Marcel and Lydia came to lunch

4 June 2024

Marcel and Lydia came to lunch

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

It was thanks to reading both Marcel Proust and Lydia Davis over the past ten years that gave me complete permission to write with abandon, opening up without the fear of seeming pretentious, presumptous or foolish. Proust invited me into the comfy world of lengthy (and painterly) descriptions of Nature, Paris, and love interests. Lydia Davis, on the other hand, invited me to witness her autopsies she regularly performed on her characters, yet all still alive and writhing in pain. In contrast to gentle Proust, I like her sharp incisions through the skin of everyday life. She has a quick visual acuity that rivals Marcel (whom she also has translated). But where he takes a page or two for anything, she pares it down to a sentence; a telegram to a text, as it were.

Writing and Painting are sisters in many ways, but because both are vocations practiced in solitude they each need separate bedrooms. And like Painting, writing is a tricky activity when done with a public in mind. But for me, as I’ve discovered, both activities can only really be learned by just writing and painting a lot. Being an amateur, writing for oneself in a diary, rarely prepares anyone for any reception in a wider world outside but it does connect one to one’s interior maybe even for the first time ever. It performs this mystical adventure by teaching one how to begin stringing sentences together with some assurance. Like with painting, only after much work, and failure, does one begin to feel confident enough to keep at it.

Like Writing, Painting, as a full time activity, can also only be learned by failing a lot. But like most things in life, to fail teaches us how to fail less as we improve. We learn to take it on the chin; no blaming it on anyone else. Though schools are OK, I think both crafts are really taught by the masters, who have already attained greatness, not by teachers. Writers have to read and critically examine a lot of books, poetry, etc, etc, Painters have to look and critically examine lots of pictures. This has been my own education away from the failures at my desk and studio.

Both of these crafts imply style because it’s essentially our creative personality that’s on display. But this, I think only arrives at our doorstep after some successes. How else could we become authentically us? I’m less sure about how style comes to a writer but if it’s like Painting then it poses problems for every student if we think it as all important. In either craft, it can ruin students who are obsessed with discovering it because it actually just finds us. If it doesn’t then we should look for another outlet for our creativity. 

An old friend of mine who has been very prolific in her life as a painter suddenly expressed this problem to me the other day. I was stunned to hear her say this because for me, she has always had a style which is natural and very recognisably personal to herself. She showed me some things from her web site. As it came out, what she really meant to say was that she wasn’t happy with her own style. This is altogether different. So we talked about that for a while. Sure, it can happen that an artist will periodically be dissatisfied with their work. That is something different. This question of style is not that, but it is something which newcomers in many artistic fields do fret a lot about. When starting out, I struggled with a lot of things but somehow dodged that bullet. 

Many years ago, I read a book by the wonderful painter and actor, Martin Mull, who attended Rhode Island School of Design back in the early 1970’s. In it he tells a funny story about one of his classmates in Freshman year who idolised Vincent Van Gogh. This fellow not only went around campus dressed up looking like Van Gogh, but in the studio, he was also trying to paint with Van Gogh’s explosive style much to the amusement of other classmates and teachers. One day, after complaining about not having his own style to the class, his teacher asked him to paint a self-portrait as an assignment. When he returned the next week and showed it to the class, the teacher explained to the confused freshman that any and all ‘mistakes’ in the self-portrait were in fact, his very ‘own very personal style’. His ‘mistakes’ constituted his own way of using a brush with colours on a flat surface. Mull didn't remember what happened to that fellow, but this proved to be a valuable lesson to for him, and needless to say, it would have been a great moment for all the students. 

This study was the first of several a few evenings ago. I had barely started it when I immediately decided to keep in its fresh unfinished state as a study. I saw something in it that I liked and that I wanted to make use of in the future, but maybe larger, and in the studio. It has that flat child-like feel to it that speaks to the kind of pictures I made myself as a child using water base paints. There is also some truth of the moment in it. Does it work graphically? Is there light in it despite its somewhat impoverished colour? In spite of all these things, it created for me a kind of suspension bridge that went right backwards over the arc of time to me as a little kid playing around with paints.

So making these pictures over the past few years has aligned with my habit of keeping a diary over the past few decades. And this ritual eventually taught me to express thoughts that at least at the time seemed authentic to me. When I discovered writers like Marcel Proust and Lydia Davis, I was encouraged enough to believe in my own indulgence, something I think is natural, almost paramount really, for any writer, or painter. Without it we wouldn’t be nimble enough climb tall trees and explore it's fragile branches. 

My diary, to my surprise, was teaching me all about myself.  So when I look back on all those years of writing in museums and filling page after page in notebooks on the likes of Titian and Goya, I finally understood that all that while, I was often obsessing about the hat check girl at the entrance who took my overcoat. 

Goofy

24 April 2024

Goofy

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 April 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A study like this from a few nights ago feels like I’ve lifted the veil away from the classically ‘pretty’ sunset genre. I confess that after painting so many of these rosy things I kind of miss my gloomy side. But in this one I can almost breathe a sigh of sad relief for it appears that I’ve touched a dark corner where I’m equally comfortable. But don’t get me wrong, and I like all the ‘pretty ones’ too. It’s just that my life has been filled with so much melancholy that I’m still distrustful of so much  ‘happy, joyous and free,,,, or pretty for that matter’.  But hey, I’m still getting used to it. Being joyful still takes time getting get used to because I’m an Irishman at heart.

In this picture though, I like certain technical things about it even after just looking at it for a day or two. I’m amazed by those pale lime-colored splotches made from broken Prussian Blue that live up in the rafters of the sky. Like the sound of faint church bells, they’re distant reminders of heaven. But I love how their colours answer the golden expanse that invites nighfallt. But all the same, I cannot (with joy) shake the feeling of an impending tragedy engendered from the whole image. I think the dripping paint in the foreground only re-enforces its tragic air.

It’s never easy to convey pathos in Painting without it seeming overdone or purposefully sentimentalised and manipultive. In other media it’s obviously  easier; films, theatre, opera, photography and dance even. It’s because in the end, all art is about death. And the way to death is of course, through life. Many of us choose to sing and dance our way to the other side in one fashion or another, while others will cry over spilt milk, all the way from the crib to the nursing home. Others still, sit on the sidelines complaining the whole time. And yet, everywhere, in temples, churches and mosques, the faint buzz of small prayers persists like crickets on summer eves. I’m sure this sounds a bit dark, but it’s not, because every second that goes by is a breath and it has its own life, like a metronome. How do we live this great spectacle we call life? 

After so much heming and hawing through my own life, as I’ve admitted in these pages, I finally got the answer for myself, and it’s simply to devote everything to creativity and light. Yes, painting, of course, but also in the participation of spontaneous friendship that I can develop with others if I choose. So hey, we’re all here on earth together, why don’t we all sing, dance and cry together? Is it that hard? Apparently so, but just because we don’t all do this collectively doesn’t mean that we cannot do it in private because many of us also do that. Not all of us need churches and temples to celebrate light. As we all know, human life is brutally hard at times. In many parts around the globe too many people live a life of misery, from beginning to end. And too often, it’s not of their own making for some are born on desolate plateaus while others in a clean hospital in Greenwich, Conn. But suffering also comes equally to both rich and poor for a whole host of reasons also out of our control. 

So at this late stage of my own life, I can make my own happiness and joy, or misery and sadness. So as a result, I choose both art and light, and whether one comes as the main course or the desert, it doesn’t matter the order. It’s after all, my own meal, no one else’s.  

Lot’s of people say that art can change our society for the better but personally I disagree. When and if it touches us, it’s as individuals. Art cannot change a whole society because as I’ve already said in these pages that if Brahms or the Beatles, Shakespeare and Robin Williams, couldn’t prevent Hitler, then, no art can save us. But, I do believe that practicing the art of creativity in any fashion or form, can and will change us one by one on our road to the end.

Lest I sound too depressing, I admit to having been changed for the better by so many writers, artists, and people whom I’ve known in my life. Painting, films, books,,,, so yes, art has helped to reformat my own faulty memory stick of a life.  

Suddenly I remember seeing a video by a conceptual artist back in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s that really knocked my socks off. The artist made short simple videos of various friends and strangers who visted her. In her studio was a box full of plastic cartoon plastic masks; Cinderella, Micky Mouse, Pluto, Snow White, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Goofy, etc, etc...  She would ask her friends pick out one to wear for her project. She sat them down in an old chair in the middle of her large studio. She coaxed them into revealing their saddest, most painful memories of childhood while wearing a mask. It was the most inventive idea imaginable. The one I remember the most was of a woman who had picked out the mask of the cartoon character Goofy. She proceeded to recount a horrid story about incest that involved her father and uncle I think. I was spellbound, and what I learned from this artist’s work is that we can never know the truths behind anyone, no matter what we may think while looking at them. Isn’t that what Art teaches us about ourselves whether we are looking at Rembrandt or Bacon? But on top of that, can we ever know the emotional truth of any artist who is behind the work of Art?

In portrait painting, which actually has a tangential relationship to the video artist because no matter how Goya painted The Marquesa de Pontejos (1786), in the National Gallery in Washington, we’ll never ever know what she hides behind that stoic pose. I think I know more about Goya than his subject just from looking at his portrait. In a work of art, where does the suffering exist, in the sitter or the artist? Inverse to this, the video artist lets her sitters do all the contextual work in this art form. Remarkable! 

So in this picture, the sky, like the sitter I saw wearing the Goofy mask, was real, but its interpretation was an abstraction bound by the rules of my own memory that’s both flexible yet stern.

Kill the Buddha!

 

6 February 2021

Kill the Buddha!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 October 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When I think about how much joy I have in my life today I’m really grateful because it wasn’t always so. In my previous life I believe I was a pretty gloomy fellow and I was always looking for some way out of myself. What is happiness if it’s not small doses of joy each day as if microdosed like an Irish mist of bliss?

To be honest, most of these painting sessions give me great joy. I can admit it now at this stage of my life. This joy is composed of satisfaction but surprise too, it’s as close as I’ll ever get to a pink cloud.

I really enjoyed painting this study from a few nights back. One of four, it was like gulping down a Perrier on a hot day with a lemon twist in it. The bright rich yellow against that pale lime strip of sky also reminds me of the ripe wheat fields of the Luberon before they’re cut in July. Yes, it’s a seascape done in Australia, but it’s also a postcard from France that sends me nostalgia. Is that why I feel this particular joy upon seeing it? Certain wise folks in the East say that happiness is but the by-product of living creatively and making right choices in life. So isn’t this joy of mine the same by-product of just painting a picture after all? Can I think of it as the icing on the cake? 

Although my heart and soul still floats over Europe like I’m a blimp, I’m still reminded that it’s in in my newly adopted country here on the Pacific where a part of me, previously unknown, came alive.

What I know is that I needed to find something different, a new place where I could discover something unexamined in a creative way. I only vaguely felt this before changing continents because I was under the shadow of so many ghosts in France and Italy, but also in America too. 

Having painted in France for such a long time I also understood that I no longer wanted to paint as a student of anyone else anymore. Nor did I wish to have any master hanging overhead like an old crucifix, not Cézanne, or anyone, not even my beloved teacher Léo Marchutz, for whom I owe everything. 

In Japan, they say in some Buddhist circles that when you see the Buddha, you should kill it. I’ve always loved that expression. I think even the Buddha himself used to say it. It not easy to grasp and perhaps it goes against all of what we were brought up to believe in the West. In order to be reborn, even creatively, I think, we must kill even our most beloved parents and teachers whose love has nurtured us and to whom we owe our intellectiual curiosity. We need sharp machetes to clear out a pathway for ourselves. Though my own attempts at slashing away my conditioned responses in life haven’t been entirely successful because I’m still fairly neurotic, I keep at it regardless. I also know that my education in Painting will always be a kind of pale ghost hanging around me like a siamese twin no matter where I paint and I'll always carry around my French palette full of light. 

Stravinski, but also Fields and Kern

9 October 2024

Stravinsky, but also Fields and Kern

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 October 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When asked what his definition of music was, Igor Stravinsky replied that “... music is an organisation of tones, an act of human mind. I remember a phrase of the great philosopher Schopenhauer who spoke in the same terms about music, and the musical tones that inhabit and form a universe of their own in which the human mind has created the materials and reduced them to order.”

When I saw this in a clip taken from an old documentary I was reminded of how it related to the organisation of a painting. Similar to ‘musical tones’, drawings, are for me, like bones that build the skeletal frame that allow a painted image to be assembled from random and disparate ideas through brushstrokes, all of which are assigned an order by the human mind. Whew... I hate getting so pedantic, but hey!   

For myself, I see a painting’s colour harmony acting like all the muscle, flesh, and the skin of its surface. But within that structure there also lies the drawing that either holds an image together or lets it float undisciplined around the picture surface. There are a zillion different kinds of paintings out in the world today and all of them take us on different kind of journey. Like with musical harmony and melody, drawing and colour are both equally important, yet a predominance of one over the other will naturally dictate the kind of painting it becomes. But without either of them, I’d say just to abandon ship. 

Every painter (or musician) finds their own personal form just as water finds its own level. Today more than ever, the world of Painting offers so many different ways of creating, both order and disorder, that it can make me dizzy at times. In many ways I’m glad that I’m no longer a student faced with so many of these vast choices confronting me. 

When I look at this picture from a few evening's ago I see the effort I made trying to walk a tightrope between my attention to a solid idea and one to an ephemeral free-wheeling colour structure. Is there enough delicate form within it to hold this colourful surface together? With such limited time in these sessions it’s easy to get it all wrong. These are precious moments when I sometimes feel like a wizard summarily ordained to transcribe a fragile sacred text in the sky.

This picture is a precarious image but I hope it stands up on its own. But as always, I trust that if it doesn’t, then maybe tomorrow, or the next day, I’ll get closer to getting it right. I always believe in this hope, that I’m on the right track at least in this series because I have faith in the motif to lead me there.

Hope is a funny thing though. I still secretly hope for a lot of things actually, despite the wise Buddhists who tell me that hope is a useless idea. I’ve always wrestled with that because hope is one of those American ideals I was brought up with. Like apple pie, it has a whole narrative all its own, and which comes with a melody that can nudge me gently whenever I feel blue. I have lots of melodies in my head, but my favourite is ‘Pick yourself up’ with lyrics by Dorothy Fields and music by Jerome Kern. BTW, Diana Krall plays and sings a great rendition of it, and it still always cheers me up.

But a world without hope is indeed a bleak one. Many of my friends share their despair to me about the state of the world (but mostly about America at the moment). I commiserate with them but I don’t feel the same way somehow. Yes, it’s bad over there, but it was worst in the 1930’s. We can never forget that awful chapter. But I try not to rub it in because when we’re really blue, we feel what we do. Though each of our pains are unique, like snowflakes they fall equally upon us all.

Though I would never say this to friends who are in a deep funk, I do secretly wish for them to paint the sea in front of a twilight sky. But if not the sea, then anything and everything at any time of day is a worthy subject. Creative acts change our thinking. I say this because, although most of my pictures may never see the light of day, the joy of painting, as any amateur knows, is its own remedy, and it can steel one’s heart from the onslaught of sadness and despair. These fragile images from the beach that give me such electric bliss might also be my own small lamps that I light in this darkness. 

Lost and Found @ Marcel Proust

2 April 2021

Lost and Found @ Marcel Proust 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 30 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

Here is the first of three pictures from the other evening; large lumbering clouds as thick as a family of polar bears all huddling together. The sky was just beginning to turn and I was hopeful for a few studies. It was lit up as if with theatre lights of soft pink and yellow, glowing like a theatre stage. When I began mixing colours, the cloud bank itself resembled an arrangement of giant peonies. 

Lately, I’ve been reading letters from Marcel Proust to his upstairs neighbor on the Blvd Hausseman in Paris. The correspondence makes up a book translated from the French by the clever Lydia Davis. Reading this small volume is easy, like taking a short cut through the thick forest of Swann’s Way which I read in English after failing to get through it in French many years earlier. It had rested dutifully on my bedside table like a medicine too arduous to swallow despite knowing it would heal me. I gave up after about fifty pages because I was and still am, somewhat weak-willed under the weight of a French paragraph. But years later, I find myself here in Australia, far enough away from the limelight of heady distraction, yet thirsty for Paris all the same, so I tried again in English with the lively translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis. This time around I read leisurely as one really should.

But this small unique book of unusual banter is a warm surprise for any fan of Marcel Proust. It’s a concise collection of mostly trivial and anectodal musings that move at a sprightly pace. Curiously, we do not have any of his neighbor’s letters written back to him but this could actually be a good thing because after all, who wants to be in the ring with Mike Tyson?

I really like these letters because he gets to the point quickly whilst never losing that loitering visual style, as descriptive, as it is long. Lke his cousin Henry James across the ocean, Marcel Proust could also go on, and on, and on. One either loves him for it, or quits. I sometimes wondered myself whether or not I would become trapped in it, flattened between pages and lost forever like an artic explorer. 

There are many hardy readers who make it through all seven volumes, and I am faint with admiration. On Reddit I found a reader who went through the whole set in a year reading ten pages a day. They made it sound like a long journey with beautiful vistas and stunning mountain ranges but also boring empty plateaus that go on for hundreds of miles. Other readers describe how it brought them closer to God. But in any event, it is an event! it’s an adventure in artistic stamina for both the writer and all the rest of us who trail behind like a mass of marathoners through all the borroughs of NY. The artist in this case gave it his all, just like Nadal and Federer, and Van Gogh and Gauguin, though the latter two never saw the prize money. But we the readers give it our all too. Without the real lovers of art there would be empty museums.

I don’t want to go too far astray in all this but just so you know, lots of people have been also eaten up by all sorts of art work in museums and lovely homes everywhere. Like long novels there are also innumerable, over-sized, and intricate pictures into which intrepid amateurs of painting visit on a regular basis like it’s dialysis treatment.  I can think of artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegal, the elder, whose large pictures take some of us on journeys from which we never return at least in the same psychic state. And again as I always have to ask; isn’t this what art is for? One might need to be a brave soldier to make art but to love it requires a hallowed heart I think.

For me, when I think of reading Proust, I often imagine that I’m watching long thin sculls from the edge of a river bank gliding effortlessly through glassy water, each crew moving in a languid precision and slicing the water like a butter knife. It can be hypontising just to watch as time seems to switch off. And this too is about Painting or any creative act I’m sure. Can the painter and viewer both give up the stopwatch long enough to allow the work to meander freely on its own accord? Can one let go and have faith that they’ll be scooped up towards the end of their artistic endeavour and be delivered safely home again yet some place different? 

What I also loved when reading Swann’s Way was that I felt like was on a luxurious ocean liner of long ago, like I was taking a year off to see the world through the lens of 1st class life. But the same time, I also parachuted into the pages of the slow luxuriant and idle world of Hans Castorp living high up in the Swiss alps. Both protagnists lived parallel lives but one searched for the meaning of life through illness, the other through pleasurable romantic indolence.

But here, in the 21th century, our lives seem to have sped up so quickly that many of us can no longer sit still. It’s like we haven’t yet learned that an easy cadence is not just reserved for the wealthy but also for those who seek out refuge in an oasis of art. Marcel Proust has taught me emphatically that at least in the imagination of my mind, there is a vast landscape, indeed continents to explore in just painting alone, and it can be done at a leisurely pace. We can (we must) put aside our smart phones and such, even temporararly, if we truly desire to find some peace away from a relentlessly invasive news cycle. I know, from experience.

Of course, no matter how much they like to complain, it’s so much easier being wealthy. What do they say Time is Money? So theoretically, the more the money, the more the time. To use all this time to get lost in any form of art is a worthy cause I think, but I’m biased of course. Ironically, the Rich of today seem to love the frenetic pace of working more to make even more money. In yesteryear, of course, they possessed all the time in the world because basically they could afford to. But they could afford to, because everyone else was running around below deck to make sure that enough coal was shovelled into the giant steam engines propelling this affluent life they lived. How else could the Grand Bourgeoisie calmly repose in chaise-lounges on the decks of so many boats drifting toward the 1st World War?  

Left to their own devices, Proust also reminds us continuously just what busy-bodies the Grand Bourgeois were really like. Today, in contrast, the wealthy fly faster, and higher in their private jets, and they seem to love making more and more deals. Are they any less insecure?  Do they reside in a state of calm curiosity? Boy, I certainly hope so, but what I read about them in the NYT, I kind of doubt it. Suddenly, all this makes me think of the marvellous story by Eugene O’Neill that I loved in school, The Hairy Ape. 

But again, back here on mortal earth, and again in this surreal 21st century, it’s been a strange few days recently, I occasionally slip into that French ‘existential angst’ for no real apparent reason. Life is pretty good despite COVID. I’m getting a lot done in the Painting world and my piano study always improves and gives me joy. But it occurred to me that all this might be because I live a life of solitude. There are days that slip by me when I realise that I haven’t had a converstion with anyone else. I’m reading a contemporary book, Orphic Paris, a kind of diary by the poet Henry Cole who resides in Paris. On one of the first pages is just one quote by Verlaine: “A man alone is in bad company”.  Should I worry?

A painter gets it right or dies

   

12 September 2021

A painter gets it right or dies

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

I remember pulling this study from the boot of my car the other day to bring it into the house and when I quickly looked at it, I thought to myself, “Once in a great while, a painter gets it right.”

It was an early Spring afternoon with a slight fresh breeze and a few people up and down on the on the beach. This was the first of four painted from one of those hazy soft skies, the kind that gently obscures the pale clouds at the very end of the day. When I arrived to set up, I had noticed this small, raspy orange trace of sunlight that appeared to be glued onto the delicate sky and just ready to be painted. Then I remember thinking before putting these brushstrokes down, specifically in these words:  “YOU’RE GONNA STUFF THIS UP!” 

One doesn’t get a second chance when one stuffs up such a fragile image like this, but if one does, they must keep going until another solution is found. In these paintings from the beach, I personally hate going further into an image just because of mistakes I must try to fix. It means reconfiguring the picture completely into something else as I've already noted many times in here. It usually works out well but some images I really, really like so much that I don't want to hurt it. It's like licking an ice cream cone that you want to keep forever. Invariably though, you do what you have to do and accept that it becomes a different painting for better or worse.  

So in this one, I still took a long pause momentarily before putting down these small whispers of orange just as I imagined seeing them. There was no space for thought, just intuitive movements like those made by an excited child. The picture was done in about fifteen minutes. 

Writers always talk about the ‘crumby first draft’, and I always think to myself: Boy are they ever lucky, because a painter who works like me doesn’t have the luxury of a first draft. He must get it right or go off to suffer an ignoble death in some dark hole in the ground. Eventually though, he'll rise again like Lazarus and return to fix it, finding the courage to turn it into into something completely different. One needs not only a lot of talent or grit for this sort of thing but divine intervention too. As I noted a week or two ago, only the Dutch were very good at this sort of thing but they’re now dead. 

Anyway, I've sort of come to appreciate these obstacles because left to my own devices I might be just churning out sweet sunset images for a Hawaiian calendar. 

I've learned to be flexible late in life even though they say the opposite is true for older guys. But at least in this painting gig I'm able to adapt to the circumstances quicker than ever before. So, in every painting session, even though I know I’m not cool  or calm enough to be a poker player, I've learned to adjust to the next situation. Naturally, this helps in every corner of life, but in these quick images at the beach it's especially fortuitous to be nimble. 

What I really like about this small study is the complete unity of expression, a feeling as if the motif were both seen and felt all at once, ingested even through my imagination and then gently exhaled upon this modest canvas board with the light touch of a magic wand.  

One cannot see the thought process involved in its fabrication for it was hidden even from the painter. It makes me think of how much I appreciate the frank conviction of a child’s painting, one which originates in their spontaneous imagination, only to then be pushed out with sudden glee. 

This is one of the most fragile images to come out of this series.