Builders and electricians

 

21 June 2020

Builders and electricians

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In France many years ago, I dropped in on a friend and painter one day. Instead of an education at the Beaux-Arts, he had studied economics I think. He was smart and somewhat of an intellectual even. Despite a French education that shaped him with a rational thought process I appreciated that he became a painter way outside the system from which he came. 

It was a spring afternoon and he was in his garden when I arrived putting some last touches on a picture. Our usual banter immediately turned to Painting, but on this day we spoke of a programme which we had both heard the previous evening on France Musique which highlighted the relationship between Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Both popular, they are iconic composers who are played often throughout the week. At the start of our conversation, I said that although I marvel at Debussy, I was really crazy about Ravel. We began talking about them both, which pieces we liked, etc, etc.

I told him that Ravel felt to me like a comfortable armchair straddling the turn of 20th century Romanticism, one in which no doubt, Brahms had certainly napped in before him. Debussy, his contemporary, on the other hand, seemed to be steering music into the 21th century on a skate board. For some reason, I wasn’t even surprised to hear him tell me that Debussy was the superior artist. It seemed in line with his cerebral taste and education. Though this discussion was at least thirty years ago I’ve never forgotten it. Like most things I found interesting during my daily life, I noted our conversation in my diary at the time. I would summarise his thinking thus: 

“Unlike Ravel, Debussy’s musical ideas were not weighed down by an excess of emotion.” He then asserted that because of this, Debussy was the greater artist.

Our discussion that day was, as always, very precise, almost mechanically logical, the way they can sometimes be in France, often even, to the point of didactic exhaustion. But on the other hand, this was one of the things that I truly loved about living in France, a country of thinkers and lovers of not only Art, but of eloquent and passionate debate. France is a kind of an immense cafe, a home to a collective cultural brawl that’s filled with hyper-reasoned participants and unafraid of verbal skirmishes. Don’t forget, France is the land where Cyrano de Bergerac who slew his opponents with his tongue, after all. 

Our discussions about art were also part of our own particular brawl about painting, but at the same time, it was the glue that held our unlikely friendship in place over the years. We shared a certain legacy that was born in a fertile French soil that allowed our discourse to replenish year after year despite our differences. And yet, in this instance, I found myself annoyed by his arrogance and it rubbed me the wrong way. 

Any avid listener to France Musique receives a large dose of both of these composers on its programming on a regular basis, so I had listened a lot to both Ravel and Debussy since arriving in France back in 1973. But for me, I had learned to love artists (of every field) for lots of different reasons. And as I've eased myself into older age, I've hopefully also eased myself into more humility and so I'm less apt to attach my thinking to a pyramidal hierarchy of pre-eminence. 

I had  learned over the years to critique a particular work of an artist, not the artist, nor their reputation themselves. It keeps me out of a lot of trouble, and it’s for sure, more diplomatic. But it’s also cleaner, a more precise way of exploring and evaluating the all the Arts over the long haul of history. I’ve found that in things artistic, all roads should never lead to Rome, but away from it. Though it  may begin in Rome, I believe it should lead to a squirrelly foreign destination full of diversity and surprise.   

Paul Cezanne is generally considered to be the father of Modern Art, and like Debussy, he ushered into the 20th century a new structural form which broke away from centuries of pictorial thinking as if a dam had burst and swept away most of what was already housed in the Louvre. To a great extent there is much truth to this metaphor because he constructed a new landscape for all adventerous painters.

Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, isn’t considered in the same light, and he, like Ravel, was steeped in the painting structure of the 19th century, one that arrived via both Rembrandt and Delacroix, among so many others, including many artists from Japan. 

And yet Vincent Van Gogh almost single-handedly, opened up the palette to more light than the world had ever seen or experienced beforehand. He was a new lightbulb. So if Cezanne was the builder, then Van Gogh was the electrician. 

But according to Emile Bernard who knew them both, Cezanne had heard of Van Gogh and even thought he was a mad man who made crazy paintings. “Il est fou!” He had declared. So, you see how opinions are not facts in art. And anyway, I’m also someone who distrusts the word 'genius', and I try to avoid using it at all costs. But I do use the words: Greatness, Great, Good, OK, and Awful, among others, to describe art in general But I also use them to describe people sometimes.

It has been many years since that conversation with my old friend but I’ve never forgotten it. It was a learning curve for me, and I still remember being so taken aback at the audacity of it. Today, even more humbled with age, it shocks me even more. 

So, all these years later, have given me the clarity to see that greatness comes in various colours and different forms, even newer tastes with which I may not yet even be familiar. And although I can be ruthlessly critical of particular works, it’s rare that I slag off an artist’s whole oeuvre, or the artist ad hominem.  And today, I’ve also come to see that even thinking like this is an odd form of narcissism. At such a distinguished level of creativeity like for either Debussy or Ravel, where craft melds with vision, comparing two iconic composers is akin to comparing Cezanne to Van Gogh or an apple to a pear. 

Meanwhile, at the beach came this frosty-coloured picture from the other night, the second of two studies. It’s getting chilly at the beach these days as we approach the Winter Solstice, and the sea looked to be a cool silver blue. I’m still not sure what I think of it but there is something Modern and flat in it that tells me I’m on my own right and authentic path. In time, it might look more interesting but it could easily be a dud too. Time will tell me one day. In this moment how can I know? It’s a long story, this painting racket. A painter just continues forward, one picture at a time, one day at a time. 

One thing is sure though, I accept that I’m not a great painter, so I don’t need to waste time worrying about that form of narcissism. To be a good painter is already great enough because no one will ever paint just like me. 

Hermès scarves draped across the sky

 

2 September 2020

Hermès scarves draped across the sky

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

This study from last week seems to confirm yet again my increasingly apparent interest in a more formal structure from this motif. I like it but it begs the question: Is it possible to transpose such ephemeral things as inherently unruly as the sea and sky into an image more fixed and solid? Can I create one that demonstrates the savvy geometry of this wise and logical earth?

Thinking of light as something solid is already a curious thing to imagine, but painters attempt it all the time. It's just air, all dressed up as a band of luminosity. That's the extraordinary thing, and it’s possible for us to sometimes achieve because a trail of other artists have already done it. Meanwhile, I’m still looking for a way into it.

Turner did this spectacularly in so many of his larger paintings, especially those shimmering views of the river Thames from the Mortlake Terrace estate of his patron William Moffat. But before him, Claude (Lorraine) 1604 - 1682, also appeared equally obsessed with large and spectacular sunset views which seemed to hold colour in ribbons of translucent silk. And though he may seem old-fashioned today, he was way, way ahead of his time and I think Turner himself was indebted to Claude, as he is known today. But not to be outdone, the Dutch were also masters at depicting this luminescence that hovered over the sea. 

From working here so often in front of the sky each day, it seems to me that where light really shines is when it’s just a by-product of a perfect drawing. That is to say, a place where everything resides in complete harmony over an entire graphic surface. How else to render this light than by using a refined, almost polished format of chiaroscuro? 

In this image from last week, I can see that I’m falling into a form of abstraction that allows me to treat light (as manifest in colour) like a material substance. At certain times, like in this image, when I’m painting a full bloom at the beach, I can almost imagine these ribbons of colour streaming across the sky as smooth as Hermès silk scarves. 

I don’t know how far I can push this motif which now goes on for over two years, but as long as new questions keep coming up, I suppose I will keep on working there.

The other afternoon when I arrived to set up, there were a dozen young kids playing cricket on the beach to my right.  I set up and made a palette and got right into the first picture when I immediately spotted a whale splashing not 100 metres offshore.

I could see it was part of a large pod of several whales in migration going north, but this was the only one which appeared quite over-excited. It suddenly made me think of a kid I knew back in elementary school, who, when we all went out to the playground for recess hour, he would go completely nuts, just bonkers, dancing and rolling happily around all by himself, in the grass for hours on end. Brian Cruikshank was his name, which I still remember oddly enough. He was an otherwise quiet and withdrawn child in class for the rest of the time. He hardly ever spoke except to respond correctly each time the teacher asked him a question. This drove the rest of us nuts.

So anyway, I shouted out to the kids playing cricket to watch the whales, pointing offshore to where they were blowing spray into the wind through their blowholes. The kids stopped their game, and they too got all excited themselves seeing the whales. Then they wanted to come over see my painting, so they all came up and encircled me, full of questions with lots of ooohs and ahhhs. They were on a school trip from Lismore, a small town inland about 50 kilometres away, so they don't often get to the sea. Being winter, no one swam but I could feel their complete joy at being there and playing cricket on the hard sand. 

We, who live so close to the sea and to the whales, are extremely spoiled I realised.

I managed four studies, all somewhat similar in spirit to this one. I left the beach in a happy mood.

Sisyphus stumbles while phoenix rises

 

29 September 2020

Sisyphus stumbles while phoenix rises

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 September 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is an unusual image but it came after such strife the other night that I have a quiet affection for it. It’s also a rather particular colour harmony and it’s so fleshy that honestly, I cannot really warm up to it. Curiously, despite the pink and orange hue of the sky overall, it still has a muted cool harmony that cannot seem to heat up the image. Even the ocean, when I look at it now, appears like a frigid bed to remind me of a love affair long past its expiration date. 

 

These days it isn’t often that I want to throw a tantrum and jettison a canvas board into the sea but I came close with this picture. Years ago, I used to regularly have tantrums when painting, but now I seem to know better because I seem to be calmer in theory, perhaps more reasonable and measured. But a painting that’s gone pear-shaped can turn a mature adult into a lunatic in minutes, but this study, one I nearly murdered, lived to tell the tale. 

Over my lifetime, I’ve jettisoned canvas boards over cliffs, thrown them into ditches, into trash bins, and even into the Grand Canal in Venice. Only rarely, did I possess a small hint of guilt for my selfish act inflicted upon poor Mother Earth. Each time I would find myself in such a state of wilful rage that I felt like a bad-boy tennis player on TV destroying racquets after a lost match. Either way, these would be funny things to witness I’m sure, but I take note that it’s usually the guys who do this, rarely the gals..... just sayin. 

How to lose with grace? Isn’t that the conundrum for the gentleman or lady when faced with failure in public, or in private? When the Muses laugh at you from above, there’s nowhere to hide. Fortunately, my own tantrums were always exercised in private. But, I’ve changed a lot of over these past few decades, indeed, so much so that now when I’m on the cusp of losing a picture, I take a breath and step back to assess the situation like a real grown-up, like President No-drama Obama, for instance. This is that wondrous moment when I decide that I have nothing to lose, and I need to just let go. As the Zen wise guys would say: 

“We’re already dead anyway, so what’s the problem?” 

Well, actually, the problem is my fragile ego. (Or is it a large and ungrateful one? I‘m never sure) but regardless, it’s childish nonetheless, so to come back from the brink of any creative disaster, as anyone knows, is a wonderful thing to witness. And isn’t that why we so love sporting events? 

Nowadays, when struggling with a small study, I find myself gently pushing and pulling at a painting without that same old violent fear of failure. I actually appear less chained to that feeling today, as if my brush prefers working over an image like it's a cat kneading a soft pillow. But I still do get flashes of a young child in the corner of the classroom trying to smash a square peg into a round hole.

Today, out of that fury, a phoenix rises and my brushes find a path back into the painting, punching at times, but kissing too, in a confused passion. And though a sky, like in this image had lost its warm rosy bloom, I motored on, on the fumes of memory. Just like for a writer, memory is everything for an artist, and intuition is one’s boundless grace.

I like so many of these studies specifically because they’re so often scarred with uncertainty and indeed, they seem to both live and thrive as messy and deficient responses to the serious questions of Painting. 

Previously, any creative act for me, had always felt like a final exam to be feared, one for which I was never prepared and would invariably fail. But today, I see any of them as just pages in a long workbook, full of ideas. Some may pay off, whilst others may not, only time will tell me which is which. And whether a picture works out or not, is less relevant even after a certain point. But again, the Zen wise guys in the East would say it was always irrelevant from the beginning. 

This is funny, because for a couple of years I played regularly with a steady tennis player whom I could never beat. After a while, I got into the habit of telling myself that I was already dead before stepping on the court for our sessions. And it helped. What's really funny is that I tried explaining that to a guy once but he simply looked at me and thought I was completely nuts because he only ever wanted to rip his opponent's head off.

So, I'm happy that I'm finally learning from all this friction in life instead of always shying away from it. Without it, I wouldn't improve on the tennis court or in front of an easel here at the beach. In life, as in love too, it's the skirmish that teaches me. And at the end of a match, I can ask myself, did I play with assurance? or with an excess of caution? Ditto for painting. 

So, I freely admit it, this painting was touch and go to get to the finish line. It was a particular sky and what I mean by that is that I didn’t get a clear idea of the colour harmonies. Normally, I might fake it enough until I found my way into it, but for some reason this sky confused me still. And yet, here it is finished. Is there enough truth in it to be plausibly real enough for a viewer to be able to see it? Just writing these notes about it has kind of warmed me up to it slightly, but we’ll see in a year or two if it holds up.

Doubt and discipline

 

12 December 2020

Doubt and discipline

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 December 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was one of three from the other night. They were a little different, brighter and lighter in every way, but I liked this one best. The sea was super flat, full of bright light, and silver blue. A difficult sea to paint, so smooth it made me think of a glass slipper. But I appreciate the vast varieties of weather conditions that oblige me to find solutions for such different colours and forms each day. 

Last night a fellow painter friend of mine complained to me that she felt that although she has been at working as an artist for some 40 years now, she still feels that she doesn’t know what she is doing. Curious, because in my mind, she has always been a tireless worker, always at it, day and night, and yet like for so many artists, a rich and successful career has eluded her. Nonetheless, I was surprised to hear all this yet again. I had always also marvelled at her discipline because next to her, I’m a bit of a slouch, a sloth even. 

But I laughed gently, because I had heard all this from her many, many times before over the years. I replied that most artists, writers, musicians, etc, etc, who cannot make this confession, may have more gumption than integrity. I went on to add that having a great career is not the same thing as having possession of a great craft or vision.

But maybe I was being a little generous. What I had meant to say was that an artist (unless they are Picasso), who never question themselves, and who appear to know nothing of the gnawing doubt deep inside one’s creative skin, must surely make insipid Art. So thus, I pontificated to allay her fears. I may be a bit harsh but there must be truth in it because I think throughout history, nearly every great artist, writer, musician, have themselves confessed to all that.

I added that I think just to face all this emotional insecurity is the first step to seeing it all more clearly. Then, it’s just a matter falling in love with one’s work again because actually, all this confusion is really just a lapse of love. The way out of it is to jump back into the work, the craft; the nuts and bolts of art, not the airy fairy feelings around it. 

This doubt can be the key to a happy daily routine in most cases, irregardless of the work produced. I also reminded her of Sisiphus too.

Somehow, I think, even after the usual route of going to art schools, many of us still manage to hide our deepest insecurities as we venture out into the world of studios and galleries (and no need to dwell upon the cocktail parties, receptions, and exhibition openings that await the luckier ones amongst us). What little I have come to understand as an ‘unsuccessful’ painter (and college drop out), is that art doesn’t generally come out of the class rooms, but out of the recess periods, like as kids, and when we were always at play. And besides, (full disclaimer: I’m not really a believer in art schools anyway) but that said, I don’t discount the fact that art schools are still great for networking and getting laid a lot. 

In truth, I used to feel that by slogging it out on my own it would make me a better painter and that eventually I would get somewhere, but in the end, it just made me lonelier. Then I gradually accepted that I was kind of a loner anyway despite being someone who is generally pretty sociable and actually likes people. And of course, I had chosen to stay in France to study with Leo, my teacher.

But back to my friend; what I didn’t tell her was that I used to actually feel that there was some wisdom in this idea that the greater the doubt, the greater the artist. But now I’m less sure of it because sometimes creative people are just so overwhelmed with lack of confidence that they are terminally irresolute. They may never seem to find a way out of their own foxholes. But either way, maybe I shouldn’t be making such broad pronouncements. Life is a hard slog for us all no matter what our professions, either chosen or imposed upon us. Aren’t we lucky to just be painters in the first place? Maybe one just has to work hard, but also look equally hard at great art. Like Henry James once said:

“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.”

I also told her that I have read of a few great painters who’ve claimed that only in their twilight years did they finally began to understand what Painting was all about; when their teeth and their hair was falling out, as both Delacroix and Goya had attested. 

All fine authentic artists have certainly said similar things I’m sure. But to contradict myself ever so slightly, I might note that one could say that humility isn’t always the litmus test of an artist’s quality. If one looks at Picasso, whose ego was as great as his very best things, overall, his greatness was still but a fraction of his giant ego. With more humility he might have continued making really innovative works, as great as Guernica, for example.

Titian, on the other hand, had both hubris and genius. It is said that he dropped a paintbrush while at work on one of his portraits of Pope Paul III in Venice, he stopped, and he waited impatiently for the old Pope to get off his chair and pick it up for him before resuming his work. Doubt can be a healthy thing for everyone no matter what their vocations. The thing for me is that while I am working here at the beach, doubt is rarely present. This is always the proof that the routine is everything. For me anyway, the routine has created the craft, and the craft has created confidence.

Stefan Zweig

10 November 2020

Stefan Zweig

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 November 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the second of two paintings done the other night on election day in America. Naturally being in the future here on Australian time I was already on the edge of my seat, and I think it affected my otherwise lovely sky. But unlike my shaky uncertainty over the US election, this study came quickly and with a deliberate confidence. My friends in America all say that these times are precarious, but aren’t all times precarious? Doesn’t it all depend upon where we live and how we live in our own situation? Being an American myself, it’s easy to agree, but I’m also Australian, French,  and Irish too, so my slant on life is also quite nuanced.

I’m not trying to cute, but it’s a hard fact of life that if one lived in Haiti even during the relatively ‘peaceful boom years’ in the Clinton era in America, life would be miserable with or without money. So everything is relative like they say.  But that said, the advent of another four years of Trump would be nasty for the whole world over.

Personally, I feel really grateful that any anxiety I might have felt in this era concerns itself primarily with the insignificant dramas of just painting a picture here on the North Coast of Australia. Unbelievably, I’ve even developed glimmers of hope in this fragile task. This has come about because I think I’ve finally learned to just let it go of all the needless worry and doubt about things over which I’ve had so little control all my life. 

So outside of us, in the world at large, where all its random tragedies and precarious restraints can hold us in paralysis, we’re told nonetheless, by the wise buddhists of the East, that freedom is always just inside us. A tall order! And it’s easier said than done, because terrible suffering is so evenly distributed around the globe to both the rich and poor, the healthy and less lucky. So at the end of all this, I wonder to myself; isn’t it just through my own very personal struggles where I’ll find pleasure or pain? 

A few  years back I discovered Stefan Zweig in a small bookshop in Paris. I liked the title and the intriguing cover design, so I picked up his wonderful memoir, The World of Yesterday and ran through it like a marathon in two days. This book moved me and has stayed in my memory ever since. It’s a story of his exodus from Austria in the 1930’s before Hitler’s invasion. A beautiful book, an elegiac but spry account of the terrible uncertainties arriving like a tornado for the Jewish people. He writes vividly of the disbelief that so many of his friends and relations were feeling in front of a storm that was already hovering over them. They were frozen like deer in the headlights. “Do we go, or do we stay?”. He writes of leaving many of his family behind as he fled to England. Sadly, after so much horror and misfortune in his life he later committed suicide in Brazil where he had settled and written many more books. I’ve read a few and they are all authentic postcards from another age.

I think of him now as I’ve often thought about so many Holocaust victims and survivors with this rise of Right Wing White Nationalism in the USA today. As bad as Trump is, he’s but the ring leader surfing the tsunami of racial hatred that’s lurking in the swell just underneath. It not only harkens back to Germany of the 1930’s but even further back to the beginning of humankind. Alas, we haven’t learned much. But anyway, though we’re not quite there at the Nuremberg rally, but we could be in a blink of an eye. 

What I loved and learned about in Stefan Zweig’s autobiographical book is that no matter what happens in life one must try to maintain a curious and reasonably happy mindset. That he eventually killed himself years later in Brazil doesn’t discount what he had written earlier. I got from him what I get from all artists, writers, and musicians; that to live creatively is a wise but lucky choice.

This study was from a week ago, though not fabulous, it works comfortably. I think of it today as a happy sky because we voted Trump out of office. Apparently, he and his henchmen are already trying to steal the election by claiming it was rigged, ha ha. But the world knows he lost. In fact, we all know it, even he knows he lost. Ignoble, moronic, and somewhat like Hitler, he’s a conman, and he’ll do whatever he plans to do but it won’t make any difference now. If Hitler and Jerry Lewis had a baby, it would be Donald.

Whew...so anyway, this is an optimistic painting which I took away last week from the beach. Although it’s not brilliant, I’ll take it. I think it’s a fitting bright sky for the election outcome. 

While I was painting a group of kids had come by and circled around me as I worked. They were polite and curious, peppering me with lots of questions. At the end I asked them all what their favourite colours were. A girl said yellow, a boy said blue, seconded quickly by another boy, then red and pink were thrown out by the younger ones. Then, they asked me for my favourite colour, and I said, 

“Because I’m a painter, I love them all! Today, I liked the pink in the sky and the blue of the sea, but also the yellow of the sky above”.

Somehow, that seemed to make sense to them, though myself, I wasn’t even sure why, but with kids, everything seems cool. As they were leaving, I threw out the colour green because none of them had cited it. “Oh yeah, I like green” said the eldest girl in a red bathing suit, a perfect colour compliment I thought as they left down the path.