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? In this roulette wheel of life, who is to gain and who is to blame? There are some who say that life is a great mystery and it is only through mystery that we find truth. I like that because I believe in art.
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 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 adventure 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 and he delivers it to us.
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 working away in solitude 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 more concerned with the social imbalances of life the US. Consequently, their 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 London 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 movement in art. This picture has been like the sun around which everything else has revolved ever since he painted it.
For me today, a painter’s problem 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? Are we chained to Figurative Art or can we convey what we need to say through Non-Figurative means? Is what we need to share even interesting and worth sharing to others? Of course, an authentic and original voice is always preferred.
Unlike the lawyer who knows the answers to their questions before asking them, I'll play dead.
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, and 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 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.
