine grounded in devotion. Everything else is just fluff, maybe interesting fluff, but fluff all the same.

When I think about how much time I’ve wasted in trying to find order in my life by thinking, I'm appalled. I’ve lived the life of the drunken Noah depicted so beautifully in stone on so many Romanesque Churches throughout Europe. But remarkably enough, something shifted for me years back in my own Dark Ages and I’m grateful for it. I feel like I awakened from a long dream and in many ways, it's this series that has jolted me upright. 

This study came after a struggle as the whole colour harmony appeared to collapse towards the end of the session and left me at a loss. But being a good fantasist, I faked it accordingly. 

Eventually, Nicholas de Staal

4 August 2024

Eventually, Nicholas de Staal

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 July, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Chilly, these days!

The other day a painter (and acquaintance) asked me what I thought of some of her paintings. I had looked at them and was at a loss of how to be honest with her without hurting her feelings. A long time ago I learned one of the best lessons of my life. It was to never ask anyone such a thing about my own work. I learned the hard way because once many years ago when I did question a friend about a painting of mine I received a negative response and I got such a resentment that I didn’t eat for a year. I vowed to never again fall into that trap, and I haven’t. 

If one can't handle someone else’s opinion, then they should never broach the question. Why didn’t I learn that as a kid? But I’ve since learned to avoid this problem by turning it around on the questioner, by asking them, “what do you think of it?”. This seems to work out and lead to a discussion about what works in a painting, and it usually diverts the discussion elsewhere. In any artistic activity, isn’t this the real question? I’ve learned that the best way to avoid such a question is to shy away from Art, but politics and religion also.

In this case, it had turned out OK, as I waded into a swamp of ideas, ad-libbing like a stand-up comedian the whole way. But to be honest, I’ve become more real in so many aspects of my personal life, that these days I can usually handle most questions, so it’s rarely a big problem. I try to just say what I mean and mean what I say in all things. 

I realise that this question of engagement is interesting. What does it mean to be engaged both intellectually and emotionally with something which we collectively assume to be Art? I know that it really doesn’t matter for 99% of the world population, but hey,,,, if you are reading this it must mean something. 

Art criticism is an age old pasttime, one which was fairly widespread in the wealthier nations up until the 19th century. All hell broke loose in the 20th century, and now in the first 2 decades of this 21st century, it’s all so contextual that it’s like walking through mine field. But I still love the debate about Art in spite of all these thorny obstacles. I’m just careful about with whom I’m engaging. Today, I generally engage as a painter and much less so as a critic. How I look at a painting is as important for me as it is for a baseball scout looking at young players. I share the same love and devotion of this game of Art.

To be in front of a painting, or any work of art one loves (which is engagement), can evoke the same kinds of visceral feelings to that of an epicurean seated in a three star restaurant. It’s an affair of gluttonous passion. In a work of any sort of Art I want to find a visual intelligence, something which comes out of a wide collection of ideas that one has carefully nurtured through discerning curiosity. 

Like with anything, if I can assert that I am engaged, then I must also be judging. When anyone asks me what I think of such and such an artist, I now always respond by asking them of which work by such and such an artist, are they referring? It’s always best to keep it specific; “Which Picasso? "Which Tintoretto” or "which Basquait?”. It’s tidier this way with no ambiguities hanging about. 

In fact, a friend in France did recently ask me what I thought of Nicholas de Staal. She had seen a large show of his and was enchanted with him, and his work (all my women friends have a crush on him). And why not? He was a very handsome man with a mysterious past of White Russian lineage and who painted very sensitive landscapes around Provence, La Drôme, Antibes and Paris. Poor guy, after a very productive life of work he killed himself at 41, by jumping out of an apartment in the middle of Antibes. So I told her, I liked many things of his very much, which was true. So yes, not only do I like  many of his pictures, but I admire him even more perhaps. He loved Art passionately and though he made a small family, his life revolved around his obsession of capturing the light of Provence. What’s not to like, as my Uncle Phil in the Bronx would ask? 

I saw a large show in Aix two years ago when last in France, and I surprised myself by taking lots of photos of his small things with my phone. This tells me I that I liked his work and was indeed engaged with it. I liked the graphic truth in so many images in the show, and though many were probably painted inland, many of them possessed the airiness of the sea. Indeed, many of his pictures exuded luminosity from every pore of the canvas.