Tiepolo

30 September 2023

Tiepolo

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 September, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From this past week came several similar variations on a theme close to this picture of which I’m not quite yet sure what to think. It had been a crazy week of psychodelic-looking skies reminicent of the age of hippies. But these rich warm skies creep into the Springtime evenings like appetisers on an ‘Al Fresco’ menu. Because of this, I awakened this morning with the feeling that I have a lot to look forward to. The Spring afternoons beckon those giant, red apple skies that linger over the purple seas, Mmmmmm.

This week I found myself thinking about how, when and why, I became a painter. It came up for me as a result of a discussion with an old friend on Facetime. We were complaining to one another about the art world when somehow it turned into how each of us got pulled into this life of creativity.

How did I became a painter, he asked. I replied that I really just “slipped into it” because as a kid I drew well and with ease. Then I told him about watching an old Italian guy painting scenic views of Italy on large walls of a friend’s parents living room. It was a huge place and he was decorating them these idyllic landscapes of forests and villas that were filled with dancing and prancing figures in 17th century costumes. For me it was amazing. I must have been about 11 or 12 at the time. This old guy obviously knew what he was doing but he was on the sullen side and pretended to not understand me when I posed questions. But because I was at my friend’s home a lot, I used to watch him mixing colours and wiping turps around to create skies while my friends played football outside. It made a strange impression upon me. Much later if I had to think about what it looked like, it sort ressembled the Venetian Tiepolos, father or son, but anyhow, the whole vibe was definitely Venice of the Otto Cento as I came to understand it later on.

I soon realised that having an ability to draw heads and faces with a striking likeness gave me a certain cachet with friends, and it kept the bullies away. It gave me an admirable and almost mysterious identity. It became my invisible cloak, something I never had in my own family. So naturely, I drew a lot, but mostly for others, something I understand now. For myself alone, I was less interested because I seemed to have had an empty heart, one that could never be filled. Why bother? I must have thought at the time. 

But it can be a problem having even just a little talent for something because in my own case, I never had to work at drawing. It came easily as a child. In fact, I’ll confess that as much work as I’ve done during my life, I still feel I haven’t worked hard enough, nor have I devoted my entire life entirely to it. The truth is that I could have done many other things with my life with equal pleasure. But, I always had a feel for painting, like a seedling that eventiually came to bear fruit when I met my teacher Leo in Aix that first year in France.

Because I didn't appreciate my own gifts I grew up with a distorted idea of myself and the world at large. In my head I was living in a jail cell trying to cajole the prison guard for attention.  I cannot speak for anyone else but it was only when I got clean and sober did all this confusion begin to clear up. Suddenly, I questioned everything. “What had motivated me all my life? Love? Sex? Success?” It certainly wasn’t Art, though that had always been my identity and talent. Strangely enough, It was only when I fell into this series at the beach that I began to completely work all this out for myself alone and 100 percent. It's been my therapy.

I’m not a Conceptual Artist so I don’t work for an audience, in fact, I really don’t need one. I work selfishly for the challenge of this artistic task in front of me and the unique pleasure it gives me alone. I see now that I’m part of a community of creative souls who go back thousands of years. Only when I understood that completely did I realise that I could be free, and it was these Evening Prayers that guided me into freedom. They say it takes a long time for some of us to wake up, and I’m a slow-poke. So all this I got into with my friend last week on Facetime, and I found myself surprised at all that came out of it. 

This picture has grown on me as I’ve been writing these words. I accept it for what it is but also for what it isn’t. Naturally I like that it’s been reduced to a flat picture plane but also that it gives a hint of a light-filled sky. But it might need an imagination to fall in love with it. When I think back to my early memories of watching a crabby old Italian artist decorate the walls of an immense room, I see now that it was surely an invitation that took me sixty years to answer with these small studies from Australia. 

Turner at the riverbank

 

18 November 2022 

Turner at the riverbank

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 May, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

At the beach the other night came this study, one of two from the evening. All day it had been extremely hazy and humid, and a stickiness in the air seemed to glue everything together. When I arrived at the beach it felt even worse than at home so I set up quickly then went down to slip into the sea. 

Once I got to mixing colours on the palette I jumped into this intense yellow sky. After almost a month of not working at the beach, I felt typically nervous, ambivalent even about getting into my car to drive there. Although I’m in the studio working, it’s an awful feeling not wanting to get out to the beach for my therapy seesion. As is always the case, whenever I show up there, I feel instantly better. 

About a million years ago I read the first chapter or so of a biography about J.M.W. Turner but I couldn’t get into it for any number of reasons. I was in the South of England and somehow I thought should read about Turner after visiting Petworth. But I do remember an anecdote recounted by one of the sons of George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, whose patronage of Turner made him a frequent guest at Petworth House in Sussex, where he made many gouaches of its interior and conceived large paintings from around the vast park. 

According to one of the Earl’s sons, Turner could usually be found down at the riverbank and fishing with the young boy. Although Turner always brought his small bag of watercolours, brushes and pads, the boy claimed he never saw Turner painting because he seemed so obsessed with fishing. I love that the great prolific Turner took time off to fish.

This study was left in its current of state of suspension because I liked it that way and wanted to preserve its freshness. I also saw that there was little more I could to do to make it any better other than to completely reconfigure everything so better to stop and make another one I wisely thought to myself. A good choice, but sometimes I’m not so smart. This is what it is, in this netherworld of the unfinished. I does however possess something for the future, I’m sure of it.

Regardless, what amazed me was just how fast my feelings came out while painting at the beach. It’s like going on a date when suddenly one is flushed with both expectation and terror.

I saw a short reel that came to me on Instagram the other day. It was a painter who filmed herself working on several things in her bright airy studio. She said it was important for her to leave the works in a state such that “they left the viewer with an open-ended space to interpret the image". Seeing a few pieces in the video I could understand what she meant and it opened up a whole dialogue within me about what constitutes an image. This is after all, a valid question in this time of so much change in the multi-disciplinary fields of Art, and yet I was left feeling underwhelmed by her work somehow. Either it took me nowhere, or I else I didn’t like where it took me. But I liked her cool attitude, her vibe as it were. But, as we do, I immediately began thinking about my own motives. Where am I trying to lead the viewer? 

As I have already admitted, the initial motors for me in this series of rapid oil paintings, were J.M.W. Turner’s watercolours of the sea and sky that he made in Venice. Of course, he made them in lots of other places but it’s the works of Venice that the painter in me remembered most vividly. As ‘abstract’ or ‘non-objective’ as so many of them are, there is a persistent structure inherent within them that directs a viewer specifically towards both what was represented, but also all that was left out. Looking at his small, abbreviated watercolours, I always get the feeling that they were born not just in his eyes but in his mind also. 

 

What does it mean for an image to be evocative of the original motif? How much space does an ‘interpretation’ require of us to see what the artist had in mind? Is it on a graded scale? Is this even important for an artist today? If it is, then what does any artist wish for their viewer to see and feel today? Does it even matter?

Everyone will have their own answer, but mine would cautiously follow in J.M.W. Turner’s footpath. His watercolours, made over two hundred years ago, are innovations unparalleled in what we call Contemporary Art today. Indeed, for me, these small things which he made on the fly, often eclipse  so much ‘abstract’ or ‘non-objective art’ created in the whole 20th century. A large portion of his entire oeuvre in watercolours is an existential threat to Non-Figurative and Expressionist Painting. I say all this with caveats of course. There are many Non-figurative painters whose work I personally love, two of my favourites are Joan Miró and Philip Guston. But there is so much to say about all this, for another day because I too, make non-figurative work in my studio.

 

Museum shelves

29 May 2023

Museum shelves

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 May, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It’s the late Fall here, and yesterday, though not too cool as I was putting the laundry on the line, I heard the faint drone of the cicadas telling me that summer is almost gone. But in this Painting game that occupies my mind, each season offers up its own varied response to the angle of the sun.

The other evening was magnificent with such rich possibilities that I was able to made six smaller studies. This was the fourth one after the sun had buried itself behind me in the West. By the end of the session, the sky had looked like an inferno for the my picture, a hot spicy set of clouds that left wide scarves of pink and purple overhead. Below it, the sea glowed like embers in a fireplace. 

When I took the studies from the boot of the car the next morning to shoot them with my old i-phone 7, I suddenly had the feeling that I’d really like to see them all lined up around several long walls in a white gallery space in a renovated ‘Hotel de Ville’ somewhere in France. In these lovely old places there is an unusually large respect for how artworks are spaced around white walls of different sizes and configurations. They are often broken up discreetly by misshapen walls and indentations from the many broken centuries long ago. Marble fireplaces stand their ground in the grander rooms which are usually connected throughout by either six-sided tile floors in the South, or worn, creaky wood floors up North. I've known such places in cities and towns around France, and I still dream about them. 

Of course, these are just dreams and mostly desires which live on the highest shelf of my own personal bucket-list, because they always appear just out of reach. I’m sure that everyone has these dreams too, ones which they secretly yearn for but appear unattainable. Would they be for a better home or to be a nicer neighbourhood? Would they be for a loving partner? A family? Or just for a lover, a cat or a new car? Maybe it’s just a pile of money in a big bank account somewhere in the Caiman islands. There’s enough room for everyone up there in dreamland on the top shelf. I'm sure of it, because somewhere, in all of us, is a Don Quixote. I do believe that in everyone’s head there are bucket lists also that live on several shelves. Some are high up and maybe out of reach to most of us, but lower down there are others accessible with a stepladder, but only those well balanced and poised. Still others are easily at hand and achievable like just reaching for a pair of socks to wear. Can anyone of us be patient enough to obtain of any of them? But what then? What would we actually do with our dreams and desires once they are within reach?

Today, in this chapter of my own life, I would for reach an exhibition space large enough for one hundred, no,,, lets go with one hundred and fifty, small pictures that fill an entire 'Hotel de Ville' somewhere in France. 

I must be really old-school and/or somewhat traditional because I hate these shows where all the works are coupled together on a large wall and where it's impossible to see any of them individually. Of course, the whole point of this type of hanging is to obfuscate each independent work but impress us by the giant assemblage of all the work. I much prefer a linear approach, one by one for a measured meeting with an oeuvre. If I really like it I can pause and linger in its aura of truth and beauty sort of like old school Speed Dating or the new equivalent of Swiping a potential date to the right and out of my life in an instant.

In the culinary world of restauration I’d be a chef advocate for Slow Food. When I digest a picture in a show or museum, I like a space in which to appreciate what it is I am taking in. It’s also in this space of time I reserve to contemplate something with an unhurried star of mind. 

But it’s also the space between pictures in which I can breathe easily as I move along a wall full of images, each one just out of reach. I only need to put my attention upon the painting in front of me, not on the next one further down the wall nor in the next room. In this impatient digital world, where do I ever have this opportunity to just be slow and present in front of something? Luckily, for those with access to a park or forest, nature certainly does the trick for a lot of people, but then so does art. I really love museum exhibitions in France where they take all this stuff very seriously. Museums there, are like churches where everything is rather sacred and people speak in hushed tones in front of pictures. 

Normally, I’m not someone too constrained by time like so many people today, but when I go to see a big popular exhibition and I'm running a little late, my habit is to enter into show but quickly zip right up to the end of it in order to size it up and see what's in it. I need to know how many rooms there are, and what’s at the end, so I don't miss anything I know I’d like to spend time with for there is nothing worse than finding diamonds at the end of a show when the guards are pushing you out the door. So thus, I have a system that returns me to the very beginning of the show where and I begin again, and it works. If it’s crowded I cruise leisurely into the slip stream of the crowd while hunting for open spaces and works that catch my eye. I’m not such a linear or chronological kind of guy when it comes to many things in life, but like I said, when it comes to art, I’ll take space anytime.

Oh, the sunny dry days!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

These are not set out in chronological order but are rather all thrown together like wild flowers one has collected in a single afternoon because these skies here on a mundane beach are as varied as the British countryside in June.

After months of rainy skies we've been blessed recently with a string of dry sunny weeks and because I had not been out so regularly I'm super grateful to rediscover the ritual of steady work  from the variety of these Autumn skies. And although I'm a lazy gardener, I imagine it's not unlike the bliss one would feel picking fresh veggies from a generous garden in which their hands have been working the earthy soil each afternoon. A ritual of work when it's practiced steadily is a happy and lucky gift. I'm continually impressed by myriad of ideas that come into fruition when a daily ritual is established. It's almost easy to forget this vital link in the creative process. 

I've chosen these images randomly out of a large batch of work and I'm not even sure that many of them merit to be shown, but hey! 

In this seasonal moment the 'blooms' are short-lived most days but they are certainly interesting, and full of colour. There are also days when I'm pretty happy with what I'm up to but then, there are also days when I think I've exhausted the motif. But I know these are just feelings, so they pass. By the next day, I'm looking at the horizon line with a cautious optimism. Already today, the afternoon looks to be good, so I'll be on my way.  

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 April, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March, 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

 

The chariot of the Goddess Selene

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. 

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

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.

Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

22 April 2018

 Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 April 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been tormented and bursting with water over the past few months giving me some wild paintings. Here are two real curiosites from the same afternoon last week. This one, to be fair, is bit of wreck if one judges it through a sanitary lens. Like many of the things I’m doing these days it’s messy and far from conventional in every way. It does however convey a feeling of storm clouds over a dark mysterious sea. It’s the sort of sky that's generally impossible for me to capture and condense quickly, so maybe this is why I see something special in it. But I admit that it’s also a tormented, and it's a brooding image that might not be easy many viewers.

For the longest time I couldn’t pull this the picture together until out of frustration, I took a larger brush and began sweeping it with circles as if I were using a small broom like in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To my surprise it worked and I stopped in just time to let it be. What holds it together are the small pink bits of open sky in both the right and left hand corners. Like fingers, these fragments of pink space grasp the whole form and appear to hold everything firmly in place. I like that it’s so full of colour despite the deep twilight hour when the sky barely brims with luminous pinks and violets. 

It’s a scruffy-looking picture too, as if it had been kicked around like a old ball on the beach, but personally, I kind of like all these spontaneous bits of slap-dash marks made naturally during its creation. These impromtu scars remind me of how animals, both in the wild and in the deep sea, can appear in old age after a lifetime of survival. Though importantly for me, this ‘mark-making' as it’s now called, is but a by-product of painting from a motif and never the destination itself. These wounds sometimes skulk around in many of my landscapes. One either likes them or not.

But what I really like in this image is the way that both the sea and sky seem to be glued onto the same plane and flattened as if like dried flowers and compressed into a book of fairy tales by a young girl who locked them into a coffin between two pages of her diary. These flat massive and menacing clouds have been pressed into time immobile, yet still full of ruptured energy.

I think it manifests a certain feeling I’ve been aware of within me when working here at the beach under such skies. Although it wouldn’t perhaps appeal to a large public, some painters might see something in it. I secretly wish I had the formula to paint others as easily as I painted this one today. I can still feel like a beginner all over again each time I go out there to work, but it’s a better gig than that of poor Sisyphus.

Another thing I like is that the effect of the picture is immediate and in your face whether you like it or not. It might even appear ‘ugly’ at first glance, but as Baudelaire reminds me in front of such images, “All truly original paintings often appear ugly at first”. F.Y.I. He doesn’t say ‘great paintings’, just original ones.

But Baudelaire was not only speaking of great artists like Van Gogh and Igor Stravinsky, but of so many others too, professional and amateur alike, who all linger like me, in the shadows of Art’s long and wiggly road. I feel confident, even arrogant enough, that he may have also been speaking about an image like this, one hundred and fifty years before its creation. 

It’s always been in me, this desire to create pictures as things ‘alive’. In front of such a picture, I wonder if I don’t simply desire to feel that ‘poof’ of a feeling like at the optometrist when given the glaucoma test. In a fraction of a second the machine punches out air at high speed at your vulnerable eyeball, testing it for pressure on the cornea. In this painting I want that visceral sensation thrown out at the viewer in the same way; ‘Poof’, either one gets it or not in one blow. 

To me it also reveals an unusual aspect of Nature, one from a very particular perspective; close up, and cropped. It doesn’t display a concept or a conventional viewpoint, it derives naturally from a wild Nature. It’s a set of clouds mushrooming over a sea at dusk in almost miniature scale as if selected by a 75mm telephoto lens. It evokes for me, a Thelonious Monk, off kilter and in your face, a sloppy primitive voice in all the right places, where Monk’s genius is camouflaged as an autistic child.