Satie went out without his umbrella

24 June 2020

Satie went out without his umbrella

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I never really struggled with the act of painting, not colour harmony, nor with drawing once I began studying with Leo. Yes, I still struggled, but I wasn’t lost without a clue, like I had been deaf and mute at art school in university. It was more like starting over, like I was learning French after years of studying Latin. At the same time, I had to learn a lot and work at it, but it had never been so foreign to me even from an early age because I had always had an intuitive sense about light. Studying with my teacher Leo, freed me up finally so I could use it. Suddenly, I had both a direction, and a means with which to construct a chassis to draw and paint an image.

Being able to always draw had been the ticket that allowed me to avoid being bullied in schools because I could do something that others couldn’t. It gave me a pass,,, sort of. On the other hand, I also took it for granted too, because curiously, I also assumed that everyone else had those same skills. My real problem in painting arose from me alone and I had to overcome all of my own personnel issues around creativity to make any progress later on. I was my own problem, but art never was.

But curiously, I found a way into sorting out my issues with painting through learning music in my later years. I had always wanted to play piano but had thought I was too old to begin. That mind-set went on for years until finally, at the age of 30, I bought an old piano, and many beginners from another era, I began learning to play simple things by Bach, Bartok.

It was an unhill climb because music never came easy to me like it seems to for so many others. I had to work at it in a way I never had to work at drawing or painting. This was a great opening but at the same time it revealed to me that I hadn’t ever really worked hard enough on my plastic skills in Painting or drawing. I was coasting, which wasn’t a great way to achieve anything. But at the piano I felt like a mountaineer on a cliff face, always in peril and forever trying to save myself. 

Over the years I’ve managed to learn some musical harmony through the Tin Pan Alley charts that led to some of the great Jazz Standards we’ve all come to love today. Like everyone else, I also learned some Bach and Chopin, but it was Erik Satie who led me through dark tunnels and into the trough of hard work. 

At the beginning of the Pandemic I began memorising the first three Gemnopedies, then the first three Gnossiennes which took me two years, but they now live cautiously in my hands and heart. I suddenly realised that if I could do this then I could certainly accomplish as much in painting. Somehow the work on Satie helped me dislodge most of my worst creative insecurities. It felt to me that after so many years that I could finally stuff my perfectionism into a pizza oven and watch it burn out of me as a smoky ghost. Henceforth, instead of seeing painting as a final exam, I could begin seeing it as a just workbook. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I learn to paint for the pure joy of it as I’ve learned to do on the piano? 

This moody picture is from a few nights ago. It also reminds me of Eric Satie and his wistful music, but in particular, his set of piano works entitled Pieces-Froides. Erik Satie, the much celebrated French composer, lived in a tiny unheated room in Montmarte at the end of his life where he died in poverty. After he died, the story goes that a few friends assembled there, and while they jammed into the small room and drank brandy to remember him, someone opened the closet and dozens of umbrellas spilled out. His friends were surprised to find their own amongst them. They say that he went out with an umbrella even on sunny days, and he apparently had a habit of ‘borrowing’ them from everywhere he went. This is easy to do in France today where cafes and shops provide umbrella bins next to their entrances. 

This image was a bit of a mess because a rain storm came in as I was working and the rapidly moving clouds wrecked my need for stability and structure. But like always, there was that moment in a sky full of flux when I have to take a stand and really commit to the drawing. In this picture though, I kept shuffling clouds around until I made the commitment. Lucky for me that I had somehow preserved those small turquoise windows of light.

But, I like this picture also because it captures an instant almost like a Polaroid, and yet it’s a painting done live at the beach under a windy chill. At first, I wasn’t sure about it but it looks better to me after a few days. It summoned up my feelings of this cold and forlorn afternoon as I left the deserted beach the other evening. It’s winter after all.

A few days in September

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18

September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18

September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

There is a curious film with the title 'A Few Days in September' which I like very much and still watch every few years. It stars Juliette Binoche and John Turturro, who naturally give great performances. Because it takes place between Paris and Venice there are two suitable younger stars to handle the love angle. And Nick Nolte makes a quick surprise entrance and even faster exit at the end of the film. 

Sometimes when I long for France and Italy I put it into my DVD player and play pretend that I'm there, and that I still drink white wine in a quaint bar behind the Giudecca. 

It's a hazy picture this film, and it's full of uncertainties, just like my favourite evenings here at the dusk hour when I come out to paint. We've had some really lovely mysterious-looking skies (and seas) over the past two weeks and I've gone to heaven there each night. Here are a few that speak in hushed tones and muted innuendos. They were done over these last few days of September.

Like the film, these discreet images seem to be masking the truth about what's really going on in the twilight sky. Because they're naturally fleeting, they also hide their mysteries. 

But alas, the rain has returned, and the metéo says it will not leave for another week or two. 

Anouk, a niece of a friend in France came to stay for a few days while traveling around Australia. A lovely woman who sized me up and immediately decided to organise my kitchen. She reminds me of Marie Kondo, the Japanese wizard of decluttering, known in Japan as 'fusui'. 

I will confess that I've let things go wild around here, both inside and out of my small home, my procrastination also appears to have grown like a long beard these past few years. So it was providential that Anouk arrived, and she just got to work with a quiet determined joy of getting a tough task done. 

Lately, I've felt like one of those lone sheep here in Australia that one sees on a TikTok video, the kind which somehow got away from the homestead, and after a brief few years was so weighted down with wool they could hardly walk anymore. But once found, they are brought home and sheared to resemble baby lambs all over again. 

 

Fragrances

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

This is from about two weeks ago when I began painting on smaller canvas boards which allow me to grasp the images faster. More compact, they’re better suited to painting the rapidly changing colours and they allow me to casually swipe paint across them with greater ease. I've made a dozen of them this week but this one particularly pleased me. 

Though this would not be for everyone, a fragile study like this seems to be what I'm after in this moment. The marvellously strange thing about it is that I couldn't have known I was after it until I painted this. (!)

This was the last study of the day and the sky appeared to be blushing with a delicate pink colour harmony. After a few years working here, I’ve come to see that these faint secrets overhead are what the sky gives away when it thinks no one else is looking. 

It’s at this fragrant moment when colour sails away like perfume diffusing into the night air. How many people would imagine such intimate goings-on in the sky just above their heads? Not me until I began painting at this hour. How could I have known otherwise?

The weather has been cooperative so I’ve been out most evenings and the blooms are bold but short-lived. Nice.

Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

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Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

J.M.W.Turner (date ?)Gouache and watercolour on paper 188 x 227 mm

I was sent this small Turner watercolour recently by a mysterious gentleman, whom I didn’t know, a certain Peter Shear from Indiana who is a painter. I believe that he stumbled upon my small blog space l’Air de Rien which has been the skeleton for this book, Evening Prayers at Brunswick Heads. This was a nice surprise. He understood not only what interested me but was kind enough to pass it along. 

It was a shock to see it, for this unpretentious little oeuvre, lacking in any visual presumption is just so perfect and beguiling that I can only weep with envy. Its innocence speaks of a rare and simple vision, one which could likely only come from the hand of an assured artist or perhaps even a very creative young child of rare sensibility on a very lucky and insightful afternoon. 

There is, at certain moments, an awkward honesty in Turner’s voluminous record-keeping of the sea and sky that reveals such a playful abstraction that one could think (if they knew little or nothing about Art) that indeed it was made by a child. But this would be a fairly cheap value judgement by a smug, smart-aleck whose sensibilities are but ruled uniquely by the left side of their brain only, for this is a masterpiece of invention.  

For me, the brilliance of this tiny and unobtrusive little souvenir is beyond description. This child-like innocence belies a profound vision, one that was not only cultivated by a lifetime of looking at Nature, but also by a lifetime of experience and talent that is buried deeply within the structure of these four corners and behind its quiet and simple design. 

But also hidden within this simplicity are the essentials of picture-making. There is a foreground, a middle-ground, and background, which all together, seem to come racing up to the viewer all at once as one plane, and it replicates how the visual world operates. In Painting, this is called abstraction, and it has to be learned not only through patience and practice but also through a generously extensive understanding of Art History itself. 

This is because our eyes don’t naturally allow this to happen due to our inability to focus on all planes simultaneously. It is therefore left to the artist to reconfigure this physical impossibility so that we, the viewers, can imagine it. But this sounds way more complicated than I am making it out to be. To put it simply, our eyes generally only reveal to our brain, at nanoseconds at a time, an entire organic view of the world as we look out at it, one instant after the next. It is why some painters will squint their eyes whilst looking at a landscape in order to ‘see it’ as one whole organic form in their mind. But to paint it as one whole viable form can only be achieved through an abstract process, one by which, both a gifted child and a painter like Turner, perform so intuitively. 

This means that normally, we cannot, without practice, perceive a landscape as painters have learned to make them because they were re-created using a kind of abstraction built by planes that move forward and backward on the two dimensional surface.  There is no doubt that a landscape painter will surely look out at the world quite differently than a gardener whose macro-view of intimacy is at a different scale. Conversely, imagine a mouse suddenly seeing his familiar landscape from 100 metres above in the claws of a hawk? 

The painter must be inventive. For instance, he or she needs to build a kind of visual scaffolding that can fashion a foreground, middle ground and background, which when viewed all together, might not be readily apparent to the rest of us because our eyes don’t naturally take them in as one. This is a necessary invention, an  'abstraction' that all painters, from early toddlers to professionals, devise to create their own personal systems with which to make pictures. 

Viewers don’t realise any of this because they don’t have to think about it, it’s a given, and it’s instantly taken for granted. Though most serious viewers of art can sometimes detect when an image falls flat, it’s less evident to discern the attributes of a painting when it succeeds. But the ones that fail usually do so from small bruises throughout like on a fresh pear.

But a painter like Turner, through his experience, knows how to ‘read the room’, intuitively. Like other great artists, He understands intuitively how to reconfigure the visible world through a connivance of both talent and gumption to reconstruct the logic of a landscape and to fashion it into a painted image. Alas, for the gifted and clairvoyant child (and a few lucky painters and visionaries) it’s always innate, yet for most painters it needs to be learned. I was a painter who had to learn it because I had already lost my own creative child much earlier in life, so none of this came intuitively to me until much later on when I re-discovered my early love of painting. 

Put another way; the ‘Academic Painter’, of which there are many prestigious adherents, are trained to paint Nature (landscapes and models), as a compilation of separate parts, attaching them through a painting technique alone. I think that an academic painter appears to be trained to only see a picture as separate parts, things to be attached to one another and joined bit by bit. Consequently, the end result resembles a patchwork quilt, albeit maybe full of skill. But worse, the academic painter only seems to look at the landscape just once,  and at the very start. They then proceed with that concept already established in their vision. A fellow like Turner would naturally be assessing the ‘motif’ from start to finish and yet might even be loyal to his first impression. I know this from experience because I’ve had problems trying to understand this dilemma of working spontaneously over a shadow of memory. 

But unlike this process, a painter with a vision like Turner’s, sees everything as an organic whole image, and one all at once in his mind. The secret of this mind is that it has learned to make sacrifices in order to achieve a whole picture plane, one that we call a painting surface. This is why Turner is such a great example of seeing the ‘motif' as a unified visual idea, one already formed mysteriously in his mind. Like so many other really great artists who produced large pictures in the studio, he managed to hold onto his vision (and memory) throughout the long process.

Either because of his long experience or his immense talents, or both, he saw everything as one, not unlike a poet whose stanza has been stripped away of the extraneous to expose the bones of his feeling.

Dazed

 

This is a reprint from 29th December 2009 when I lived in France. I couldn't resist putting it back up 17 years later.

Finally, to the poterie studio where I have put off too much work before I leave for Australia on friday. Yikes! But I'll get it done.

Its easy work but I need to be inspired and I can easily burn out after three hours

I end up feeling like these teddy bears look, dazed and confused. 

Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

These are simple pictures, they’re not big enough to be considered ‘great’ and they don’t pretend to be so. The idea was just to catch all these wild colours swimming in the twilight sky. There is a time limit to these sessions unlike ones made in a painting studio that can stretch on leisurely for weeks at a time. At the beach some sessions are short, but on my luckier days they can go on and on into the night.

Just as each picture can be so different from one day to the next, I too, am quite different. Somedays I’m joyful, sometimes not, maybe I’m tired and a little grumpy with a mind full of problems, real or imagined. But because I go out there as a habit to work, nature has a way of opening me up to it regardless of my state of mind and as a result, I am always changed by the painting process. Over the years I’ve now been transformed by it and it’s why I still go out there. As a painter friend has always reminded me, “when one paints, one lives better.” 

These studies have also opened me up again to exploring a limitless expanse of the grey half tones that link together all the colours as they cycle around the colour wheel. What surprises me when I take a few steps back to view the whole ensemble is that most of the paintings, even though they obviously share my fingerprints and DNA, they are usually so manifestly different due to the weather.  

Many of what I call my Evening Prayers have been moving gradually towards a flat and graphic disposition. I like that. When I compress the motif down to just a few horizontal stripes of subtle colour is when a small bell rings inside me and I feel good. This is where my compass naturally wants to point on its own. 

I bring all this back to my own desire to see the motif as fresh as if for the very first time, each session, day after day. This means approaching it quickly, seizing it, and subduing it with whatever experience and craft I possess. By working this way I’m able to avoid a sentimental view of nature, something I deplore in Painting. This isn’t a recipe for everyone, it’s just a way I discovered for myself because I am an anxious person, and in this series, I need a colourful frenzy at the end of the day to find peace. 

In summary, I initially thought this project was about colour but to my surprise I discovered it was really about light, without which, there can be no real colour. And because the drawing is fairly easy and without real complications, I can really focus on colour. This is something I began to appreciate over time. By consequence, when I get out there to paint it feels a little like I’m getting into a Waymo self-driving car because I have so few concerns about anything else except to take in the view and enjoy the ride. After all, I’m just looking and seeing.

Addendum, editing this book has taken almost three years. Two and one half years longer than I had originally imagined it would take. It’s been a great experience, the richest one of my life actually, but because I wasn’t a writer I needed to find an authentic voice and become one. So of course I also felt like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde due to all the editing I faced every day. Passages I had thought polished and complete, would over the next day or two, look like someone else had written it. Basically I needed to learn to write. 

 

Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction

                 February 2006, Tombo pen on Muji paper, 15 x 10 cm

For the past eight years, I have been making studies here at the beach on Brunswick Heads on the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Done at the end of the afternoon when the twilight hour approaches, they represent a visual diary of my evening sessions which I came to call ‘Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads.’

Many years earlier, I had seen the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto who spent years travelling around Japan making large black and white studies of the horizon line that appeared to cut it in half. He used an 8 X 10 camera, often with long exposures during all kinds of weather and in every season. I was deeply moved by these things. And although prior to seeing his series, I had never been too fond of black and white photography, in his case, I was taken aback by the painterly nuances of black, white, and a vast multitude of greys. 

Although his images were the inspiration for my own series, I only wished to explore the horizon line in colour using oil paints at the dusk hour. Like so many people, I had spent a lifetime of walking the beach at dusk, and I had long been intrigued with the idea of painting twilight skies. But while Sugimoto’s photos were created using a long exposure, my own in complete contrast, are painted with lightning speed due to the quick colour changes at that hour. 

Although I call it a series now, when I began I had no idea that it would become such a long project. Initially, I had simply wished to get back outdoors to paint again and have some fun mixing colours from the evening light at the beach. I had been previously working in the studio for a number of years where the creative process is so completely different. But one evening I just went out with an easel and a backpack full of colours, rags, and turpentine, to see what I could make from it. Nine years later, I still go out regularly when the weather looks interesting.

I now practice two kinds of Painting forms simultaneously, one complimenting the other. One is done in the studio while the other is out in front of this motif at the beach. They both bring pleasure yet in different ways because they speak to different corners of my curiosity.

Although at the beginning of this exploration at the beach I hadn’t imagined these paintings as being ‘site specific’ or even a serious project of any kind. The early pictures just naturally became a series without much thought at all. It was more of an accident because I had no idea I’d still be painting out there nine years on. Only later did I understand that it might be a kind of ‘site specific’ term to describe it. I had assumed that ‘site specific’ referred generally to a site chosen, then altered by an artist who subsequently documented it in one way or another. In my own case however, it turned into a series simply out of repetition. And though I haven’t altered the site in the least, I see now that I have certainly been altered by it. 

Because the motif is so inherently abstract, being just the sea and sky separated by the horizon line, I use colour as the principal vehicle with which to push the foreground backwards into the painting while at the same time bringing the background forward up to the surface. This is for me one of the greatest lessons from Cezanne, who in the 19th century, single-handedly ushered us into the era of truly Modern Painting by demolishing perspective and breaking down distance. 

During these years I’ve made lots of studies, and through many failures, I’ve learned a great deal while at the same time also growing into the ‘motif.’ I’m always looking for a pictorial resolution in each picture that carries its own illusive logic. I’m interested in the unity of the whole surface as being one that creates a formal integrity for each visual idea. Consequently, if these studies appear scruffy or a little sloppy and unfinished, it’s because I’m certainly more Expressionist than Impressionist. But personally, I like all these spontaneous and accidental elements in my own work and in others’ too. It’s a matter of taste. 

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 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 there was also on a brighter tone, and partly POP, at least in his beginnings, Howard Hodgkins. And not to be forgotten, the really famous and popular David Hockney, whose 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 Picasso 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 the art fails, we'll sigh and quickly move on, forgetting it because we, the public, 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.