30 November 2020
The chariot of the Goddess Selene
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
This week I was looking at photos and videos from visits to London and I came across many from the British Museum where I used to draw from the marble reliefs, especially the famous horse’s head at the Parthenon Sculptures.
When in London I usually make a beeline to the National Gallery where I visit with Piero della Francesca and Paulo Uccello. The next day it’s to the British Museum where like many tourists I’m haunted by the head of the horse on the far right display of the Parthenan. It’s one of the exhausted horses that draws the chariot of the moon goddess Selene throughout the night until dawn. If not sculpled by the master Phidias himself, it was at least drawn by him and executed by ones of his assistants in the 5th century. There are two heads which bookend the immense display of the Parthenon pediment. There are two other horses and Selene’s torso in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Originally, on the left corner of this pediment the chariot of Helios, the Sun God, rose from the sea at dawn to ride across the sky until dusk when the chariot of Selene the Goddess of the Moon took over riding the night until dawn when her chariot sinks into the sea again. At the right end of the pediment is what is left of the head of one of the stoic horses exhausted from fatigue.
Though it’s hyperbolic to admit, these works are at the height of technical perfection while at the same time, synchronised with an intuitive feeling of pathos unique to rare artists and artisans in throughout history. Like so much that came from the Mediterranean basin these works seem to be infused with a feeling of profound tragedy, so naturally a guy like me is quickly drawn to them. Like Netflix, which has a category entitled, “Movies to see in your lifetime”, these antique reliefs and sculptures that make up the Parthenon in the great hall of British Museum, are also things to be seen by everyone at least once in a lifetime.
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
As we know, both dawn and dusk have been celebrated for thousands of years on earth. So though I detest the hour dawn, I do celebrate dusk in my own way here at a beach on the North Coast of New South Wales where like so many other places in my painting life I’ve also been drawn to the twilight hour like a wolf. Unlike most beach lovers, as I said, I shrink from the arrival of the dawn light like a vampire when the intense blazing light rips me away from all I cherish in the shaded nuances of night. But full disclosure; I came into this world at 8 AM and I think I hated to being pulled from the comforts of a womb entombed in dark and ignorant bliss. Was it was the bright light of the delivery room at New York Hospital that marked me forever with this distress? Could be, all I know is that though the dawn heralds great promise for most, it’s a huge let-down for me and it fills me with a general unease that’s impossible to understand. There! I've admitted it finally, and accepted it wholly; I’m a nocturnal creature who is roused from the torpid sunlight facing the bright day with 'my gloom-pleased eyes', as John Keats wrote in Ode To Sleep. But at twilight when Selene arrives driving her black hearse I'm again freed and liberated from my sunny woe. Sometimes she sees me and waves glumly and I wave back with good cheer at the night ahead.
So naturally, I perform better as the sun loses its grip over the vivid landscape when twilight sinks into the earth like a shower of fine fairy dust. These four pictures were all made under such an uncertain light. They were painted recently over the past few weeks and they appear to express perhaps my own regret at tragedy of perhaps being born. This made me think of the horse's head on the right end of the Parthenon pediment. It's amazing what comes out of both a painting session, but a writing one too.
Many pictures done here at the end of the day are bright and colourful because they exude the optimism at the start of a session. On the other hand, these four, like cabooses, arrived at the end of each session when dusk dies and yields to darkness.
They speak to the night that arrives by its on own volition no matter what the day has wrought. Weddings or funerals, love discovered, or just discarded, a child is born or dies, but both the terrible and joyful events of any day consistently will comes to an end.
So again, compared with so many other paintings in this series that so often appear to exude a kind of beaming but quiet hope, these possess a gentle gloom. I like that they are so vastly different from day to day. I also like their casual finish, for they look a bit scratchy and beat up, insouciant even. My diary tells me that I was reasonably happy with them but not much more.
As we approach the summer months the days seem to yearn for humid heat which brings a haze to the late afternoons that I can already see in these pictures. Like the brushstrokes themselves, they speak to the transitions that also go on underneath the surface of our lives life at every moment. These are simple studies and they could be like frames taken from a film of each evening’s descent into the darkness. They seem fleeting even, more there than here.
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
So yes, it’s true that I’ve always had this melancholia deep within, but better to finally accept it than pretend otherwise with a faint false smile. In truth, all the paintings from this series reveal the many different parts of me. Isn’t that the point of becoming any kind of artist in the first place? If it isn’t about self-discovery, why do it? And how could it be otherwise than for me to shine in such divine darkness?
Like the tired horse, yes me, the rueful unrequited lover, still entangles myself with this twilight motif on most evenings in order to foolishly behold all her beauty from afar. Sometimes, after a painting session I’ll even languish a while and await the first few stars to come out. It’s a resplendent moment and without any artifice or human input, just the night falling in silence, and it still always brings me pleasure.
