16 February 2022
Continuity
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
A study from last week, the first one of the night and this morning it made me think of Pierre Bonnard. It’s probably due to the colours he loved so much. He seemed to love those warm delicate violets and sharp flaxen threads that break the bright airy Veronese Green.
It’s a very nervous-looking picture but I like it. It reminds me of my Sodastream thingie that transforms tap water into Perrier in seconds. Indeed, the painting has a fizzy side of it that surprises me because I certainly wasn’t feeling all that effervescent whilst painting it. It had been a hot humid afternoon and I would have loved to have a waiter arrive at the dunes with a cold Perrier on a silver platter. But hey!
Regardless, it has a curious colour harmony from the very start of the session when the sky was just starting to turn. I’m always partial to that lime-green hue that seems to kick off the colour wheel into all that hot melodrama of yellow and pink. It vaguely feels to me as if it were born in the future somehow, an image only half-understood in my hand but already forming in my thoughts for some time now. The direction will easily clarify itself if I remember to remain true to my real loves; light and space.
But at the same time I’ve been struggling with finding a way into ‘something new’ in this series like I have a kind of writer’s block, but one particular to painters. The only answer is to persevere and remember that one cannot give up before the miracle, as my friends say. While it is wise to keep at it in a disciplined fashion, there are also ways to shake things up at the same time. But how?
I made a design to clean out lots of older pictures that don’t excite me much. It’s usually because they are boring for one reason or another or they just don’t work. So, on many of the better ones that could be touched-up I’ve started adding some fresh bits of colour. Some nights at the beach I patiently look for a way back into them hoping to find an answer from the distance of both time and space. In each of these pictures I’m looking for a resolution to finish them like a writer in search of an end to their novel.
The idea in this series was always to get it right in one session as if it were a small watercolour. Work quickly, and do or die. My biggest weakness is I’ve always had the greatest difficulty going back into working on an unfinished landscape. Most painters don’t appear to have this problem but for me at a certain stage of the process, a painting already has a personality of its own and though unfinished, it’s already got a history behind it that’s hard to change. The problem is that its history also possesses its own movement jumping on a train as it’s leaving the station. I need to be in sync but I never am. Is it my anxious spirit or just a fear of failure? For me, it means changing everything to go back into a painting. But to be fair, I’m usually also bored and no longer interested. But anyway, there is also the complex issue of syncing up the overall light. This is the continuity problem, like in films.
It’s one of those things that drives directors and editors crazy I imagine, and it can wreck a film sequence. Although not at all as dramatic a problem, painting a landscape on different days used to make me so crazy that I forsook working on large pictures that required me to return again and again to the same place on different days. Why bother? It’s too much trouble doing that out in the landscape.
Imagine having to shoot film sequences out on the water over the course of a few days during a film shoot. The weather tells the sea and the wind how to behave each day, and because it’s rarely ever the same, the problem of continuity figures into it. It’s near impossible on a tight filming schedule to find consecutive days to find the same wind and sky even if the sea remained the same colour. Everything is different, mostly the wind which dictates what the water looks like. The most clever directors can coerce their actors into brilliant performances but they cannot bribe the weather God.
I am particularly obsessive about these continuity issues when seeing a film. At a certain point, I think the line producers just say: “Screw it” the audience will never notice, and most might not. Alas, some of us obsessive film nuts actually do. But I think we’re also rather forgiving too because we know that no one can boss around Poseidon.
So, for me to avoid this whole drama of weather I just work quickly and small outdoors, hoping to get it right in one go.
And all this makes me think of Pierre Bonnard, the Patient King. Apparently, (and unlike film crews) he had no schedule and so he worked on canvas’s tacked up on his studio walls for months and years on end. He worked indoors to evade the disturbance of the weather. He painted (I speculate) with a painfully slow deliberation as if all the clocks in his home ran slow. Really great things in Art possess that awful cliché of ‘timelessness’, but there is truth in it nonetheless. Once a successful artwork lives, it lives forever; music, books, poems, paintings, they’re created in their own time, and they’re loyal only to their own destiny, be it fire or flood. So I’m not sur why but this leads me to some of Bonnard’s famously discreet but brilliant things he wrote in letters to various friends. Here are a few which I read continuously in times of difficulty in my own work. These are my own translations which may not please some academics.
“L’oeuvre d’art; un arrêt du temps”
(A work of art is a pause in time)
“Ce qui est beau dans la nature ne l’est pas toujours dans la peinture. Examples : effets de soir, de nuit”
(What is beautiful in Nature isn’t always in Painting, ex. effects of the evening light)
J’espère que ma peinture tiendra, sans craquelures. Je voudrais arriver devant les jeunes peintres de l’an 2000 avec des ailes de papillon.
(I hope my pictures will outlast their cracks. I would like to meet the young painters in the year 2000 on the wings of a butterfly)
Élément étranger: souvent le blanc pur ou le noir.
(the foreign element; usually pure white or black)
Il y a une formule qui convient parfaitement à la peinture: beaucoup de petits mensonges pour une grande vérité.
(There is a formula that works well for painting; lots of small lies to create a great truth)
Tout le monde parle d’une soumission à la Nature mais il y a aussi une soumission au tableau.
(Everyone talks about a submission to Nature but there is also the submission to the canvas)
