The simpleton and the scorpion

 12 July 2022 

  

 The simpleton and the scorpion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From last week came some curious studies as the Winter Bloom has kicked in with a small moon. The light in the Western sky has turned electric, and sometimes I have to pinch myself and wonder if I’m not hallucinating.

At the moment there are so many colourful ribbons cruising overhead that I sometimes dream of hopping aboard any one of them like I’m a cummuter in London catching a double-deck bus on the fly.

So, I work swiftly and the speed of execution might seem frantic to an observer but to me the sky is like a colourful pin wheel spinning in the breeze and it’s just beyond my reach. At the same time for the painter, it’s also a double-edged sword, one that slices through the whole world of both the catastrophic and the serendipitous in one quick blow. 

This was one of several, from four nights ago, and it’s my favourite. I like it because its idea is complete, yet at the same time so simple. It’s something whole from which nothing can be added or removed. It says exactly what I saw with little adulteration as if me, as the artist, was invisibly present.

I also like it particularly because it still surprises me even after just a few days of looking at it. I think the point of painting is actually to surprise us, not just once, but continually, forever and ever in fact. A really successful picture is an anomoly, for it breaks Nature’s tenet which says that all things that grow old will also die; fauna, flora, and even us. But a work of Art of any kind, when it really works, it lives on beyond us and it’s something we cherish all the more so because of this fact. Our Art is passed down and protected by subsequent generations. I believe we value it because it teaches us something new about ourselves, and it does so because its creator also learned something new from its act of its creation. Yes, I know, climate change will eventually either drown it, or burn, but hey,,,, I’m not putting a timer on it.

I also like it because it dares to ask a question, another vital sign that a picture is alive and lives out in the the world of humankind. This is picture that does not have an answer for anything. But like A.I, it might possibly have a consciouness all its own and could ponder its own surprising existence. My own search for self-expression, that Holy Graal of creativity for so many artists I think, might just be as simple as painting what’s in front of me because implicit in this action is already a kind of self-expression purely manifested. 

I don’t often look at many of these pictures after they’re finished, I put them away in book shelves in my home where they suffocate all together in tight communion. But within this community they’re at least protected from the mildew of this seaside weather here. 

In any event, like for any creative act, the goal is to enjoy it always but also improve. Because I love tennis and I play regularly, I learn continually from both on the court and at the dunes where I paint. In both activities I’ve learned to act and react quickly by seizing my subject at once and striking like a scorpion with full trust in my intuition. Though I may still be a crap tennis player but decent painter, I’ve improved considerably in both domains, and happily so, because if having painted or played tennis this long without making progress I would certainly be a simpleton.

Red Riding Hood

18 June 2022

Red Riding Hood

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Like any creator knows, sometimes a work of art surprises its author by coming out unexpectantly for the better and leaves them surprised and a little delirious. I imagine young parents feeling that way when their sullen teenager ripens into a thoughtful, intellegent and sane young man or woman. But like childbirth and child rearing, that doesn’t mean that the work came easily or that it lacked all the little choices that make up the process of the piece.  

I am not even sure I know what I mean by all that except that I am touching upon a place where one’s personal willpower or ego has been left on the bench over on the sidelines, it’s where the artist has been kidnapped or seized by the capricious but benevolent hand of a drunken thief sent by the Muses.

Often in this work, a sky can lead me astray and I’m quickly distracted like little Red Riding Hood on her way through the dark forest. But this night was a little different and the sky felt like the diffident girl at a dance, standoffish and aloof, as I approached her. She gave no sign of approval but I asked her to dance anyway and we did, and this picture was her. 

It wasn’t laboured but it came up quickly and only took about fifteen minutes. But like the girl at the dance, the sky had been uncertain, ambiguous and even unfriendly at first. It was a leap of faith as it so often is with creativity and things of the heart. Somehow, I was sure I would find a path through it by sheer stubborn force of habit which I did in the end, for the picture came out as a surprise. 

At the beach, I sometimes feel like an inbriated husband outside the front door without a key. It forces me to sneak around through the back window or any opening I can find. The other night I mixed a palette and proceeded with the confidence of a thief. And, what with so many recent rainy days I had really wanted to get out there by hook or by crook.

For me, and others I sure, I’ve discovered that I always seem to be most present when I’m most absent. It’s because when I am most completely engaged in something I really love doing, I’m elsewhere, or nowhere at all. It happens while playing tennis or the piano when they go well, but I always feel it most preciently while painting these days. Everyone has confirmed this wonderful space; writers, musicians, athletes, car mechanics, neurosurgeons, and even the stone masons in Venice, for it’s the empty space of absentminded-focus where this magic happens. Why didn’t I learn this in grammer school? I wouldn’t have wasted so much precious time.

But this marvellous state of quiet cannot happen all the time because painters must fail a lot, over and over, it seems. It’s the entrance fee for everyone who dares to live fully.

The Zen wise guys call this space the ‘Beginner Mind’, that ‘in between thought’ before one acts. The Ancient Greeks called it ‘The Muses’, the invisible angels who guide us, pushing us relentlessly and who allow us to accomplish the task at hand despite our human inclination for despair. The ‘Muses’ drive the motorcycles and we just get on for the ride I think. 

I know that everyone has felt this from time to time, Thank God, we do feel it at times. (There! you see, I have used the G word after all,,,, after I had promised myself I wouldn’t go near it)

Inmates without doctors

6 September 2020

Inmates without doctors

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This came from an odd experiment the other night. I had gone out to paint with an idea in my head without paying attention to the motif in front of me. I wanted to impose a visual idea upon the session which is already an il-fated proposition. But because this idea had come out of something I had seen in the sky the night before I couldn’t erase it from my head. Maybe like a child, I had wanted something to appear so much that I imagined it would magically re-appear again the following night. 

So on the palette I was also trying to prepare for a sky of a few olive coloured clouds I had seen the previous evening. I was so sure would they would re-appear that funny enough they actually did briefly at the end of the session, but quickly dissipated at dusk when I had already finished and even forgotten about the clouds. But even still, I left with this study that for some reason reminded my of a sticky date pudding.

But I like it anyway, it feels compact and centered around the nebulous block of sea that I had just left in its deconstructed state. I packed up a little early because the sky had died out but to be fair, I was also distracted by an eccentric fellow who has dug out a small camp not ten metres down below where I paint in the dunes. He sleeps on the beach each night in a kind of foxhole in a warm swag, and when it rains, under a colourful canvas top that distracts me. He has showed up these last few years for several months at a time. He is fabulous fabulist, and for a while, he had me going. He was a secret millionaire, a yachtsman, a learjet pilot, an entrepreneur with several properties around he world, etc, etc. He amazed me with a steady stream of carefully crafted name drops , one where stars fell under his magnetism and who put him up for weeks at a time on visits. But, Australia, in the end, is a small pond where all the minnows know each other so I through friends eventually figured him out soon enough. Yet I liked him at the start because I like eccentric folks in this square world.

Sadly, he was always trying to get away from this ‘horrid’ country and back to some unnamed Italian town on the Amalfi Coast. I, on the other hand, had only just arrived here, and I love Australia. But somehow, through his charm and my laissez-faire affection for oddballs (not unlike myself), I left ajar the precarious door to reason and let him into my life likeI would a stray cat.

So the other day, he had come to say hello while I was painting. He quickly launched into a nervous pitch about how the skies were crawling with UFO’s. Apparently, he watches them intently each night from his small foxhole and he loves to tell anyone about how amazing they are. When I arrive to paint in the afternoon I’ll hear about how fast they move until “they stop on a dime” hovering over the horizon but then, just as quickly, they’ll zip back overhead glowing with colour. They return to repeat the same patterns again, and again, much like his fabrications, over and over again.

So as the weeks and months have gone by and the UFO”s have gotten bigger and faster. I smile and feign interest because, like I said, he was kindly, a little crazy, yes, but a gentle soul I thought nonetheless. There are lots of curious souls who inhabit the many small corners of life around here in Brunswick Heads. They are off the grid, as they say and ‘doing it tough’ like they say here in Australia. 

As I move through this contemporary life of craziness, I discover that it’s often hard to discern the bona-fide inmates from the straight civilians in this seaside town. And, I sometimes wonder if there is there a doctor in the house, and would they even make beach calls? But at the end of the day I look at my own life, and is painting this mysterious sky any different than watching for UFO’s each night? 

Like all artist’s I know that Imagination is pretty much everything but not everything at the same time. Somehow, we need to be tethered to the earth if even to have a roof over our heads and enough money to buy food each each. But I’ve wondered also just how long can all this last? Rents are impossible, andI don’t know many poor souls could live in a foxhole on the beach for too long. We are coming up to the end of winter and there are too many young mothers with children who sleep in cars and camper vans around here. It’s heartbreaking. Like they say in Australia, “They’re doing it on the tough”. 

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

4 June, 2020

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

While America seems to swim in turmoil at the moment, I find myself in Australia living a quiet life near the sea centered around Painting and far from the chaos. Many years ago, all of this would have certainly raised my anxiety levels enough to paralyse me but I changed, although maybe aged is a better description. Resistance to mask mandates for protection against COVID-19 seem to be right up there with racism as a social divider. I’m old enough to realise that there is little to nothing I can do to make our society any better than to simply be a person who is respectful of others, kinder, and without consideration of race, gender, or religious denomination. Be gracious everywhere, is my prayer. And yes, I’m a polite, old school American liberal. 

This painting, was the last of three from the other evening. The session had seemed to be coming to a close and I was about to pack up when I looked up and saw a pink field within grasp high in the sky. It could have been my last handhold before reaching the summit so I decided to grab another board and tempt fate.

A winter chill set in and I regretted not wearing a second tee-shirt under my hoodie. The warm ‘glow’ was evaporating from the sky and twilight appeared like a stealthy thief yet something skeletal of it remained in my memory. It was a bit like when you have stared at a bright colour for the longest moment but then quickly turn away and see its complimentary replacing it in your mind. 

This hint of colour was just enough to allow me in to improvise this small study. The ‘bloom’ had mostly faded away by now but what remained in my perceptive field was enough to allow me to invent this. It’s pretty straight forward, perhaps even a little too much so, maybe too conventional even, boring perhaps. But looking at it this morning, it looks pretty straight-forward, nothing to write home about, but correct and works well ticking all the boxes. 

I think paintings like this just pop up once in a while by there own volution as if to say to the painter: “You may not have wished to paint an image like this today, but we, the Muses did,,, so there!” 

It’s funny how, like in a Communist country, you never get what you want, you get what they give you. I’m pretty used to this. It’s one of the more quirky facts about Art. So like every creative person, I’ve become adaptable. In my van, I was driving through Bulgaria back in 1986, and stopped in Sofia one evening. Tired and just looking for something to eat with no fuss I found a pizza joint. To my amazement there was only one kind of pizza on offer; cheese with meat. Being a non meat-eater I ordered two to go and had to scrape off the meat and get outta town as fast as I could.  

But there is a ring of truth in this small study regardless, because it’s so simple and everything in its right place. There is a foreground, clearly delineated, and the grey clouds sit comfortably on a firm horizon. By this I mean that the process was authentic. I often need to re-assure myself with sentences like this whenever I’ve just done something a little boring. But the more I look at it, the more interesting it becomes as a picture precisely because all these mundane elements appear to work somehow together so fluidly. The truth is that when you paint a lot, there seem to be less fireworks. Like a regular sex life over the years, the act can often be just a cheese sandwich and not always caviar. But this has gotten me into a lot trouble when I’ve tried explain that to various partners. 

And yet, like a partner one has loved through thick and thin, it may also be why a painter returns again and again to the same motif at the beach. Not only has this twilight sky proven its fidelity, but it’s shown me my own innocence and vulnerability in front of such beauty. The pink glow at dusk, a young woman’s blush have killed this painter.

Addendum: I really like the sky, those small spontaneous blobs of blue violet that break the swarth of Pink field high above. They were the reason I wanted to attempt this image. To have seen that, and actually painted that whole zone is enough to make a painter happy for a week at least.

Searching for a family of light

28 February 2021

Searching for a family of light

South Beach, F.I. August, 1974, oil on canvas board 20 X 15 cm

This tiny painting, (approximately 15 X 12 cm) was made sometime in August, 1974, at South Beach, Fishers Island, N. Y. It was my favourite beach and like Brunswick Heads, it too was almost aways empty. The dogs loved it as much as me and my brother, who took them most evenings for a walk there. I was introduced to painting in France that previous year, and I was learning to paint out in Nature for the first time. This was one of the rare survivors I managed to keep from those weeks in August. 

It interests me today because it reveals something about my emotional investment in deserted beaches by the sea. It’s also a reminder that like many others living by the sea, I’ve always been enamoured by the light over the ocean at all times of the day. It’s as if I expressly became a painter in order just to emotionally connect with life through these elements. This tiny little image marks the very beginning of me being an artist and not just a painter. This is because my love affair of working at the sea appeared to go deeper than just painting. There was a personal connection with the elements not just with a conceptual one. 

I remember working on masonite at the time which I had clumsily coated with gesso. They were small because I felt small in my life at the time. Like everything that’s really personal in life, it’s too complicated to explain. But, I had small my ambitions, if any at all, and looking back now, it’s perhaps so that nobody would notice me. 

I was only there for a month that year and I only went back a few more times before France swallowed me whole. Most of these studies that August were done on masonite but for some reason, this one could exceptionally be a small canvas board. I don’t have it anymore as I offered it to a friend in France who had liked it. 

By this time, I was already under the early influence of Cézanne’s watercolours, and so this is apparent in the delicate handling of everything. The drawing is almost minimalist and there is a paucity of material which lends itself well to a pale sky. There is a real distance established between the foreground, middle, and background, though it's quite subtle and almost imperceptible. Looking at it now after so many years I am simply amazed that I was able to paint it because today it seems even well beyond my pay-grade, now fifty years on. I know this because I have floundered and failed from so many other motifs which were far easier things over the years. 

What I cherish, is it’s light, a white New England light of the fading summer by the sea. And thus today fifty years later, I find myself painting from a dune at a beach on the rim of the Pacific Ocean. The beach looks almost the same, nothing but dunes as far as one can see much like at Fisher’s Island on the Atlantic ocean. But here, the light is more vibrant and generally less subtle than up in the Northern Hemisphere.

Below are two studies from a few nights ago that reveal that I’m still quite obssessed with light, and its effect on the sea and sky. Done within days of each other, they also display the great variety of weather that churn through here on the coast in any season. They also have distinct personalities because I’m a painter who adapts to whatever Nature throws at me. That is the nature Art.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 February 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 February 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

To mask, or not to mask

13 March 2021

To mask, or not to mask

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In spite of the rain pouring off and on for weeks now, there have barely been a few windows of light. It sometimes pours downs so hard on my steel roof that it feels like I’m wearing an infantry helmet. But when softens down a little, it’s becomes a piece by Steve Reich. The grassy lawn around the house is spongy and it soaks my ankles, so there’s been little painting at the beach these days.

And COVID has hit the area hard and everyone is either anxious or angry, they either wear a mask or they wear defiance. And so the vaccine fight goes on, but one thing is sure, everyone is depressed either way and lonely from everything I hear through the grapevine. I’m a kind of a solitary guy so I’m somewhat adrift to the rhythms of  life in this community and hardly an authentic gauge of truth or sanity around here. I got vaccinated and that’s that. In these matters I’m quite conventional so I don’t have an opinion about others.

Surprisingly though, despite all this turbulance in the air, in just these past few days, the skies have cleared and it has allowed me to get to the beach to mix a palette ‘for work or recreation’ purposes’, so the regulations dictate for us all around here. That said, in theory, we are all in lockdown though it hasn’t really affected me coming out to paint at the beach. This is rural Australia after all, and anyway, I still need my dose of heavenly breezes upon my face.

This was the only one from the other night because I scrubbed out the first. This is only the second or third time in the past few years that I have abandoned a picture. I just lost it, and like the drowned swimmer I recently witnessed here on the beach, I just couldn’t ressurect the light in it. Death, alas, is the same for everyone, but still, it put me in a bad mood briefly. 

So, I then started this one, hoping to reset my mood. It has a feeling in it which I like. I had fun with these gentle clouds that channel my love for strawberry ice cream. At the same time there is also an uncertainty in the way in which they were painted, I think because I was unsure how to treat them. The colours were changing so rapidly and they had to be synced up with the changing sky that was shifting into gold. It was tricky, but this spontaniety forces whatever skills I can muster to follow the colour wheel into dusk. After all, Nature provides the map to all the answers if I’m clever enough to follow it without prejudice.

Addendum; We all wear masks now when we’re out and about. It’s a curious atmosphere, but of course, many don’t, which is also another curious thing. But I caught myself in a mirror the other day at a store with my mask covering most of my face and I suddenly thought to myself;  ‘Wow, I’ve never looked so handsome!”.

Marquet, Matisse, etc

 

22 October 2023

Marquet, Matisse, etc

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Weather has finally cleared after a week of rain and I was able to get out two nights ago to make this painting. It so reminds me of Albert Marquet, a painter I’ve always loved. Once in a while I come up with images that feel strangely inspired by him even if he wasn’t remotely on my mind. What was it, I wondered, that felt so familiar in this picture? How do I define it? Looking at it this morning, I perceived that it was really just a feeling. Sometimes, pictures whatever their size or importance, elicit artistic familiarity through any number of ways. Technically, I could note that he used a lot of white paint which he mixed into all his colours giving his pictures a feeling of a soft overall harmony. Here in this painting of mine, it’s also through a gentle sense of light that permeates this simple image. Does it share with Marquet a sensuous thread of artistic DNA embedded in the surface? Maybe, but anyway, it reveals to me an overwhelming emotional complicity with his entire oeuvre. Something else too, I like its subtle plasticity ingrained  in each element of the picture. 

So to say that I am a huge fan of Albert Marquet would be redundant at this point. He was an unabashed sensualist, to whom no doubt I identified with so completely even as a child.  I was drawn in like a humming bird to honeysuckle.

Indeed, in my opinion, he was far more of a sensualist, more intuitive even than his close and dear friend, Henri Matisse, who achieved superstar status late in his career principally because he was far more of an adventurer than Marquet. Matisse, like an inveterate scientist ventured into newer and heretofore unexplored regions of Painting through experimentation.  

To be sure, Marquet was more comfortable within the confines of traditional painting motifs, and because of this, he took less chances. He was a ‘steadier’ painter than Matisse but one who perhaps reached less heights because of it. What I mean is that his brilliance is even-handed. Perhaps I could explain this in tennis terms, if there are any old timers out there; Marquet was to Matisse as was Björn Borg to Jon McEnroe back in the comfortable world of base line tennis.. Like McEnroe, who expanded the game of serve and volley, Matisse ventured far out of his comfort zone (and our own) but couldsometimes miss the mark. When he is on, he is the best, so don’t get me wrong, I love Matisse, but because he was so willing to experiment, he naturally failed more, often producing stilted and somewhat academic work. Marquet, despite his traditional craft, was never an academic. unlike his good friend Matisse, he was tethered to older, more traditional means of expression. he was a true Romantic unlike Matisse.

I became aware of Marquet’s painting in my father’s books when I was still a child with no understanding of painting. I was just naturally drawn to a feeling in his work. Why is that? Why is someone drawn to certain pictures or even certain painters? Whatever it is, isn’t it grand? Isn’t it what keeps art alive in our cultural community? 

Much later in life, I fell in love with his drawings which really got me out into the streets where (and when) I finally realised just how much I had always despised actually drawing from the model and the still life indoors. Marquet’s spontaneous drawings, along with those of Léo Marchutz, were to become my biggest influences later in life when I found my own assurance with crayon and paper. The most coveted book in my library is a thick catalogue full of Marquets ink drawings from an exhibition I once saw. In these drawings I sense that he is a far superior draftsman than Matisse when using ink and brush, though I would decidedly be in the minority on this judgement. Where Marquet is fluid and spontaneous and in a ‘Japanese zen’ sort of spirit, Matisse is stilted and dry, as if still trying to please his staid professors at The Beaux Arts in Paris. Though later on in his life, I think when Matisse began painting more fluidly, he did open up to a more spontaneous way of drawing. His pencil drawings are wonderful.

Anyway, as always, there is so much to say about all of this,,,,,,.  It’s true that at times, I can be harsh concerning Matisse, and my ideas have disturbed a few friends because, after all, he is a kind God, even to the Post-Modernists out there who grudgingly give him a pass despite his colourful love for the figurative world of joy. But is it not for this reason why some painters (and public) really love ao many of his pictures? Is it not for this kind of colourful love of joy? Our affection isn’t always because a particular painting looks good, or because it answers something deep inside us, (though these are reasons enough to love a painting), is it not because as painters, we wildly admire the solutions that are solved within the complex parameters of each picture, and by each painter? And is it not like that for any vocation which is practiced with diligent care?

Addendum:

Matisse and Marquet were very close friends throughout their lives. They wrote each other continously for decades. I’ve read their correspondance in two small books published in France, and they are the kind of small books that gives one hope not just in Art History but also in humanity and the fraternal necessity of community.