Doubt is our passion

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The weather has changed again, after intermitant weeks of rain the skies are mostly now clear so I’m again allowed to get to the beach. As we approach the Winter Solstice, the afternoons begin to clam up like heavy iron doors each day before 17h. But hey! Soon, enough, I tell myself that by the end of next week the days will lengthen and so will my optimism grow again too.

When I returned to the beach the other night I had a string of good days of work though I did feel like a novice. No problem, it happens a lot when I’ve been away for even a week. But also it feels invigorating. I guess it depends upon how much, or how little sleep I’ve gotten the night beforehand.

So I approached the afternoon with cautiously but with excitement too. The afternoon had been super clear and the air was cold and windless. This was the first of three studies from the other evening which all came quickly. This season at the start of winter often brings bright turquoise and lemon yellow seas at the dusk hour. Sublime lime! But how to capture it? 

This one in particular embodies something that surprises me. It may be that I find pure joy that in it, and I wonder where it came from? Surely not me? It seems to sing, and I say this because it’s been so rare that I’ve been able to access this quality. Too much of my work has rarely exhibited love for joyous things. I’m melancholic fella even if people find me somehat affable. I’ve always been drawn to darkness. Sadly, pathos for me, has been a stronger bridge to others than joy. But hey!  Maybe I’m changing? 

If I were to make titles for any of these paintings I would certainly call this one ‘The Incredible Lightness of Being’, to steal from Milan Kundera’s brilliant book of yesteryear. All I can say is that I am continually amazed and grateful that this motif, like a village fountain, is a gift that keeps giving and giving so generously since forever. Of course, it’s just the same motif I first approached five years ago, and its mercurial behaviour remains the same night after night. What has changed has been me, because it has made me a better painter today, and that’s only because I’ve learned to see better. Over time, this is what a good and hardy motif can teach even a mediocre painter.

Like all work, the quality of one’s paintings goes up and down in the short term, maybe it has to do with the mood of the Muses. I think it’s the same for every painter, whose one great painting session can awaken them and silence our doubts. But for those awful pictures, one needs both resolve and faith that have been stored within throughout all the seasons. After all, isn’t this why all seasoned artists, writers, and musicians keep showing up day after day, to trudge over their own landscape filled with both failure and success?  For Henry James once wrote, “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion, and passion is our task -- the rest is the madness of art.”  Henry James (1843 - 1916) What artist could argue with this?

But here, even inspite of myself, the joy is apparent, and I’m so glad for it. I painted it quickly and I even like the wonky horizon line that droops slightly on the right. But even this, is just a part of an organic whole, a creative mishap, not really a mistake, more like a misstep, and these missteps reveal the process of painting and give it its originality, like it or not, and for better or worse.  

It’s a flattened picture, compressed like a candy wrapper one might find on a city street. This flat quality is everything I’ve been secretly coveting ever since ‘seeing’ Matisse decades ago. I just didn’t know how to get there authentically on my own. Such a conception of painting one cannot fake. It has to be ironed out slowly from lots of failure. What I also really like is that this picture is not locked to the horizon line but exists beyond it, in a world of make-believe and into the realm art. These are now winter skies and winter seas that sparkle and glow as gentle June calms the ocean down. 

In the end, I’m so grateful that I’m the author of all these things for better or worse, even for my most worst things because they’re still like offspring to me, and I accept them all. If I saw this one study somewhere for instance, on any wall, celebrated or otherwise, I would rush over to it embracing it like a young mum to her infant son after school. Is this vanity? pride? or perhaps just foolishness?

Painters and paramours

14 July 2023

Painters and paramours

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Painters and writers, are not tourists. When we look at pictures, or when we read books, we’re investigators. With the obsessive fervour of private dicks we scour every squirrelly squiggle on a canvas as we parse each sentence on a paragraph.

Writers also read books differently than other people in the same way that painters look at pictures differently. It’s not a big deal, it’s just the way it is. It’s not unlike a certain mechanic who will stop to admire an old Porsche type “C” that's parked on a street somewhere. Just like a painter, he sees all of it at once, and he understands why all its round forms organically fuse together through each of its perfect and separate details. It's because he sees beauty and he knows how to respond to it. But there are gardeners too, who, where most of us see empty fields, will behold lush gardens. 

It’s the same for lovers of books and paintings, watches and golf clubs. Objects of desire attract everyone of us who have a vested emotional interest in them. These are true love stories, unusual ones, but love affairs all the same. These love affairs are so powerful they can break up otherwise perfectly happy couples. 

And so, art is a formidable love affair, as it should be. It is not just a question of liking, preferring, or coveting an art work. It’s about a whole world of mystery, craft and obsession. But behind everything, it’s about love of craft. Proust wrote somewhere in Swann’s Way; “We no longer love anyone else when we’re in love”, and that sentiment can also be true about art. Like in the civilian worlds of the human heart, creativity makes us forget about everything else going on in the world while we're working.

Even reminiscing all his beloved images can plague him at a moment’s notice and for any reason all. While in the wee hours of the night and next to his beautiful wife, an imaginitive painter might still be dreaming of Goya’s Marquise de la Solana. In fact, everything he’s ever seen and loved is at his fingertips, and like on his smart phone, everything can be called up instantaneously. His imagination relentlessly tempts him, taunting him with memories of all his favorite things. 

This bright yellow painting was the first of three from the other night. It was a wonderful sky, so simply delineated into three wide stripes of colour that I had no trouble grabbing them quickly within minutes. The clear winter light felt like an invitation allowing me an easy access into both sea and sky. This one turned out to be a super fast study only because I wanted to preservere it in my memory bank for future work. I stopped after a minute or two. Sometimes it’s like that. Once a palette has been prepared I have all I need for a picture lasting up to an hour, or even a minute. Though it may look rough and unfinished, for me, there was no need to go further. Of course it might have become another picture but lots could have been done to also ruin it. What do they say: “Brevity is the soul of wit” ditto sometimes, in all forms of art. 

 

Marthe’s perfume #2

28 July 2022

Marthe’s perfume #2

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

This was the third study from the same night and unlike the previous two that seem more conventional, this appeared to be a new and unusual destination. It’s barely discernable as a seascape, rather more non-objective, a place I love to visit as often as I can in front of these twilight skies. It’s a simple picture, so austere really that it’s just three planes of colour that appear to melt into the twilight haze. Whereas the previous one appears to also fade into the twilight air, this one appears to be baked into it like a sponge cake and I would love to see it as a larger picture. It’s an idea that naturally appears more adaptable to a larger format I think. It also seems to open a glass doorway into a place where I'd wish to find myself quite soon. I live for these moments of pictorial clairvoyance, it’s like I’m receiving postcards from my own future.

I work so quickly in front of these shifting colours at this hour that I have no time to think. That’s a relief, but redundant too because I find myself writing this fact ad nauseam in almost every diary entry. This is in such contrast to a studio space where I would have leisurely moments to think and postulate, fantasise and reflect, all the while smoking lots of cigarettes in order to disguise this procrastination. It’s definately not out there on the dunes where I am harried like a New Yorker during rush hour. But anyway, I’ve come to understand that art hates procrastinators. 

This image in particular, made me think of Thomas Aquinas today because he speaks of art’s imitation of Nature as being contingent upon how I see and interpret what Nature is giving me at every nano second while working. If at the motif, I’ve been faithful to the information I’ve received, then there is a good chance it will reveal some truths about the motif. 

And so thus in this picture, if I’ve been true to both the drawing and the colour in the motif then it has a good chance of working as a painting. If a painting doesn’t ‘work’ then it would either it be deficient, or that maybe the viewer cannot buy into the illusion I'm presenting. Tricky business. In Painting, unlike life, one might say that what is true doesn’t always appear real because what appears real isn’t always true. 

For me, unlike in Maths where two + two equals four, it's in art that two + two will always equal five, because a successful solution in a picture will always be greater than the sum of its parts. 

I had always imagined Art in this way, so it was a surprise to learn that George Orwell had already created this metaphor in 1939 to illustrate how an authoritarian leader dupes his citizens to believe that two + two = five when the leader says so. So yes, for me, this surreal equation means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts only when referring explicitly to a work of any kind of art. 

It’s actually closer to Aristotle’s meaning that the whole is something else, more ‘mysterious’ than just the sum of its parts. This adds an additional element that binds art to the mysterious, something which I like.

But in the end, all these words and ideas of Thomas Aquinas, George Orwell, and Aristotle, don’t mean a hill of beans if an image doesn’t live. If this painting above cannot stand on its own, then no rhetorical gymnastics can keep it upright. For me, the structure of a painting can even be as fragile as perfume if all its elements are cohesively united. 

 

Marthe’s perfume

28 July 2022

Marthe’s perfume 

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

I’ve had some wonderful evenings lately as I rediscover the delicacy of these winter skies when the sea can be turquoise and the sky champagne, the colour of perfume. I made six or seven studies over the past few sessions and I’ve felt drunk with joy. 

This is the first of three studies from the other evening. The drawing in this first one is more conventional than the one on the following page. It began with a very pale sea as the cloud bank turned pink. It’s the kind of picture I’ve dreamed of blowing up in size. In the studio I’ve tried to scale up similar ideas but have yet to succeed. My problem is always my own impatience but maybe I also lack the necessary skills to proceed thoughtfully into larger versions (150 X 150 cm) because it’s such a different process. Everything I’ve done in the studio so far, feels like I’m cut off from the wind and the changing colours but the light too, from all those spontaneous elements that feel so necessary and natural outdoors.

One of my heros, Pierre Bonnard reworked his paintings over months and years in the small studio of his home in Le Cannet above Cannes. I imagined him painting with speed of a snail. Ensconced in his private quiet life life, he painted everything around him: his wife Marthe in the bathtub, a whole host of still lives from the dining table, the dresser tops, and the open door which always led out somewhere towards more light outside on the terraces and the gardens. He painted vast views looking West down to the coast when needless to say, the view was unobstructed in that period before the Second World War. Strangely enough, when I was thirteen, I spent a summer there not a stone’s throw from his house and must have ridden by it a million times on my mobylette, but I was oblivious to Bonnard then. He is a giant for me now, but also for so many others of the art public who yearn for his slow-motion notion of beauty.

He tacked up loose canvases around the studio walls when working, and one only has to look at a photo of him to glean his gentle, stoic patience. He worked like this for years on various paintings and yet his output was remarkable. These photos of him in his studio puttering around his simple home and gardens can be a shock to see when juxtaposed with our contemporary world view of artists in their respective studios that fill fashion magazines. 

I love his entire oeuvre because it’s both deeply personal but sensual too. It’s rare that his pictures don’t open up like windows through which we can collectively voyage outward with him into a mysteriously playful but complex vision of Nature. 

He was a colourist, and his oeuvre is so full of lessons that one could learn everything about both colour and light from his very personal and exotic understanding of it. But in his drawings too, there is a universe of small pencil drawings that fill hundreds of sketch books which are intimate and completely realised with so little material. Unlike his pictures, one can experience his quick and spontaneous nature.

 

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Orphic Olympics 2026

So the Winter Olympics are here again in Italy. Nice! 

The World news is so grim, we all really need something to celebrate. And what we really celebrate is youth. 

Being an aesthete, I'm naturally a severe judge when it comes to each countrie's team uniform. I'll keep it simple and just nominate a few countries that stand out in this sartorial category. 

I cannot speak for all their uniforms but Kazakhstan definitely takes out first prize for the the look of their Mogul skiers (above). Who doesn't love lemon yellow over off-white? And with the deep blue bib,,,, really!

But I was also very impressed with the Canadian hockey teams. That intense red is wonderful. But especially, kudos to the graphic artist who created the colour of the maple leaf. It's not pure black like some lazy, colourblind designer might have done. It's a dark broken black colour with subtle relief in its drawing, very subtle and sexy. In fact, although it's hardly discernible, this bright orange/red jersey is also slightly broken in colour, and it's why the whole thing works so well together with the black paints.  

The women's team in white is cool too, not subtle, but simple. 

Although I thought some teams looked awful, I've decided not to point them out, I'll stick with the winners. 

I also like the refined look of the French hockey teams. Typically both discreet and subtle even in a brawl.

I've picked up a book from my table, one that I read a few years ago, Orphic Paris, by the American poet Henry Cole. It's lovely read and takes me right back to France where I sometimes need to be in my spirit. If you want to know what orphic means, look it up,,, because I had to. 

But here, near the beach, and in another world completely, I still get out to paint when the weather permits. I'll do anything some days to get away from editing my own book which feels always endless and too full of mistakes.

Below are a few things from the past few weeks. This first one is from last night. I had been  lazy all day due to the extreme heat but managed to get out for just one picture as I was late. It's OK, but a bit too much verisimilitude, even though I did have fun with the deep dark violet sea. No worries, "just keep at it", I say to myself because I feel awfully lucky to have something to do when I go to the beach. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads,28 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Continuity

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)