Mallarmé, and the effect of dusk

6 April 2020

Mallarmé, and the effect of dusk

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

It was near clear the other night, and boy, it was fun. It was a gentle and humid sky held in a thin diaphanous veil of pigment, the kind of sky I love working from. Like many from this series, its drawing is extremely simple and it’s void of much drama. Others, with complicated drawings can be more theatrical as when clouds swarm the sky creating action, but this one merely hints at it. It’s a portrait of serenity, and looking at it this morning I wonder if it doesn't evoke the scent of both daybreak and dusk?

At University, I must have skipped the lecture on the Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé in French Lit class, but I certainly came across him later when I read about Impressionism, of which he was a big fan at that time. With a poet’s arcane clarity, he wrote about Painting during this revolutionary period of the second half of the 20th century. (But come to think of it, haven't the French always rioted about something or other behind the barricades? And for any good cause? And isn't that why the rest of us so admire them? Are they not the feisty intellectuals who will block their autoroutes over the price of an egg? I think maybe as any Zen monk might tell you, thinking a lot leads to frustration,,, just sayin...) 

 

So anyway, I was recently perusing the world through Google and came across a small piece that Mallarmé had written about Manet and the Impressionists. Manet was already established in Paris prior to the arrival of the young Impressionists, and with avuncular flourish, he presided over their artistic rebellion.

In his text Mallarmé described how the Impressionists had changed the nature of Painting and he marveled at their explorations into light as if they were foraging through the metaphoric and transient substance of the air itself. He described the vibrant colours and the play of light in a painting as both a fusion and a struggle between the surface and the space in a picture, but also between the air and the pigment, and I liked all that.

His own investigations into the ephemeral sensuality of his own poetry appear to parallel their work as painters. The air, as it occupies an empty space seemed to be a counterpoint to Mallarme’s work as a Symbolist poet. This new generation of 19th century France would soon send be sending Realism to the guillotine. For the first time ever, the viewer was to become a participant in the artwork because a landscape or portrait was no longer a declarative (or decorative) statement but an existential question. For these ‘Modernists’, paintings would henceforth became an interaction that would elicit a response from the viewing public. Art was changed forever and it led to Post-Modernism with a few scruffy brushmarks.

Expressing the inexpressable was already something Mallarmé had himself become obssesed with, and he looked for it everywhere. To bypass Realism became a cri de coeur for these Modernists. And what could possibly be more inexpressable than to paint the air itself?

Thus, in this study here from the other evening, I found myself also taken in by the soft quality of the velvet sky, but as with many of these studies, it’s the air itself which is what interested me the most. And why not? It’s the tiny thread that connects all breathing elements here on earth. As a painter, it is the most purplexing element to work from and render. This resonates for me perhaps because, like the accidental Symbolist that I seem to be, these pictures, display virtually no content but for the water and the air that make up the motif. 

In the painter’s world, the sea, being water, reflects back the ‘coulour’ of the sky overhead. In Malarme’s world, the sky becomes an empty pause, either an unfurnished phrasing of Debussy or a vacant space in one of his own poems, for this is the essence of Symbolism and the birth of Minimalism. 

The painter’s sky can appear invisible, but at certain times when it allows us to look up and through it into space, we can see that it’s mostly gaseous in its various guises, and it provides the painter with a gluey substance with which to capture light from the sun. High cirrus clouds at dusk perform this task with grace and they give the painter a handhold onto the air itself. 

But beyond all these explanations, I really just love the way this painting came put. It isn’t too often when I can connect so emotionally with a picture of mine but thankfully it does happen. If it didn’t happen a lot then I might be just a scientist, happy and satisfied, but not engaged enough to die a small death. So yes, it does happen enough, but here, it feels like I’ve waited my whole life to see this painting. That I was the lucky one to have painted it, is the real surprise this week. There are so many evenings that look like this, but it’s often when it’s too dark to see my palette so thus I cannot access it, and yet this sky can be seen at the tail end of some evenings around the globe if one is really lucky.

 

Buckminister Fuller at IKEA

26 September 2019

Buckminister Fuller at IKEA

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 September 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“I am deeply impressed with the designer of the universe; I am confident I couldn’t have done anywhere near such a good job”   Buckminister Fuller 1895 - 1983

I put together an Ikea kitchen together two years ago and it taught me an important lesson; Ikea directions are never wrong. No matter how much I howled at the last stages of completion, if I haven’t followed everything to a dotted ‘t’, I would have to remove everything and start all over again. It reminded me of the classic Zen exercise, the one where the master orders the novice to make a long trench across the monastery grounds at two meters deep and a meter wide. When it’s done the master changes his mind and says, “..No,,,,No,,,, that is not correct, it is in the wrong place, you must fill it in, then make another one closer to the trees over there.”

So for me, I’ve also learned that painting in front of a motif is a lot like following Ikea’s directions, not exactly, but somewhat fundamentally. I think so because like in this study from the other night, if the motif looks a certain way, and I want to follow it into the night, I'll need to ‘read it’ like a kind of map with it’s own singular set of visual directions. It may sound crazy to express it this way but once I’ve started, a picture will always only go one way despite all the choices I may seem to have. Once I’ve seen something, I follow it around like a bloodhound even if I’m unsure of my choices, because my scent always knows where the dog bowl is hidden.

It’s an elusive track that jumps between what I see out on the motif and what the memory of it tells me what I remember of it. If I’m not plugged in I can quickly lose my way.  Though my memory is not the photo of the IKEA cabinet in the catalogue I’m trying to assemble, it is the pathway that my spontaneous volition uses to get there. So I might have a reference for it and a place from where to start but it’s my craft that takes me to the finish line. In this painting thing, it’s never the IKEA photo that I follow but the ever evolving sunset into the night.

This study is so extremely simple, it may be even boring at first glance, but for me, it does has an organic truth in it. And looking further I notice a single small cloud in the sky that I wasn’t aware of painting. Upon examining it, I realise that it had been created by leaving the canvas blank, and herein, I reveal an old habit from my early fling with Cezanne as a student. It’s a good habit that I still treasure and it proves to me that the memory of the initial IKEA photo is actually quite flexible and can always bend to my will as I paint.

It had been a lazy Spring afternoon, a little on the warm side, and this was the first of three made that afternoon. It was done very quickly, maybe in just five minutes. I was hoping the sky would warm up and broaden into a rich big bloom but it didn’t and yet I like this for its improvised and smudgy verisimilitude. The five different layers of colours are a sensual take on the flatness of a picture from last week which I liked. I love that despite the similarities between all these paintings, they all have different personalities.

At home I binged on Woody Allen this past week and saw Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. What a treat. I know, I know,,,, he has taken a lots hits over the past few years, but personally, I’m someone who judges the work of an an artist not the person even though I understand that this does not allign with the current moral zeitgeist, but hey! Like really great paintings, all three films are aesthetic gems, and each of them are far more than just the sum of their parts. Don’t all great things share this same quality? So when Buckminister Fuller praises the designer of the universe in secular terms such as this, I agree wholeheartedly. It’s proclaimed without a trace of modesty and with a dose of truth like any real American artist.

  

Fractal secrets shared in front of the hearth

26 December 2019

Fractal secrets shared in front of the hearth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 December 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 December 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 December 2019 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here are three studies all made on the same evening, one right after the other in the order of execution. They are pretty straight forward, and though maybe not so glamorous or sexy, I think their beauty resides in their truth, simple as it may appear. While looking at the shredded quality of these clouds this morning, I suddenly 

imagined three step sisters ready for a grand ball. But my imagination is both eccentric and historic. Anyway, I like them as a trio because for a painter like me, it’s the delicacy of these clouds that excite me. 

There is a certain kind of cloud that appears in a particular sort of pale sky, usually with a bit of humidity in the air that evokes all the lacework done by millions of women all over Europe over the centuries; rich and poor women, the sisters and nieces, the hired hands and the dilettantes too, all of them sitting around the hearth and sharing of secrets.  

And these small shredded clouds, like secrets themselves, are fragments that dissolve into thin air during the tumid moments before dusk swallows them up like a giant whale in a fairy tale. On the beach at dusk it’s a marvellously gentle light and and an unassuming one too. In this gentle light ancient secrets can speak to painters and drunk poets but also small dogs and wild children too when they romp deliriously into twilight.

And these are the types of clouds which take me to Painting. For a long time I have thinking about how pieces (or planes, if you wish) of a whole picture are fastened together one to another. I realise that I’ve spoken about this before because it’s a mild obsessionof mine.

I got into a conversation with a guest at a dinner near Dieulefit with a scientist from Scotland one summer evening years ago. I was peppering her with questions about fractels and the Chaos theory for some reason. Eventually by the time the strawberry tartes appeared on the table for desert she suggested to me a book to read aptly titled ‘Chaos’ by the then NYT science editor James Gleick. When I got home I immediately ordered it then quickly devoured. 

It’s all about fractal connections (and disconnections) but measurements too, and it traces the history of this new thinking which sprang up around a few eccentric scientists working on the Atomic bomb in Los Alamos in the late 1960’s (L.S.D. was also involved). But anyway, I have always been frustrated at how mathematics rounded everything off to the nearest .09. It drove me crazy. Even as a small boy looking at the sky I had already empirically understood that infinity was ever-present all around us and that nothing could be nicely reduced down to an even and perfect equation. Like many children I used to watch clouds endlessly as they swirled across the sky, appearing and disappearing, cartwheeling and somersaulting into one another like in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Looking at clouds and  leaves in the world of plants, was the easiest ways to witness the fractal behaviours in the Universe. And so, for me, when painting certain cloud shapes in the sky, the fractal connections manifest immediately.

In painting, the importance of how planes (and shapes) connect to one another is an essential element. But also in all Art, Architecture, Music, and even as a girlfriend once advised, in love affairs too. Every painter has to deal with this whether they know it or not. And moreover I should say; whether he or she is conscious of it, or not, for I can see that lots of artists do not seem to place an importance upon it. And yet, they are still constrained by its importance nonetheless, for the successful unity of a painting is always still grounded in how the sum of its parts click into each other like Lego creating an energetic whole.

Of course the subject matter in a painting is extremely varied and uniquely different and it will be composed of materials depicting a multitude of various elements that deserve different treatments; the skin, bark, stone, wood, glass, flora, hair (human and otherwise), and the air itself, the most popular element that holds so many pictures in its light grip. In a unified painting, all these diverse elements desire to be connected to one another with great subtlety, or not purposely so. Painters of every age in history had to learn the delicate craft of bridging these often disperate elements on a picture plane. 

In the popular genre of landscape painting these variously bits of fractal foliage equally work to attach disparite elements of a picture together one to the other; the fields to the trees, the hills into soft mountains, the chimney smoke into the air overhead. In a landscape, their terrestrial logic is tactile.

But these studies are mostly concerned with painting the sky which is ephemeral. In the end, it is basically just coloured air and gaseous clouds which require a deft but patient hand.

Whether one looks at an 18th century marine-scape from Holland or an abstract 20th century work by Willem de Kooning, the unity, or lack there of, is cemented by the manner in which each brushstroke of paint, both literally and figuratively, attach to one another. 

The really, really great painters do this extremely well, whereas the lesser among us seem to limp along with uneven ambiguity. So I hope that these three studies above, whether limping, or in a ‘Gavotte’, reveal a tiny fractal system at work in some fashion or other, successful or otherwise.

The happy couple

19 November 2021

The happy couple

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

This was the first of two from the other afternoon. It had been humid all day and the salty air created a slight haze that diffused the colours and set off a rich and colourful bloom. Nice! It was calm with hardly a breath of wind and the sea was flat like a mirror. 

Although I usually develop a few vague visual ideas immediately upon arriving at the beach, I'll generally only commit myself to them after preparing a palette and after perusing the sky a bit, but by then I'm ready to commit to a visual image. All this happens quite fast. So because I’ve learned to place faith in my eyes and my craft, I'm always ready for an adventure and I can easily turn my will over to both these things. It makes it easier, sort of like getting into a Waymo taxi for an afternoon spin. 

And yet, there are moments when my wild child rises up in me to complain, demanding that I take back the wheel and drive myself. But in this series, it never really works out well. When I paint in front of this sky, it feels to me like I'm guided by sonar which is very different than how I approach painting in the solitude of the studio. Though both ways of working are equally compelling (and fun), they demand a different side of my imagination.

In the studio stillness, I can easily lose my bearings when confronted with just my own ideas and cut off from the windy dunes and the big sky overhead.

It's like I'm switching languages when in the studio where I invite my wild-child into the room, and when arguments usually follow.  

"But all this is good!"

Philip Guston, one of my favourite non-figurative painters might casually declare. Further, he might also add; 

"...that is the whole point of painting in this era of existentialist choice..."

And I would agree. But because I work both figuratively and non-objectively, I need to see them as two separate compartmentalised spaces, and the DMZ between the two areas is also my own DNA of light and colour. I'm like a UN observer who moves uneasily between the two zones.  

I know that many of these pictures from the beach may look alike to others. A few friends have already intimated this to me, but no matter. I've come to realise that I don’t care so much what others think of them in the end, I only seem to care about how I think of these things. And anyway, one cannot judge a series by just a few pictures that pop out anymore than one could judge an athlete's daily performance. Artists and athletes are in it over the long haul, though perhaps athletes may have shorter long hauls. Unlike artists who can work till they drop dead, athletes are comets who shine brightly, before passing on.

I really enjoyed painting this picture from the other evening. First of all I’m a sucker for a pale turquoise sea that is as delicate and feminine as a gardenia petal, one that I would hesitate to touch, much less paint. 

And just like a happy couple, the sky and sea on evenings like this, complement one another like in a great marriage. The sky on this night deferred to the sea as would any thoughtful loving husband who wished nothing more than for his wife to scintillate by yielding to her glow when entering a dinner party. 

I want to tell the world that it looked just like this but of course I'd be lying. But I could say that the sky on this particular evening brought out the very best in me like would any great partner in a marriage. 

Glacial change

 

I'm sure that watching the tragic aftermath of the flooding in Nepal has upset everyone around the globe, but no matter the continent, rich or poor, spiritually vibrant, or lazy and decadent, human suffering hits all of us in the same gut most everywhere.

Is it too abstract, or just too convenient, for some politicians to stay mum on the connection between the flooding in the Himalayas and the science behind climate change? Why such glacial action, when we can all see it, feel it, and die from it?   

 

Willy Nilly

31 December 2022

Willy Nilly

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

This morning I was looking at a catalogue for an old Cezanne watercolour show and I was reminded of something I've often felt when looking back on my early years in Aix as a student. 

When just starting out as a young painter I found it difficult to spend time learning from the late work of Cezanne, his watercolours in particular. They are sparse and they can even appear unfinished, and I felt that trying to understand them was akin to stumbling upon a set of notations written by Albert Einstein while at Princeton. 

So looking back now from my perspective today, I see more clearly the difficulty of learning from a painter’s later work. It can be done, and maybe many have succeeded, but I found it confusing. The problem I had with trying to learn from him was that he had already painted most of his whole life before arriving at these late watercolours, and there just wasn’t enough information in them for me to grab ahold of for myself. 

Though it took a while I finally realised that copying these things as a student would only lead me to something that 'resembled late Cezanne watercolours’ and they wouldn’t advance me onto a path where my intuition was already trying to steer me. I couldn't get there from his work but I know others who did. I guess it's a question of temperament.

I understood later on that Cezanne's austere pencil drawings done throughout his working life actually prefigured these spare watercolours at the end of his life. Not only that, but his very early work was not only thick with paint but of darkness too because to find his own ‘light’ later on, he had to pass through his own tenebrous past.

I suspect now, that many of these ‘unfinished’ drawings and watercolours were simply left in their abbreviated state for a reason known only to Cezanne. He certainly could have gone further but he stopped, why? Only he knew, but maybe he cited reasons for it somewhere in his letters. I'm not an expert on Cezanne, could it be that he stopped just because he liked what he had achieved? Did he not want to ruin something that he wished to retain as an idea or a study? Maybe he thought he had arrived in heaven?  

But beneath all this, the real problem with working from his late watercolours is that it didn’t allow a young painter (like me) to dig deep enough into my own backyard to find a light of my own. No matter how much one adores or admires Cezanne (or any painter of consequence) he doesn’t just give his light away willy-nilly. I learned that ‘light’ had to be earned the hard way by making lots of dark, lugubrious failures before I would find a way into it. I know this now because I struggled like everyone else trying to figure it out. 'Light' in a painting, is never given away, but it will appear freely when a generous drawing allows it.

Of course, all artists are different and they all evolve (and devolve) in a myriad of surprising ways. I sense that most really grand painters have to dip down into their own personal muck before rising up again to meet fate because many do pass successfully through darkness to get there in the end. A painter like Vincent Van Gogh, certainly went through hell, painting all the way through it and out again in his last luminous paintings from Auvers right before he died. 

Unlike most painters, I think one could learn from any chapter of his life’s oeuvre, from the earliest drawings and paintings around Etten and Drenthe, and finally to Auvers where he died. The early work revealed his scrabble to grapple with learning how to draw, but also his discovery of the surface of a picture plane. A few years later on when he landed in Provence it was as if he had been rocketed into the fourth dimension. The work he made there is so infused with light that any painter, young or established, could learn everything about colour and drawing from just studying him alone. He was a singular figure in art history and remarkable both as an artist and teacher. I have an obvious bias towards him for many reasons, but mostly because I also learned about light and colour in the South of France. 

But alas, all this comes late to a painter like me. Looking back at my own twists and turns, I see that I was looking for solutions to Painting like a worm burrowing blindly through the long dark corridors of great museums. Ignoring my own nagging intuition, I erroneously imagined that I still needed something from the past, like maybe a magic ring or such, a thing that I didn’t realise I already held in my possession. 

So, back to the present here in Australia, this painting was one of two that came out of the other evening. It was a confusing sky full of different kinds of clouds that indicated a front moving in from the South. Not often, but when the sky is all higgledy-piggledly just before dusk, the last bit of the setting sun can shine high in the East lighting up several layers of clouds simultaneously overhead. Like from this picture from the other evening, there can appear small cotton ball clouds at low altitude that will turn bright pink, orange, or gold, usually in succesion.

I love these evenings when colour is working on several different layers all at once. They free me up and yank me out of my habits. Skies like these are chaotic and they’re the best teachers but the fail rate can be high. These are evenings as close to heaven as I’ll ever get I fear. And these jewel-like clouds on this night, some would buy them if they could find the right currency.