Chopin’s spiderweb

28 November 2020

Chopin’s spiderweb

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 November 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This morning as I moved around my home I was listening to Chopin’s Études (Opus 10,) all the while glancing at a few pictures on the walls which I had recently framed and hung. 

“Hmmm, that’s it” I thought to myself.....“these small studies from the beach have something in common with these Études.” In an instant I saw, and heard a fragile bridge between them. It was a poignant realisation because from the very start of this series at the beach about three years ago, I had also imagined these pictures as studies  I think this was because I didn’t take them too seriously, but also perhaps because I needed to somehow protect myself against failure. If I had a shrink I’d certainly be exploring this idea. But at the same time, I don’t wish to reduce Chopin’s iconic Études to the simplicity of these small works of mine or to compare them artistically. The rapport between them is from personal observations and not based upon aesthetic qualifications of which I’ll try to explain.

Like so many lovers of Chopin, I’ve heard the Études a million times, and compared to his other works, I’ve always felt a great spontaneous eruption of emotion in them. He moves through all the harmonic keys like an obssessed explorer travelling the world in search of hidden continents. From within each key, whole regions are opened up and musically examined, exploited even.

There are also quirky and sometimes frenetic variations within many of them with which I identify in my own small pictures. Like his Études, each of my own small studies in this series has its own emotional logic embedded in their brushstrokes, and this is a repetitive motif that cycles through the colour wheel in much the same way that Chopin cycles through all the keys, one Étude at a time.

Each picture of mine has its own particular idea, one that arises intuitively out of how I proceed to treat the sea and sky on a particular afternoon. What’s the weather doing? How is the light? Bright or diffused? Is it dry or humid? And the clouds? Because my simple studies are without a whole host of complex relationships which might have been housed in larger and more complicated pictures, there is room only for one idea at a time. This is a constraint of time each afternoon but perhaps it also suits my nature.

When one listens to the Chopin’s Études I think one can understand that they too, possess one simple melodic idea but which he fully exploits harmonically. Therein lies his greatness. (BTW, he first wrote one set of them, Opus #10, when he was just a teenager, then another set, Opus #25, when he was only 23 years old) Sacré Bleu!

What a talent. Yes, they are Études, but they are also complex studies that embellish an idea and they’re only constrained by the chosen key. This does not seem at all too dissimilar to that of a painter’s austere oil sketch like mine, but that said, they gave birth to the Concertos where Chopin develops a greater spiderweb of grander melodic harmonies that fill out like a tree in its summer bloom.

Another similarity I felt, was that each of my pictures are as distinct to one another as are his Études. They are parts of a family wherein each picture is as original as it is different to one another, as one sibling might be to the next. Yet seen together in the metaphor, there is always a family resemblance somewhere, however obscure. They are connected by a feeling in the convergence of brushstrokes. But this resemblance isn’t just physical; it’s not just the eyes, the ears, the smile, the hands, or even the feet. These subtle particularities are more nuanced and they can relate to the voice, the laughter, the sense of humour and the weird singular twitches so often shared in common between all siblings, yet not so easily discernable for an outsider to pick up on. 

These are for me, in painting, the indescribable little quirks of a picture, the inexplicable brushstrokes and erasures, even the marks of mistake that render a picture so distinctly original. It’s a fingerprint, and it’s so human, like hearing someone play piano. This reminds me that art runs parallel to nature, in that nature’s logic is as original as it is repetitive in our visual world. And one only has to hear the first few bars of his music before one easily recognises the hands and the soul of Frederic Chopin. And so too, is it also with a painter, whose originality is visible for all to see at the very first glance. It’s in the signature of the hand that is revealed by the brushwork and for a serious eye, it cannot be faked. 

This picture from two nights ago came from a lovely bloom that lingered on for the longest while. This doesn’t always happen so I’m super grateful when it does. It was the first of three. I had liked the second one and was tempted to use it but in the end this one behaves more like a successful picture despite my emotional attachment to the other one. This one is loyal to the simplicity of its design, and everything sits rightfully in its place. There is distance in it too. A cold dark green stripe at its base acts as a doormat to welcome the eyes. Then the textured chilly blue sea leads out and up to the horizon line. The sky clearly illustrates a phase of twilight wherein a red ribbon of violet hugs the sea beneath it. Overhead, a rich buttery layer of warm yellow connects to a cooler pale lemon sky that reaches up to faded Prussian Blue still higher up. To describe it in these terms I almost feel like a coroner who examining death through the eyes of a painter. But I’m happy with it.

Inmates without doctors

6 September 2020

Inmates without doctors

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This came from an odd experiment the other night. I had seen something in the sky I wanted to re-create so I had gone out to paint with this idea in my head without paying attention to the motif in front of me. Basically, I wanted to impose a visual idea upon the session, and this is already an il-fated proposition. But because this idea had come out of something I really liked the night before, I couldn’t erase it from my head. Maybe like a delusional person, I so wanted something to appear that I imagined it would magically the following night. 

So, on my palette I began preparing for a sky which would have a few olive coloured clouds I’d seen the previous evening. I was so sure they would re-appear that funny enough they actually did briefly at the end of the session only to quickly dissipate at dusk when I had already finished and had even forgotten about them. But even still, I left with this study that for some strange reason reminds me of a sticky date pudding.

But I like it anyway, it feels compact and centered around the nebulous block of sea that I had just left in a deconstructed state. I packed up a little early because the sky had died out, but to be fair, I was also distracted by an eccentric fellow who has dug out a small camp not ten metres down below where I paint in the dunes. He sleeps in his warm swag on the beach each night in an oval shaped foxhole that he’s dug out of the sloping dune and he reminds me of a crab because he’s continually digging away at the ever encroaching sand. But he does it happily, and I’ve come to admire him, he’s like Sisyphus, but when it rains, he raises a colourful canvas top that distracts me. He has showed up these last few years for several months at a time. He is fabulous fabulist, and for a while, he had me going. He was a secret millionaire, a yachtsman, a learjet pilot, an entrepreneur with several properties around he world, etc, etc. He amazed me with a steady stream of carefully crafted name drops, ones where stars fell under his magnetism and who put him up for weeks at a time in mansions aroound the globe. Yet here he was, sleeping on the desolate beach at Brunswick Heads. And like so many places, Australia, in the end, is a small pond where all the minnows know each other, so through various friends I eventually had him figured him out. But despite all his fabulations, he might have actually know several big shots around the world but maybe just had a falling out with many of them. I say this because he and I eventually had a falling out. But despite this, I had sort of liked him in a certain way because I like many eccentric folks trying to thrive in in this square world.

Sadly, he was always trying to get away from this ‘horrid’ country and back to some unnamed Italian town on the Amalfi Coast. Me, on the other hand, I had only just arrived here and I really love Australia. But somehow, through his charm and my laissez-faire affection for oddballs (not unlike myself), I left ajar the precarious door to reason and let him into my life like I would a stray cat.

So the other day, he had come to say hello while I was painting and he quickly launched into a nervous pitch about how the skies were crawling with UFO’s. Apparently, he watches them intently each night from his small foxhole and he loves to tell anyone about how amazing they are. When I arrive to paint in the afternoon I’ll hear about how fast they move until “they stop on a dime, hovering over the horizon for a bit, but then just as quickly, they’ll zip back overhead glowing with colour”. They return to repeat the same patterns again, and again, much like his fabulations over and over again. So as the weeks and months have gone by, and the UFO”s have gotten bigger and faster. I smile and feign interest only because, like I said, he was kindly, a little crazy, yes, but a gentle soul I thought nonetheless. 

There are lots of curious souls who inhabit the many small corners of life around here in Brunswick Heads. They are off the grid and many of them are ‘doing it tough’ like they say here in Australia. As I move through this contemporary life of craziness, I discover that it’s often hard to discern the bona-fide inmates from the straight civilians in this seaside town. And, I sometimes wonder if there is a doctor in the house, and would they even make beach calls? But at the end of the day I look at my own life, and wonder to myself if painting this mysterious sky night after night is any different than watching for UFO’s? 

All artist’s I know, need use of their wild imaginations, but at the same time, they still need to be tethered to earth and have a roof over their heads with enough money to buy food each day.

But I’ve wondered also just how long can all this last? Rents are impossible, and I don’t know many poor souls who could live in a foxhole on the beach for too long. We are soon coming up to the end of winter and there are too many young mothers with children who sleep in cars and camper vans around here. It’s heartbreaking, and like they say here, “They’re doing it on the tough”.  

Meanwhile, I continue to exercise my own sort of madness as I try to glean something from the sky. I like this picture from last week. There is something mysterious about it, is it the deeper winter light?

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

5 June, 2020

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

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

While America seems to swim in turmoil at the moment, I find myself in Australia living a quiet life near the sea and centred around my painting and far from the chaos. Many years ago, all of this would have certainly raised my anxiety levels enough to paralyse me but I've changed, maybe aged, is a better description. Resistance to mask mandates for protection against COVID-19 seems to be right up there with racism as the social divider at the moment. I've noticed that as some people grow older they become brittle, while the lucky ones become more flexible. I’m also old enough to realise that there is little I can do to make our society any better than to simply be respectful of others, kinder even, and without consideration of race, gender, or religious denomination. Be gracious everywhere, is my prayer these days. And yes, although I’m a polite old-school American liberal from the East Coast I can still be a jerk.

This painting, was the last of three from the other evening. The session had seemed to be coming to a close and I was about to pack up when I suddenly looked up and saw a pink field within grasp high overhead. It could have been my last handhold before reaching the summit I imagined, so I decided to grab another board and tempt fate.

A winter chill set in and I regretted not wearing a second tee-shirt under my hoodie. Twilight was stealing the last warm ‘glow’ from the sky, and yet something skeletal of it still remained, both above me, and in my memory. It was a bit like when you have stared at a bright colour for the longest moment only to then quickly turn away and see its complementary replacing it in your mind, fleeting and intense.

This hint of colour was just enough to invite me to improvise this small study. The ‘bloom’ had mostly faded away by now, but what remained in my perceptive field was enough to allow me in to invent this. It’s pretty conventional, perhaps even a little boring. Looking at it this morning, it appears straightforward, and though it's nothing to write home about, it feels correct and ticks all the right boxes. And if that’s the case, then it might just live on for a while longer if it pleased someone enough.

I think paintings like this just pop up once in a while on there own volition, as if to say to the painter: “You may not have wished to paint an image like this today, but we, the Muses did,,, so there!” 

It’s funny how, like in a communist country, you never get what you want, you get what they give you. I think of the Muses in this way regarding my own work. I've even gotten somewhat used to their capricious antics. 

It’s just one of those quirky facts about being a painter, and like every creative person, I’ve become adaptable to things unseen and unexpected. Back in 1986, I was once driving in my VW through Bulgaria when I stopped in Sofia one evening. Tired, and just looking for something to eat with no fuss, I found a pizza joint. To my amazement there was only one kind of pizza on offer; cheese with meat. Not a meat eater, I ordered two of those to go and had to scrape off the meat and get outta town as fast as I could to find a place to park and sleep.

But, there is a ring of truth in this small study regardless, because it’s so simple and everything is in its rightful place. There is a foreground, clearly delineated, and the warm grey clouds sit comfortably on a firm horizon line. By this, I mean that the process was authentic, but hopefully not mechanical. I often need to re-assure myself with descriptions like this whenever I’ve just done something that appears a little boring. But the more I look at it, the more interesting it becomes as a picture precisely because all these mundane elements appear to work together somehow so easily. 

The truth is that when you paint a lot, there seem to be less fireworks to each session. Like a regular sex life over the years, the act can often be just a cheese sandwich, not always caviar. But this has gotten me into a lot trouble when I’ve tried explain that to various partners. 

And yet, like a partner one has loved through thick and thin, it may also be why a painter returns again and again to the same motif at the beach. Not only has this twilight sky proven its fidelity, but it’s shown me my own innocence and vulnerability in front of such beauty. The pink glow at dusk and a young woman’s blush have killed this painter many an evening.

Addendum: I really like the sky, those small spontaneous blobs of blue violet that break the swarth of the pink field high above. Their delicate footprints were the reason I wanted to attempt this image in the first place. To have seen them, and actually painted that whole zone is enough to make a painter happy for a week at least.

Builders and electricians

 

21 June 2020

Builders and electricians

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In France many years ago, I dropped in on a friend and painter one day. Instead of an education at the Beaux-Arts, he had studied economics I think. He was smart and somewhat of an intellectual even. Despite a French education that shaped him with a rational thought process I appreciated that he became a painter way outside the system from which he came. 

It was a spring afternoon and he was in his garden when I arrived putting some last touches on a picture. Our usual banter immediately turned to Painting, but on this day we spoke of a programme which we had both heard the previous evening on France Musique which highlighted the relationship between Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Both popular, they are iconic composers who are played often throughout the week. At the start of our conversation, I said that although I marvel at Debussy, I was really crazy about Ravel. We began talking about them both, which pieces we liked, etc, etc.

I told him that Ravel felt to me like a comfortable armchair straddling the turn of 20th century Romanticism, one in which no doubt, Brahms had certainly napped in before him. Debussy, his contemporary, on the other hand, seemed to be steering music into the 21th century on a skate board. For some reason, I wasn’t even surprised to hear him tell me that Debussy was the superior artist. It seemed in line with his cerebral taste and education. Though this discussion was at least thirty years ago I’ve never forgotten it. Like most things I found interesting during my daily life, I noted our conversation in my diary at the time. I would summarise his thinking thus: 

“Unlike Ravel, Debussy’s musical ideas were not weighed down by an excess of emotion.” He then asserted that because of this, Debussy was the greater artist.

Our discussion that day was, as always, very precise, almost mechanically logical, the way they can sometimes be in France, often even, to the point of didactic exhaustion. But on the other hand, this was one of the things that I truly loved about living in France, a country of thinkers and lovers of not only Art, but of eloquent and passionate debate. France is a kind of large cafe, an immense souk of sorts, and home to a collective cultural brawl that’s filled with hyper-reasoned participants who are unafraid of verbal skirmishes. Don’t forget that France is also the land where Cyrano de Bergerac slew his opponents with just his tongue.  

Our discussions about art were also part of our own particular brawl about painting, but at the same time, it was the glue that held our unlikely friendship in place over the years. We shared a certain legacy that was born in a fertile French soil that allowed our discourse to replenish year after year despite our differences. And yet, in this instance, I found myself annoyed by his arrogance and it rubbed me the wrong way. 

Any avid listener to France Musique receives a large dose of both of these composers on its programming on a regular basis, so I had listened a lot to both Ravel and Debussy since arriving in France back in 1973. But for me, I had learned to love artists (of every field) for lots of different reasons. And as I've eased myself into older age, I've hopefully also eased myself into more humility and so I'm less apt to attach my thinking to a pyramidal hierarchy of pre-eminence. 

I had  learned over the years to critique a particular work of an artist, not the artist, nor their reputation themselves. It keeps me out of a lot of trouble, and it’s for sure, more diplomatic. But it’s also cleaner, a more precise way of exploring and evaluating the all the Arts over the long haul of history. I’ve found that in things artistic, all roads should never lead to Rome, but away from it. Though it  may begin in Rome, I believe it should lead to a squirrelly foreign destination full of diversity and surprise.   

Paul Cezanne is generally considered to be the father of Modern Art, and like Debussy, he ushered into the 20th century a new structural form which broke away from centuries of pictorial thinking as if a dam had burst and swept away most of what was already housed in the Louvre. To a great extent there is much truth to this metaphor because he constructed a new landscape for all adventerous painters.

Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, isn’t considered in the same light, and he, like Ravel, was steeped in the painting structure of the 19th century, one that arrived via both Rembrandt and Delacroix, among so many others, including many artists from Japan. 

And yet Vincent Van Gogh almost single-handedly, opened up the palette to more light than the world had ever seen or experienced beforehand. He was a new lightbulb. So if Cezanne was the builder, then Van Gogh was the electrician. 

But according to Emile Bernard who knew them both, Cezanne had heard of Van Gogh and even thought he was a mad man who made crazy paintings. “Il est fou!” He had declared. So, you see how opinions are not facts in art. And anyway, I’m also someone who distrusts the word 'genius', and I try to avoid using it at all costs. But I do use the words: greatness, great, good, okay, and awful, among others to describe art in general, but I also use them to describe people too.

It has been many years since that conversation with my old friend but I’ve never forgotten it. It was a learning curve for me, and I still remember being so taken aback at the audacity of it. Today, even more humbled with age, it shocks me even more. 

So, all these years later, have given me the clarity to see that greatness comes in various colours and different forms, even newer tastes with which I may not yet even be familiar. And although I can be ruthlessly critical of particular works, it’s rare that I slag off an artist’s whole oeuvre, or the artist ad hominem.  And today, I’ve also come to see that even thinking like this is an odd form of narcissism. At such a distinguished level of creativeity like for either Debussy or Ravel, where craft melds with vision, comparing two iconic composers is akin to comparing Cezanne to Van Gogh or an apple to a pear. 

Meanwhile, at the beach came this frosty-coloured picture from the other night, the second of two studies. It’s getting chilly at the beach these days as we approach the Winter Solstice, and the sea looked to be a cool silver blue. I’m still not sure what I think of it but there is something Modern and flat in it that tells me I’m on my own right and authentic path. In time, it might look more interesting but it could easily be a dud too. Time will tell me one day. In this moment how can I know? It’s a long story, this painting racket. A painter just continues forward, one picture at a time, one day at a time. 

One thing is sure though, I accept that I’m not a great painter, so I don’t need to waste time worrying about that form of narcissism. To be a good painter is already great enough because no one will ever paint just like me. 

Hermès scarves draped across the sky

 

2 September 2020

Hermès scarves draped across the sky

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

This study from last week seems to confirm yet again my increasingly apparent interest in a more formal structure from this motif. I like it but it begs the question: Is it possible to transpose such ephemeral things as inherently unruly as the sea and sky into an image more fixed and solid? Can I create one that demonstrates the savvy geometry of this wise and logical earth?

Thinking of light as something solid is already a curious thing to imagine, but painters attempt it all the time. It's just air, all dressed up as a band of luminosity. That's the extraordinary thing, and it’s possible for us to sometimes achieve because a trail of other artists have already done it. Meanwhile, I’m still looking for a way into it.

Turner did this spectacularly in so many of his larger paintings, especially those shimmering views of the river Thames from the Mortlake Terrace estate of his patron William Moffat. But before him, Claude (Lorraine) 1604 - 1682, also appeared equally obsessed with large and spectacular sunset views which seemed to hold colour in ribbons of translucent silk. And though he may seem old-fashioned today, he was way, way ahead of his time and I think Turner himself was indebted to Claude, as he is known today. But not to be outdone, the Dutch were also masters at depicting this luminescence that hovered over the sea. 

From working here so often in front of the sky each day, it seems to me that where light really shines is when it’s just a by-product of a perfect drawing. That is to say, a place where everything resides in complete harmony over an entire graphic surface. How else to render this light than by using a refined, almost polished format of chiaroscuro? 

In this image from last week, I can see that I’m falling into a form of abstraction that allows me to treat light (as manifest in colour) like a material substance. At certain times, like in this image, when I’m painting a full bloom at the beach, I can almost imagine these ribbons of colour streaming across the sky as smooth as Hermès silk scarves. 

I don’t know how far I can push this motif which now goes on for over two years, but as long as new questions keep coming up, I suppose I will keep on working there.

The other afternoon when I arrived to set up, there were a dozen young kids playing cricket on the beach to my right.  I set up and made a palette and got right into the first picture when I immediately spotted a whale splashing not 100 metres offshore.

I could see it was part of a large pod of several whales in migration going north, but this was the only one which appeared quite over-excited. It suddenly made me think of a kid I knew back in elementary school, who, when we all went out to the playground for recess hour, he would go completely nuts, just bonkers, dancing and rolling happily around all by himself, in the grass for hours on end. Brian Cruikshank was his name, which I still remember oddly enough. He was an otherwise quiet and withdrawn child in class for the rest of the time. He hardly ever spoke except to respond correctly each time the teacher asked him a question. This drove the rest of us nuts.

So anyway, I shouted out to the kids playing cricket to watch the whales, pointing offshore to where they were blowing spray into the wind through their blowholes. The kids stopped their game, and they too got all excited themselves seeing the whales. Then they wanted to come over see my painting, so they all came up and encircled me, full of questions with lots of ooohs and ahhhs. They were on a school trip from Lismore, a small town inland about 50 kilometres away, so they don't often get to the sea. Being winter, no one swam but I could feel their complete joy at being there and playing cricket on the hard sand. 

We, who live so close to the sea and to the whales, are extremely spoiled I realised.

I managed four studies, all somewhat similar in spirit to this one. I left the beach in a happy mood.