On Chesil Beach

16 February 2023

On Chesil Beach

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 February 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is from an evening last week. It was a brilliant 'bloom' that lingered on well into dusk. It didn't take long but looking at it today I think it's the lushest of the three I made that evening. Frankly, it's a frank picture, the sort of no-nonsense image that says what it means and it means what it says, all without going into overdrive. But don't be fooled by it's aura of verisimilitude, for I hope it leaves just enough incense in the air for the viewer to dream a little.  

This reminds me that in the world of art, both invention and imagination are what create reality. Wasn't it Albert Camus who said that climbing the steps to the bedroom is the best part of sex?

Anyway, there are lots of people who find more reality in works of fiction than in non-fiction, and I’m one of them. I’ve just finished the novel, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, a wonderful book that I really liked. It had been a gift from a friend and languished on my bookshelf for a few years before I plucked it out last month. 

I discovered him so late but finally got around to reading it, and as they say, better late than never. I had read Atonement earlier and really loved it. But generally, I’ve been so late to so many things in my life that I’m not surprised. I’ve been late to lots of other authors as well and late to so many musicians and composers too. There is so much out there that I find that I'm even still late to other painters too. But then, I’ve really also been late to other key parts of my life; late to discipline and hard work, but also just late to work, period. And I’ve been late to love, but now I believe I’m way past my expiration date on that one too. But significantly, I arrived much later than I would have liked at sobriety’s front door. In any event, I’m not alone, for there are lots of other latecomers like me who showed up to life like we would at the cinema and miss the start of the film. But we latecomers always stay till the end, even through all the credits.

But there's worst than that, there are way too many no-shows in this life because all that terrain stretching out between birth and death is just too rugged and people give up. There are also too many cracks that can swallow one up whole. 

Even under the very best of circumstances when life starts out well for some, all bundled up in a cute pram off Regents Park, storms arrive to sweep away many of the unlucky ones into the gutters of King’s Cross later on in life.

There are also late-bloomers and sleepers too, who spend their lives teetering on the edges of bar stools or tipsy in large rooms on comfy divans off Park Avenue. 

But for way too many poor souls around the globe, life begins and ends on a dusty barren bit of land in the middle of nowhere. Who can say where any choices have been made, freely or otherwise? Who is to gain, or who is to blame? As some say, life is a mystery, and that it's only through mystery that we find truth.  

Many of us, for one reason or another, never awaken to any sort of mystery at all, we seem to sleep through life, consciously or not, so that  truth is remains evasive. For me, that's a great shame, for life appears to not only be a great parade on main street but on all the back alleys as well. For a long time I used to watch them from the sidelines while secretly wanting to be part of it, but never daring.

My escape was always through books. But in spite of my own somnambular habits, like many people, I've always loved really good authors, the ones who take us on existential adventures and show us where they fell down and how they got up again. This is for me where invention transforms life into fiction, and then into art. 

So, from the very first page of this intimate book by Ian McEwan, I was transported back in time to a Britain I could not have known. He has the gift of narration, and not unlike a great painter, a love for detail and mood, for it’s a postcard of postwar Britain. 

Like Atonement, he paints a picture of a complicated and rigid order that's on the verge of a social collapse. I had seen lots of great British films, the edgier ones from the 1950’s and 60’s that foretold all this, but I had not read too many books about it.  

Painting, as an art form, also changed dramatically like everything else going on at the time because the trend went POP! Of Post-war Britain, I certainly prefer many of the painters who were scattered about the country busily painting away and more aligned with a figurative approach to art. In contrast to the well-heeled circles of money behind the POP movement in London, these were painters who, like an earlier generation of Americans in the 1930's, were concerned with the social imbalances. Consequently, there work revealed the darker themes that mirrored the gritty economic realities of Britain at the time. Personally, I was never a fan of the 1960's POP thing. I think it was an insignificant contribution to art, but hey!

I think this hard-hitting crew, the likes of Leon Kossoff, Frank Auberbach, Francis Bacon, Josef Herman, Shiela Fell and Eva Frankfurther, amongst many, come away with more authenticity, and I think they shine even brighter today over the long haul of time. But two painters, partly POP, became real celebrities, Howard Hodgkins and David Hockney. Hodgkins took POP into an interesting and erudite corner of Abstract Painting while the immensely popular David Hockney left Britain to go live in sunny California. And why not? It’s no fun being bleak in Britain. 

In the world of painting, like a work of fiction, a narrative is equally important because it’s about how content is transformed into a picture despite its form of abstraction. Is this achieved through style or technique? Or does it lay-in-waiting deeply inside a painter’s soul for the right pictorial idea to surface at some point in his or her life? Should one ask, or not, to what degree does our upbringing and surroundings form us as either writers or painters? Or anything else for that matter?

I suddenly think of Guernica, Picasso’s grand oeuvre and plea to the world about suffering and the terror of war. Its subject is specific and its Cubist style is employed adroitly to convey the incomprehensible subject matter with authenticity. It’s why it's still around and people flock to see it despite all the subsequent comings and goings of art movements ever since. This picture has been like the sun around which everything else revolves.

For me, a painter’s problem today is about how to recreate a visual world that conveys an idea through either 'figurative' or 'non-objective' means, and either of these are both valid and compelling in the right hands. Basically like a novelist, do we have anything interesting to say? And how do we say it? Of course, an authentic voice must be the very bare minimum in either of these art forms. 

But how does a painter render the specificity of narrative detail without bogging us all down with tedium? How did Picasso create this theme of war that lives so generously in a grand operatic space like Guernica when he was actually living in Paris at the time? The answers are numerous, but two things stand out for me; the first is his grasp of form and the second is his fertile imagination. Picasso seemed to love both forming pictures and deforming them. He created an entire oeuvre out of these two contradictions with complete nonchalance. 

Ian McEwan, on the other hand, paints a British social landscape with the eyes of Chardin, full of details that dazzle the reader and place us firmly on the soil of a repressed 1960's Britain. His brushstrokes pull me into his literary drama page after page until it slowly comes into focus.   

Picasso creates his world by first pulling everything apart, then piecing it back together again through abstract means that are personal to his unconvential style. When re-assembled, all the unnecessary details will have been removed as if like husk from a corn. Both the writer and painter hope it will all be whole and fresh at the end of the process, as if by magic. The result is not a copy, but an entirely new and believable world for the rest of us to imagine for ourselves. 

And what is it about truth and fiction in this space of memory and invention in which we all live together, yet so separately? How does a work of art, a book, or a painting, in these two art works possess the power to transport us to a particular place deep inside ourselves that we can recognise even if we’ve not yet been there? Amateurs, all of us, are seduced by art when it’s successful, but when it fails, we sigh, and quickly move on forgetting it because it's brutal for all creators out there.

Like a tiny bowl of sorbet between gourmet dishes to change our palate, this small picture is offered up as a souvenir of Chesil Beach in Dorset, UK. Though I've never been there I'm sure somehow, that on certain evenings the sky would bloom just like this. It’s a nothing of a picture, a mere afterthought, and yet it lives with just enough oxygen to survive its spartan life here on the Pacific coast.

 

Jane Wheeler, ceramicist and painter!

I'm a doomscroller, I can't help myself, but in this terrible time of trump, I've become a bottom feeder in a polluted sea of debris.

I don't believe at all that it's a permanent affliction but I will monitor it nonetheless and be careful.

The upside to this is that at times I stumble upon some really wonderful things, because we cannot forget that the world at large is still extraordinary. So I came across this artist whose pieces I find really great. 

Somehow they gave me the impression they'd be larger than they actually are, not by much, but still, their portly demeanours portend to something big. Regardless, they are mostly around 24 X 17 cm, or so. 

When I look around at ceramics these days I can often feel underwhelmed, so to see these really lifted my day.I am not a collector but if I were I would jump on a few of these pieces and put them around my small home and enjoy looking at them. Life can be that simple. 

What I can glean online is that she lives in the north of Britain and she only paints now. I am not sure if these were partially thrown, or coiled. No matter, because it's her painted glazing which is so delicious. They speak to a world of old (but not antique) and to a life of the utilitarian. Some of her titles read, Black Ice Flagon for instance.

She is represented by a few galleries, one of which is called Bircham somewhere in Britain. If I can find it I'm anyone can.

Below are three of her paintings which I find intriguing. The top two feel a lot like her ceramic work; messy but determined. There is a detail I snapped that was kind of a shock. It's below. Is it the artist looking out of the horror of life today? The bottom one feels so British in that kind of innate affection for wild domestic gardens and the natural love for colour around one's home.  

 

 

James Salter’s time stamp, (part two)

19 September 2021

James Salter’s time stamp (part two)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So, to plunge a little further into James Salter's theme around the transience of our lives and the unalterable fact of our ultimate end, the question is always posed, how do we live? 

First of all, I think artists of all kinds are lucky because at least when nothing seems to go right in our relationships, family, jobs, and even health,... basically everything, we can always retreat into the back room of artistic calm.

This reminds me to focus on how I use my time here on earth. James Salter seems to have used it well, enjoying both work and pleasure. Lucky guy! But for most of us, making our lives richer and using our time better can be difficult. The question is: Does life make it more difficult or is it just me?  

So because I have skin in the game, like they say, I usually speak up for Art, writ large, because I believe that an artistic vocation is a worthy one despite its reputation around the world. Is it because too many people think we're dreamers and that we waste our lives (Of course we are, but don't tell anyone). 

If an artist doesn't play, how would he or she, ever discover what's on really their mind? Speaking for myself alone, I need to write or paint just to find out what I'm thinking most of the time and to help focus, my hand needs a pen or a brush. And my mind needs to be shaken up a lot. It's like one of those snow globes with the Eiffel Tower inside that sits on a paediatrician's bookshelf. Without a small jiggle, how would I figure out what the weather's doing? 

But do we waste our lives? Pas de tout! Besides, everyone is a bit of a dreamer to some degree or other, and at least I, like millions of others, can put it to good use in my vocation. 

What's that famous American nursery rhyme from the 19th century? 

‘Row row row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.” 

But being a dreamer doesn’t mean being passive, nor is it about ‘passing time’, ‘killing time’, or ‘wasting time’. Some of us dreamers can get up to a lot of frenetic and kinetic stuff while passing ourselves off as slouches because living life can be done on lots of levels all at once. We can even chew gum and tobacco at the same time. 

According to the great British poet, Percy Shelley, “.....poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.....”

If only that were true, but I admire his sentiment anyway. It’s noble. I might broaden it out slightly to include all creative souls, potters and basket weavers, gardeners, nurses and doctors, and all those who take care of stray children and animals around the globe. All these too, are the unacknowledged and essential practitioners and legislators of the world and should have a greater voice.

It took me the longest time to find out that 98% of the world doesn't get an 'arty life'. Unless our work is marketable and deemed to be valued by money alone, they will wonder just what the heck we are doing with our lives. Value is a complicated notion when one applies it to art. Depending on the season, a banana here in Australia costs around 50 cents, but duct-taped to a wall and auctioned off at Sotheby's it's worth $5.2 million dollars. So like they say these daze, it's complicated.

If an artist has a reputable gallery, or died a gloriously premature death, maybe their value goes up. Let's face it, in the eyes of most people we’re oddballs who don't know how to make a buck.  

But all this is cool with me as long as I’m happy and healthy and live a productive life. It’s really okay because even if I’m poor, I’m at least a lot better off than most people on earth. Being poor and miserable would be hard, but not as bad as being rich and miserable.

James Salter also counsels his wannabe writers to use it all up on whatever it is they're working on. Don't hold anything back for 'the next project', 'use all your notes' and 'burn it all up', is what he sagely tells us all. It reminds me of all those coaches who exhort their teams in locker rooms at halftime; “Finish the job, don’t leave anything out on the field!” And who can argue with that?   

He also speaks not only for writers but for all artists when he says that everything disappears unless it's recorded. He reminds us of our collective history and he speaks for the laws and legislations that hold all our fragile communities and nations together when elucidated into written documents for all to recognise. Without them, we might still be living back in the time of Attila the Hun.

Speaking as a painter who loves to writes, I think pictures and stories are made out of nothing but an idea, a visual sensation or maybe even a dream of faded memories. The passage from an idea to the finished product is through a state of formlessness, and either one gets comfortable with this all unresolved uncertainty pretty quickly or they go slowly crazy. But this I believe, is the alchemical furnace that moulds books, paintings and music too, among so many art forms.

But I think it's difficult if one stays in a formless state for too long because a picture, a story, or a POP song risks to dissolve into a vague inconclusiveness if it doesn't resolve at the end of the creative process.  

If it's uneven or doesn’t come together to live securely on its own, it's hard for any creation to live very long without a viable form holding it upright. Worse still, if an idea is not solid enough, or if its poorly executed, it may not live long enough anyway. Generally, the idea is to survive not just the near term, but the decay of eternity. 

Tangentially, I think to really believe in art is to not only believe in the unknown but to have faith in it too. But patience and planning are two invisible ingredients in this solitary process that can enable a creator to survive the messy process. At least, for me, this is how it's been.

I don't want to sound too melodramatic, but as long as we're on the subject of messiness, I think that to make art is about facing death. Of course it's a metaphor, but it's an apt one because every picture, poem, or song, is a form of resistance against all those barriers in our lives, and death is certainly the biggest one at the end of the street. Like any soldier in mano- mano combat, an artist puts his, or her metaphor on the line with each onslaught. 

  

And though most of us will do anything to avoid the subject of death we all seem to flock to dystopian disaster films all the same. Is it because they remind us that at any moment all we know and cherish in life could be washed away and we'll end up all alone and afraid? Everything we hold dear in life, our friends and families, our most precious keepsakes, both remnants and memories, will all disappear some day. We get a sense of mortality's close breath when our partner or spouse dies or leaves us for another. Unless it hobbles us, we will nonetheless live for another day and brace ourselves for the next brush with tragedy. So I think that artists face their own end without ever even leaving their own studios, writing desks, or pianos.  

Since time immemorial, to combat this metaphoric end, humankind has attempted to mark its time and place on earth in hopes of leaving something solid behind. Despotic rulers and poets alike, all desire to make a mark somewhere, anywhere, whether on a canvas, or on a women's heart. We want our stories to live beyond us. Which artist in a cave in Lascaux would have imagined that their drawings would fascinate future generations 18,000 years hence? 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm 

Regarding my young ‘female’ (above) from the pair the other night, this was the second painting done after the colours had mellowed and  dusk crept slowly into the sky. For me, it’s an image that embodies so many womanly qualities that one can love about the feminine spirit. It possesses a soft and organised harmony which is delicate but with a firm carriage, and it's rather composed, a bit more Jane Austin than Jane Fonda. There is a radiance in it that is not in the other picture, the ‘male’ version. This has that quiet assurance that reminds me of so many of my favourite women friends. 

There is a subtle intensity beneath its hidden warmth. Its beauty and intelligence is discreet without any ostentation. But you might ask me: “How can you pretend to know so much about women?” And I would reply that I’m lucky enough to have had far more women friends than men in my life. 

And so finally, like at the post office when letters are sent off to other places around the neighbourhood or across the globe, each article is stamped with the time and date. Being a painter from the other side of the world and living DownUnder, I, too, can put my own ‘time stamp’ upon these pictures each afternoon. This act thus reminds me that I was here on this beach for even just a fraction of a moment on this remarkable Earth. These small paintings are proof that I was there, out on a dune at dusk and facing the Pacific Ocean on all those wonderful evenings.