Ongoingness

 

6 September 2020

Ongoingness

Evening Prayer Brunswick heads, 28 August 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I picked up a small book the other day by the writer Sarah Manguso entitled Ongoingness and zipped through quickly. I had seen a review of it in the NYT and it looked very interesting because it concerns her diary-keeping. Being a diarist myself, I was immediately sucked into it. It's tiny book of short entries on each page in which she reflects upon her feelings about keeping a diary. For anyone interested in this microscopic form of inquiry, I highly recommend it.

But I mention it because I fell on two entries in her book wherein she remarkably articulates exactly what I have trying to do with my own pictures in this period of my life. 

"I often prefer writer's diaries to their work written intentionally for publication. It’s as if I want the information without obstacles of style or form. But of course all writing possesses style and form, and in good writing they aren’t obstacles....

.... I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them.... the goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect."

This is most interesting for me but I immediately thought of the Japanese Haiku for some reason. 

As improbable as it sounds, it’s as if there might be some mystical way of achieving a painting that reveals no trace of the creator’s hand, actually, no proof of the creator even. In fact, many artists today bypass the entire process by simply exhibiting found objects rather dryly in an exhibition space. No more need of hands! 

Today, it' actually a generally accepted method of working (and exhibiting). It’s the new intersection where the Natural History museum and the Art Gallery are grafted together to make something new. 

I'm almost always up for change but the danger I sense from the viewpoint of the artist as craftsman, is that it also tilts the work of art away from the comfort of craft and into an i-cloud of ideation. And who knows where this evolution will take art into the future? 

The problem for me is that it risks to bypass the long and painful training that is the grunt work of education. I'm old-fashioned, no doubt,  and I like pianos and guitars, not buttons on a console. I also like mixing paints and making a mess more than I like making a few quick clicks on a keyboard laptop to make a painting. Because  I'm an analogue kind of guy, I think it's through learning a craft that an artist's vision is formed of the long haul. But hey!

So though I kind of liked the idea of this miraculous conception in art, it would never work for me even though it's a sexy idea. It would feel to me like cutting corners somehow sort of like letting ChatGPT write love letters for me.

Painting, is an art form distinct, and yes, still noble. It's basically all about the clever and cogent organisation of a colourful mess. Why would anyone wish to deprive themselves of this? 

But Sarah Manguso speaks in tongue and cheek, for that I really like both her mind and her writing.

But anyway, here on the Pacific Coast is an example from last week of an extremely unruly image that exudes a purely emotional response to the sea and sky. Although, it falls terribly short, it’s an example of a failure that I’ve decided to keep as a souvenir. Sometimes it’s interesting to reveals all the warts of a picture even if there is something in it that speaks to a part of me. In this image, it’s as if my id took over from my ego that afternoon. 

I never want to imitate Nature even though it might appear that I do in some paintings. I would say that I desire to mimic it by building up an image with pigment only to then tear it down a little here and there until I get what I want. This might even resemble the way I remember using oil based clay to make sculptures. In this way, 

I hope to get to the truth of what’s inside of the me about the motif. It is a process of editing, but also layering until that secret intuitive pool of meaning is drudged up from the very deep inside me. A writer might describe it as playing with the unconscious, manipulating it, and with discipline shaping it into something of form, a story perhaps. I imagine that crime writers need to find themselves crawling around the edges reason and sanity to discover the hideous nature of certain people and all they do to one another to arrive at the end of a story.

Perhaps, like the crime writer, the choices involved in the painting process can create the idea of the work in question quite unbeknownst to the creator.

Dogfight, part two

4 May 2024

Dogfight, part two

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

This is the second picture from the other evening and it appears far more formal than the previous one. It's amazing how just a mellowing out of the clouds can change everything. It also feels relatively calm compared with the first one, and it actually makes more sense which I hate to admit, means more to me in the end. I wish I didn’t feel this way, but I do. If I were a poet or composer, wouldn’t I also wish to be understood? Being understood, is just about communication, and isn't it about how well a painting communicates to the viewer? 

In all these paintings I simply hope to convey a visual idea through an image, one which might trigger a feeling in a viewer. There isn't much more to it than just that. I'm always interested in reaching out to others, so therefore I work on my language skills which in this case is the craft of painting. Are my skills nuanced enough to engage others without me sounding like a simpleton or a two year old? Naturally, the more subtle the language in an image, the better but I'm not a snob, nor am I presumptuous. But at the same time, I try not to be mysterious or unnecessarily abstruse. In fact, I don't really try to be anything other authentic when I go out to paint the sky at dusk. In my studio work too, I also feel that I'm like that too. 

I mean, art doesn’t have to be arcane, does it? Sometimes it is, but that’s because it’s usually from another age or it has cultural references outside of my own, and that use a different contextual language like that of Aboriginal Art here in Australia.  

And this doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate what is incomprehensible to me personally in painting. Naturally, I apply my western education, so generally as a painter, I just look for visually coherent images whatever its form or style. When looking at riches from other cultures I approach them with cautious discernment. 

But that said, I always still secretly long for pictures which are born with light. What I mean by that is a light that can be illustrated by the term 'chiaroscuro', a kind of description codified by Italian painters somewhere in the 15th century. 

People might often understand this concept as a drawing that's constructed out of 'bright light' from 'dark shadows'. This is crude but somewhat accurate. It makes me think of Caravaggio or Georges de la Tour where the 'lighting' is extreme. But for me, chiaroscuro encompasses an entire spectrum between any measure of light to any measure of shade. 

The Italians also use the term 'Sfumato' to describe an even more subtle gradation of light to shade. It's cool isn't it? It sounds to me like it could be a swear word hurled at someone on a street in Napoli.

But importantly, when I use this term chiaroscuro, I'm referring to also a most compressed version of it like in a late Matisse pencil drawing. For me, chiaroscuro simply illustrates an instance of making any kind of mark on a light surface. No doubt, many art academics might take issue with this degree of extreme simplicity, but hey! 

An interesting comparison that might give a better example of what I mean would be to look at a Matisse pencil drawing next to one of a Cezanne's. For me, and speaking only as a painter, not an academic, I think all of Cezanne's pencil drawings refer back to the Renaissance, and they are a great example of chiaroscuro, when his delicate drawings appear to rise up out of the surface of the paper like moonlight. 

On the other hand, I think of the pencil line drawings by Matisse done in the 1950's, as both very modern in their abbreviation but also archaic like the simple line drawings found in the caves of Lascaux, France. 

Boy! Just any mention of 'light' will take me down too many rabbit holes... Whew..., But this is because, being a painter, I'm not too different than that of a geeky nerd obsessing about computers and the internet when I talk about art. 

 

But getting back to this second picture, the placid nature of it is in direct contrast to the first image so chaotically descriptive from the earlier page. Done not fifteen minutes apart, yet that sky gives up two divergent aspects of Nature and provoked in me such different visual responses. 

Though twilight imposes this perpetual change, these uniquely disparate images are the result of both my own spontaneous spirit, but also the natural flattening of the motif as it approaches  nightfall.

Flat, yes, this second painting does also answer my great affection for all that is flat, but it also speaks of that precious moment on certain evenings when the sea and sky come together with the ease of two young lovers. None of the three pictorial elements of it feel compromised in the slightest way. They repose together like the hands of a young couple in a moment of interlaced affection. If God is an abstract form of intelligence, then painting must surely mimic it everywhere on earth. I think the only thing needed to either make a painting or view one, is an imagination, because this is the realm of Art where magic and mystery are twins.

In the end, all these pictures desire to be reduced to a state when the sea and sky are coupled together in a flat cozy manner. But that’s on a good day, of course. Speaking of this picture, I think if an oil painting could channel a sponge cake it might actually look like this. 

Sartorial something

Because I love colour, both when it clashes and comes together, I have a secret fascination for street fashion, and I'm certainly not alone. So here are some wonderful ideas for everyone who loves both colour and people. 

Disclaimer: I dress badly. i feel uncomfortable in nice clothes, like I don't deserve them. I don't have to admit this because to see me on any street you would make the same assessment in a flash. I don't know exactly when it happened that I gave up trying to look 'great' in clothes but it happened nonetheless. I shouldn't be surprised that I ended up in rural Australia where cargo pants, tee shirts and flip-flops rule. But mind you, some clever sartorial spirits (usually from France, Italy or Japan) look glamorous even here near the sea.

I think that great clothes make me uncomfortable because no matter what I wear, it makes no improvement upon my appearance. So, I guess I gave up. Maybe the truth is that I've never wanted to be visibly present. I'd be happier invisible I think. 

But there's another thing and that's because when I was young I was around a lot of very well-dressed people and I discovered that too many of them were really awful on the inside, underneath the expensive surface. It formed my opinion about human beings at a young age. Of course, this observation was only partly true, partly false, and somewhat erroneous. 

But being a voyeur, I really admire people who get out and hit the street looking great without a great expense. So thank you Simbarashe Cha, the photographer who took these portraits.  

And my fave!

 

Dogfight, part one

4 May 2024

Dogfight, part one

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

This was the first one of two that came out of an evening last week. I had to drag myself out of the house where I was nursing a cold but I could see from the comfort of my sofa that the sky outside was showing great promise so I knew I had to go. 

This one reveals something a little new, a deviation away from all the tight control I consistently exercise in all of these pictures. It’s tiresome, and I’m trying to lean into a more free-for-all mind-set. I enjoyed finding the willingness to loosen up in this small image. 

The weather, sadly, has been so unstable these past six months that it’s been really difficult to navigate the uncertainty, so when it does look decent, a 48 hour man-cold or not, I am out the door. 

My desire for these sessions has been to push myself into newer visual ideas, to open up and work more freely with less conceptual oversight. And so I’m trying to paint wildly and without caution as Paul Gauguin advised his students up in Brittany 150 years ago: “Paint wildly!” he proclaimed. One should remember that this was just after Impressionism and before Fauvism shook up the brushwork. 

But back in the future, it was a beautiful evening the other night, and these skies are a steady joy despite my ritual here, over and over again. The only thing that changes; c’est moi.

It was an easy placid sky and rich with colour despite a messy mush of a drawing overhead, a wave of low hanging clouds were rolling in onshore and moving fast, so consequently, this image is a little wobbly and discombobulated because I jumped into the sky without a drawing in my head when starting out. 

I quickly found myself lost and all I could do was try and lock on to the clouds like a fighter pilot in a dogfight. I thought, “I’m on them, locked and loaded”, and in the end indeed, it looks like a sky full of flack. 

I was determined to be as fresh and spontaneous as possible this night even as I suspected I could fail miserably. If I had started with an idea in my head, it was ironically not to have an idea in my head. Go figure, but sometimes it’s just like that and I accepted it.

Honestly, I’m not so crazy about it, but I was happy to see myself pushing to do something new and unbridled so I kept it. I’m such a control freak, it kills me. It was done quickly in any event as was the second one that night.

“An experiment”, I thought to myself after finishing them both, but aren’t they all? Ruts and routines are easy to fall into in any creative life, and finding a way to climb out can be tricky. Hopefully, the more one paints, the more one’s intuition is strengthened which I guess is a lot like radar helping to guide us when we get lost.

Artists are alone in this task, we’re not like those tennis pros who bitch at their coaches in the stands nearby when they play poorly in a match. Artists take responsibility for their solo vocations, it’s not like they have a nagging spouse to kick our butts all day.

That said, I do ask myself at times, “could it be that I’m tired of what I’ve been doing here at the beach? Have I finally hit the wall here?” 

But this is just what I wail to myself when I’m feeling really lost without a coach in the stands to encourage me onward. Maybe I just yearn to break free but cannot admit it to myself? But free from what? From the motif? From myself? 

And yet despite all this wavering in and out of these cloudy thoughts in my head, I do actually manage to always find newer, more nuanced solutions to the motif, and inevitably, I come back for more. That I do this, still always amazes me. 

At my age, I should know from experience that all these doubts only sprouts up when I’m about to find new solutions. At least, this is how I reassure myself. All the same, I wonder if perhaps I’m afraid of being cut loose from a project that has moored me, and kept me somewhat sane these past few years. I also know deep down in the center of me that these past few years have been the richest of my whole life. Quoi faire?