Out of mind

22  February 2025

Out of mind

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 February, 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I didn’t think too much of this picture when I packed up the other evening but I like it today. I like the light which is fragile and nuanced especially the brightest set of small clouds over the horizon to the left. Higher above there are patches of pale blue which I suppose is the sky, and though I painted, it I’m not even sure. In visual terms, I just appreciate them as mere patches of colour to set off the golden clouds and which help to enrich them. These are the ‘accidents’ that happen when I seem to be ‘in the painting’. 

In this spontaneous work from nature I find myself most present when I’m not there. I think everyone loves this space when they're plugged into something they're fully engaged in doing. It's something that's so natural for children but it can easily become lost with age. 

In my life it hasn't happened all too often, but now it seems more frequently. Sometimes like when I play tennis, yes, but not always, and rarely is it continuous but I’m working on it.

There is something particular about painting from nature that pushes me into this mind space. It’s different than working in the studio where the picture is more like an opponent on the tennis court and something to vanquish, than a friendly communion. Because these spontaneous pictures rarely take me more than twenty minutes to paint, the effort to concentrate is pretty easy. It's not brain surgery, so thankfully for everyone, I'm not a surgeon.  

This effortless joy from connecting with a picture out in nature comes both from the submission to the motif, but also more crucially 

to that place inside me where I'm absent too. It's where I’m at ease in my head, and like an escalator, I intuitively know where the next step will be taking me. 

Here at the beach, nature requires my complete submission from that space deep inside me. Perhaps like most people, being headstrong, I’ve never been adept at giving into anyone or anything very easily so to get into this quiet space also requires a special kind of discipline all its own. 

This  suddenly reminds me of my visits to a friend who lived not far from me in NYC. He was living in a small loft building that had an elevator that stopped and opened into each loft space. 

One of those very curious and universal habits in life is that whenever any of us enters an elevator, we all immediately turn around to face the elevator door. It's a strange almost mystical custom why we do it, but we do, and it seems to make sense. So now facing the front we all remain reverently still as the doors quietly close and the elevator either rises or falls. The custom also requires that we  we look down at our feet or above to watch the speed of its progress. Just over the digital floor indicator in this particular elevator there was also another illuminated digital message that read OUT OF MIND in a stretched Ariel font in an eery pale Prussian Blue. It was a surprise, and my friend told me the developer had been a follower of Osho, of the Poona clan in India and they were really big on clever affirmations. Indeed, each time I rode the elevator I was pleasantly taken by surprise. It was very sexy, like a great logo, and for some reason, it made me think of a thin cloud. 

In the West, Out of Mind can conjure up either a mellow ecstasy trip or a crazy person on crack cocaine running through the streets with a long knife in one hand. But in the East it generally portrays a mental state that most spiritual practitioners desire to attain. 

But Out of Mind can also just be in that empty space where we are at one in the world around us with or without drugs. It's a place of wonder and it's what I find at the beach when painting. Surprisingly, almost always, I get there and it's why I always go back. 

But aren't we all looking for that space in these anxious times? Clearly our social apps are a mere substitute, yet like a companion, they appear to wrap us up in a cocoon of solitary comfort. Would there be as many dating apps if everyone were content with themselves all on their own? 

There are rooms everywhere full of yoga and meditation practitioners too, which is a good thing because we are know how crazy life can make us. Because I'm a latecomer in finding this comfortable space in work, I've only eventually come around to understand the real value of creating art. Great or poor, whether we like the result or not, it doesn't matter as long as we learn something creative for ourselves alone. Creating anything is already great because it's always just the first step.

Of course playing and performing music, is the most common way of accessing this place. Making music has universally been the go-to space where one can practice ‘out of mind’. It’s been known as the place of ecstasy for us humans since forever, but ironically many of us in the West think we need to be ‘high’ to get into this space. Go figure. But when the space is clear, it’s the real deal, and when we have experienced it even just once, like being in love, we’ll always try to get back into it.

In the Painting world there was movement at the turn of the 20th century when artists and some writers, tried to attain this creative space of rapture through spontaneous ‘mark-making’ which today has become a style all its own. The Belgian artist Henri Michaux (1899 - 1984), was one of its leading proponents and in many of his ink drawings he used mescaline to access his inner mind. Though not exactly the Whirling Dervishes, the idea was to let go completely and connect with a trance-like space of unity through any artistic process. Artists have always dabbled in drugs to achieve a state of unity, so it was nothing new, but the work that came out spawned a new school of what was called in France ‘Les Signes’, This is hard to translate due to it many nuanced meanings but the Larousse Dictionary seems to come the closest to what I’m trying to express. “An ensemble of conventional gestures constituting a symbolic basis of non-verbal communication." (my own translation) 

Michaux’s ink drawings are wild abstractions and very seductive. In artistic nomenclature, they are Non-Objective, maybe even some of the first Non-Objective paintings to be offered up to the Art World at the time\ though I‘m not sure Michaux considered them commercial. For him and his fellow painters I think they were considered personal images, like diaries. This was after all, the modern world of Freudian analysis when looking-inward was no longer a sin. 

So Michaux was part Tachiste, part Surrealist, part poet and painter. Being a creative soul, he was all these things but also he was cerebral, and somewhat intellectual when he needed to be I imagine. The early years 20th century were heady times, but rich and brave times too. One thing for sure, he invented a style of working long before Pollack began making his own pictures by splattering enamel onto a canvas from the paint store.

But why do I bring all this up now? Something in this picture above reminded me conversations I used to have with a painter I knew in Aix. He was quite mad about ‘les signes’, and indeed, they played a pivotal role in his own understanding of how paintings are put together because these gestures are really the basic elements of any painting. All painters from any any period, whether its Raphael, Giotto, Vincent Van Gogh or Miro, are have been constrained by these gestural rules of painting.

So curiously, when I looked at this painting from the other evening, not unlike hundreds of previous images in this series, I suddenly saw it in a new light, as a accumulation of abstract gestures. Of course, this is a figurative image, but it still shares all the elements of an abstract one like in Henri Michaux's ink paintings. The difference is that mine is organised in a different way. Instead of looking inward for inspiration, I look outward towards the evening sea and sky to find a way inside of me.   

I am reminded that in this history of painting it’s always been about taking, discarding, and stealing and destroying. Artists need to be ruthless if they’re going to find a way into their inner selves. And in this series as I’ve probably iterated ad nauseum, the drawing of a painting is made up of these ‘signes’ or 'gestures'. That they all come together to form a whole image is remarkable and it's always surprise whether it’s non-objective or figurative image. What come up should hopefully satiate the creator until the next collision with paper and pencil. Contrary to Michaux, I organise these gestures to create a figurative image, but I think that we're both after a luminosity by using the method of Chiaroscuro to achieve it. Unlike even Cezanne, a picture like mine above is more 'Renaissance' than 'Impressionist' because I’m still after the various kinds of natural surfaces appearing in this physical world of concrete elements (i.e. clouds, air and water).

The later Cezanne, and perhaps all the true Modernists onward from the Impressionists through Matisse and the Fauves, approached every painting surface like it was a mosaic full of brush strokes, often wildly uneven at times, but fluently distributed regardless of Natural’s tactile diversity. This technical side of Modernism is one of the less discussed aspects of it, maybe because it’s not part of the larger and more theoretically seductive side of its social contours. To be honest, I only just came up with it for myself while writing this. I think because it’s a painter’s issue, not one for a larger historical discussion which academics generally like to swim around in. I'm a painter so I’m on always on thin ice around academics.

But, this is a big conversation, more than I had wanted to chew off here. I would need a whole chapter of examples and documentation to further explore it. But because I am a painter, not an academic nor a critic (in the worldly and economically driven sense), it might be above my pay grade as they say these days. Basically, I’m really only interested in my own understanding of Painting and Art as holistic ideas and selfishly for me alone. How to create and make things that work successfully on a two-dimensional surface is always the real deal for me. 

Though this picture certainly triggered off a lot of different ideas, it's really somewhat simple. There is almost nothing to it. And this pleases me because when I step backward and look at any picture, I want to see it all at once, then move in closer to see its inner intimate beauty. And this is not unlike the same way I discover people when I meet them. 

But in this picture I was curious about how these marks and brushstrokes have an antecedent in the works of the Surrealists and Henri Michaux at the start of the 20th century. Though  I don’t live in that world, I like to dip my toes in it from time to time.

The opposite

 

9 November 2024

The opposite

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The other night I went out to the dunes to escape reality which is funny because I normally go out there to plug into it. But alas, since then, the election results have revealed that half of America has chosen to re-elect a idiot-felon for their president. I am no longer a drinker, but if I had been, I might have tied one on the other night along with the other half of the country. Let’s be honest, The American mind is complicated and on its menu is full of every kind of contradiction available. But it’s a rich menu too, and also filled all kinds of wonderful people from every other country in the world at least for the moment. But with a racist administration, our future at least in the short term, looks precarious. So, the majority of Americans have picked what they want and apparently, they have the appetite for it. I’m not going to lose sleep over these facts of life that I cannot control. I voted, and that’s that. But “It’s a sure shame”, as we used to say in the Kentucky of my youth. So, for the rest of us who voted for Kamala Harris, let us take what little brilliance George Costanza ever offered up to the world, and let’s be the opposite of everything that Trump represents. 

Let’s go on a diet and exercise, let us be kind to the less fortunate, let’s dive into Art of every kind, the messier the better, because we'll need it more than ever during these times to come. Let’s write reams of poetry, paint big colourful pictures and let’s make lots of music, crazy and sublime. Let's cross-dress and let’s love too, the noisier the better. But let’s not swear at others, or about them, nor demean them either. Let’s educate ourselves to better understand how others live and think and let’s cherish DEI and be any kind of person we choose to be despite what others might say. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So with all that circling around in my head the other day at the beach, I painted three studies that all simmer. It was a windy evening and the sky was full of possibilities and I knew it would be fun which is really the point. I wanted to escape the awful news and dread looming over me all like a devil in one of Bosch’s paintings. But hey! Life moves on no matter what I feel about it. To paint is to live fully in the moment and it’s an opportunity to merge fully with all those parts of myself that can still be moved through anger or disappointment. It’s a cliché but I’ve come to understand that all diffculties, whether in the studio, in my home, or in my heart, are always there to help me solve the problem of myself. They act like handholds on a steep rock face.

But anyway, each of these three studies are shown in their order of execution. The sky had been quite electric in fact. For once, I cannot think of too much to say about them except that they helped me to reconnect with something calm. They appear to me today, like I said; simmering, and a little hot and bothered, and yet I like them well enough. This motif whom I’ve know for several years now is like a good friend, trustworthy and smart enough to maybe even act as my own therapist. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

No matter the state of my heart or mind, I usually can adapt to the day, the moment, even to the picture at hand. These three came easily because the sky pulled me into it and out of myself. I’m happy that this was possible because for so much of my life I’ve been too easily manipulated by outside forces including others, but no longer at least in the same way. My heart is steadier. It’s as if when I come out to paint, I can at least surrender to the strength of the sea and sky. That’s a big improvement. I need to remember that life will be a lot harder for so many other people around the world than myself.

Back in France about fifteen years ago, I read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, one small entry, like a picture done at the beach, one day at a time. It was a great read and like everyone else who has read it, I loved it and learned a lot about myself and my relationship with this world around me. To say that it taught me loads would be the proverbial understatment. I wish I could remember even just a fraction of it today, but alas, it has all slipped through my memory. That said, I do know that it changed me in many ways for the better. I absorbed at least some of his wisdom in the same way as I've been transformed by this beach motif one day at a time. No civilian one would ever know it, but painting has a noble edge. 

I picked up my tattered copy of Meditations a few weeks ago and began looking through it again and imagined to myself that I would go through it once more in bed at night instead of doom-scrolling on my phone before sleep. His one greatest lesson I think, is that we not must not lose control over our emotions. But I realised that reading philosophy like I did in University is one thing, a mental thing that just unleashes ideas. But without putting them to use through a purposeful vocation or craft, a marriage or family even, they risk to remain but empty ideas, not a batteries to charge our daily lives.

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 depending upon where we live and our own situation? Being an American myself, it’s easy to agree, but I’m also Australian and Irish too so my slant on life is also more 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 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 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 had already hovered 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, we’re not quite there yet in 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 that he lost. In fact, we all know that even he himself 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. 

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 to usually work. As they were leaving, I threw out green because none of them had cited it. “Oh yeah, I like green” said the eldest girl in a red bathing suit. All good, I thought as they left down the path.  

On the Menu

 

2 November 2020

 On the Menu

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 October, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This study is so unusual that it took me by complete surprise. I enjoyed watching it take form as if I were channeling some Romantic painter from the late 18th century. It was the first of two studies for which I had initially had other plans, but at the same time, it too, had other plans for itself. 

It's disconcerting when I lose control over a picture and yet I secretly cheer it on like it’s a truant teenager inside me painting graffiti over all my noble ideals about art. Try as I might to wrest control over a picture on any given night, alas, it cannot be commandeered at will.

But somehow upon arrival, I even had this prescient feeling that this would be a wild painting if only I could nudge it in my own direction. I had felt like it was already in my back pocket and just waiting for me take it out like it was a map of Tokyo.

So like a chef at the fish market whose choices will dictate the evening’s menu, me too, I rely upon what I find in the sky each day. But although the motif may be on the menu, I still pretend  to be the chef.

An enormous cloud was aflame when I began setting up my easel and palette. Normally, I prefer to wait it out until the sun sets and all this colour dies down enough to give me a more stable path forward. 

Unlike other painters, I think, these kinds of scenes I quietly detest due to their supra-melodramatic nature which can easily veer towards the pornographic in paintings. But hey, it's more my real nature to savour discretion in all things artistic. But I'll confess anyway that with so little time to work these become impossible skies to deal with. I think only a great artist like Turner, who with a set of watercolours, can portray such vivid histrionics. It's also a fantastic scene, and had I not been impatient I'd never have chosen it. But oddly, even then, it seemed to come out on its own volition as if I were just a bystander.  

So I wonder where did it come from? What image provoked it in my private library of visual memories? I cannot account for it, and yet, although it was certainly painted with my own hand, I think it came up from an older template, perhaps one from my early student days when I experimented much more than I do today.  

It's rough-looking too, and because I didn't know how to finish it so I simply left it in its dishevelled state. 

Like for any poet or painter, pictorial images will often arise disguised as memories that are already lodged deeply inside. There, the oldest secrets all congregate awaiting instructions about when and how to surface. Whether in a studio or outdoors, the painter needs to be patient because when these things do surface, they'll need to be organised as they always seem to pop out like children playing hide and seek. 

I’ve found that though memories are cherished in my heart, they're still held firmly in my head for better or for worse. They may appear furtive or hard to reach at times, even asleep or repressed or maybe forgotten, but alas, they're never forsaken. They will eventually force themselves upon the artist or poet who is both brave and curious enough to find order for them. After all, aren't they the keepers of our memories and stories that become our histories, both personal and collective? Isn't this really why we have poets like Homer and painters Matisse?