9 October 2020
Hiroshi Sugimoto
The other night I decided to go out and make several smaller studies, quickly, and without much thought. I had to make this a choice because normally I immediately develop ideas rapidly upon arriving at the dunes by just looking briefly out at what the sky and sea are up to. This happens in a flash and I’m barely aware of it. So the other night I had to actually concentrate on not thinking about what I would do. It was an experiment, and it was easier said than done.
I made six small studies, one right after the other as I followed the colours moving through the chromatic descent into the Springtime gloaming. Not surprisingly, all the studies resembled syblings of a happy family like small yellow ducklings crossing an old road. This one was the first and it’s super simple. What I like most are the small bits of empty canvas that I hadn’t touched but which appear pink. This is an optical illusion due to the intensity of the cold Lemon Yellow in the sky that compel us, the viewers, to ‘imagine’ its complement in our minds. In this case it’s decidedly a warm pink due to the extremely cold yellow encircling it. In reality, it’s but the white of the canvas board.
This visual phenomenon reveals a great truth about how colour interacts as a unit in a picture. The perception of colour is conditioned by the overall unity in a painting. When a painter can exploit this, he is ahead of the game. Think of Monet, especially his very late work as revealed in his Water Lilies which he painted for The Orangerie in Paris. Anything anyone could wish to learn about colour harmony is on the menu in these extraordinary works. Complimentary relationships abound endlessly in extreme nuance throughout all of these magnificent panels. It’s a sensual fireworks on display for the senses.
I like stumbling haphazardly upon Nature’s secrets during a painting session. This is exactly why I keep returning to the twilight sky week after week, month after month, and now, year after year. It’s a work-out like having one’s own Pilates trainer each week, and like they say, one gets stronger and stronger over time. But it’s also the gift that keeps on giving and giving.
So what does this mean to have an idea in Painting? Is it the same as having a vision or concept? How are these different, if indeed they are different at all?
As I've already written, Hiroshi Sugimoto was an inspiration for this series at the beach. Having seen his large, long, black and white exposures of the ocean, I wondered, as a painter, what it would be like to render the horizon line on the sea in colour. Obviously painting is a different art form, but like all art, I think, an artist of any kind or in any field, wants nothing more than to get his or her teeth into a worthy project, one they intuit might take them on a long road trip to somwhere interesting in themselves.
Sugimoto certainly had a vision for his portraits of the sea which he extended around the coastlines of Japan. For me here, it began as a lark to try a few studies in front of the twilight sky because it was something I always wanted to do here on the sea long before I had seen Sugimoto’s photo’s. Fortuitously his work pushed me to begin. I generally don’t talk about vision too much because it can somehow seem a bit too grand and lofty. I’m more comfortable using the word idea when it comes to working on a painting and yet somehow, the word ‘idea’ still feels to me a little too mechanical and perhaps not Delphic enough. Concept, also appears a bit too cerebral, so maybe vision seems more appropriate in the end because it implies a sense of the mystery, a state where imagination can arise to fuse with something solid and tangible.
Could vision then not be an experience that’s built and developed slowly over one’s working life? Is it a perhaps a larger quality that has weathered enough success and failure to have shaped one’s craft? But then there are those unique artists who seem to have been born with visions, and through luck or good fortune, were able to discover them and mine them deeply.
I wonder if vision doesn't form itself in different ways? Mozart and Bach come to mind as early prodigies. But a fellow like Vincent Van Gogh had to dig his way out of a chilly, stern religious family then labour through the dark impoverished Belgium landscape before he found his calling and gave himself entirely to it. William Blake, famously comes to mind when one thinks of a visionary poet and painter whose art existed in the subjunctive world of dreams. But as a painter, it’s Monet who naturally re-appears continually for me when I think of the visionary poet, though not one in the dreamy world, but one in the concrete and empirically formed world of craft over a lifetime.
So, the other night, I just wanted work with one simple visual idea at a time leaving the studies in a fresh state, primal, as if made by me as a six year old. At the same time, I was also aware that something might happen that had been marinating inside me already for twenty years. So that was my thinking behind the session.
What came out were hardly visionary but like every session I learned something. Perhaps for for me, a vision is something that reveals itself through the work over a long period of time. And like most artists in any craft, the work will naturally develop slowly over time through the intuition that it subsequently engenders over the long haul. In other words, maybe a vision just naturally arrives on its own volition over time. It cannot be willed by the creator. I think it’s a providential event when one receives it because not everyone does in human life. It's an intuition not unlike that of a salmon returning home after a long arduous journey with the aid of the earth's magic magnetic field. The artist arrives home each day because of all those small failures, sacrifices and little adjustments that one makes along the way.
