We’re dead already

15 April 2020

We’re dead already

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 April 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This picture came out of a very frustrated painter who could not decide how to treat the vast mess of clouds in the sky. From the start as I set up,  I decided to grab a small idea and run with it, but as usual, I couldn’t keep up with the movement going on as the light kept changing.

Unless one is Bonington, (Richard Parkes , 1802 - 1828) or one of those magnificent Flemish painters of the 18th century, a sky full of clouds can be a hairy operation for an amateur like me. There are just too many problems with them. It’s a lot like the difficulty when drawing hands. Unless one can render them with the grace of Van Dyck or with the rustic truth of Van Gogh, one must be prepared to fail. Or maybe, one could try to think like Picasso employing his graphic audacity which spins the attention of the viewer away from his mangled hands like a magician distracting his audience.

Clouds can overrun the sky, distorting the distances and making it hard to push the horizon back into the painting. When floating above us, untethered clouds will run amuck like children at recess, oblivious to discipline. Overhead, they roam casually at random confusing the poor painter below.  When I found myself lost in this study I decided to just let go. My goal, hence, was not only to fail in this picture but to fail successfully, as Samual Beckett advised us, “Fail, and fail again even better”. Or as the smart-aleck buddhists proclaim; “No problem, we’re dead already.” This is also something I will say to myself before playing a very strong tennis player.

And so the other night, just when I let go of all expectations, something wonderful happened. Skating on thin ice I suddenly felt weightless and finished this small study with a certain joy that surprised me. It’s a very simple image, and like many of these small studies it might appear boring if one looks with a surplus of expectation. Yet everything works in it. There is distance in it and the pink cloud bank squats on the heavy dark sea like it's a wall. There is a faint hint of foreground at the base of the picture that represents the closest thing to the viewer like a doormat outside the home and which  is the first stepping stone into a new place. 

All too often, I find too many pictures uninteresting wherever I look, everyone's, but mine too. And yet sometimes if I look more carefully and see that they're unified within their own chosen mode of abstraction, there is a chance they'll get better and better with time like the cliché of an ageing bottle of Bordeaux. But when a picture doesn’t come together, no matter how dazzling or sexy it may first appear, it will turn to vinegar over time.

Though it might not dazzle, I like this painting anyway. It’s a billboard for myself only, one reminding me that it’s just a another study, another successful failure.

Of graveyards and grenades

12 March 2018

Of graveyards and grenades

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 March 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Lots of rain for weeks now bring me grey skies at the beach with only random visits by the sun and it seems to mirror my spirits.

The other night I brought this home, it was one of just two. I had arrived at the beach to find a thick band of clouds brought up with the chilly winds from the South. It shut down what I was hoping to be at least a reasonably colourful evening if not full of bright cheer. There were however, a few periodic splashes of light that did help to bring flashes of life into an otherwise morbid-looking evening. My spirits were dropping and I felt like I was at a graveyard, where instead of lovely white headstones I was surrounded by thick cement slabs. 

I’ve learned gradually that all artistic activites will eventually bring up the mud of one’s own life. Being a bit of a control freak I try to hide it but I rarely succeed because a painter’s feeling always desires to be free. It’s the way it is, for better or worse. Often it happens in sly ways unbeknowst to the painter themselves. For me, all that dark stuff that lies-in-wait deep within my own crypt needs to escape from time to time like it’s a captive wild animal. When liberated, it will take me to that place of which I had been really thinking and feeling all along. But more forbiddingly, it can open up avenues where I don’t wish to travel nor do I need to reveal to others. In short, it’s not a place to find a cheerful adventure.

In this study though, I think I was already feeling frustrated by the lack of light in the sky and thus a little angry with myself for coming out when I had suspected it might be a dud of an afternoon. But I tried to make the best of it, and despite the gloom, I did eventually make something that spoke of the moment irregardless of my mood. It’s a well constructed ‘abstract’ image that I was able to wrench from a stubborn evening sky.

Despite everything, its darkness is nonetheless bound together and held by hints of light. There are times when such small image like this can seem like a tiny fragment chipped off a beautifully luminescent marble sculpture, as if born from greatness. But this tiny shard of a study feels more like it was wacked off a chunk of concrete. However, I do appreciate it anyway because I’m always thankful to wring a little light out of darkness. 

For a long time in my life, I I used to make portraits that were quite severe, something of which I was well aware. A friend once told me that my portraits made people look as if they were ready to kill someone. When she said that I completely understood, but I didn’t know how to respond because I didn’t want to explain why this was so. I had come to understand by then that indeed I harboured lots of anger inside but I didn’t know how to dislodge it even after a few therapies. I really wanted to paint portraits that were less hard, less severe, more truthful to the model and less to mysel, but I seemed incapable of it despite my best intentions. I was in limbo, like stuck in a DMZ where truce was timid. 

All this existed beneath my consciousness, and it felt to me like a physical thing living in my basement like a grenade placed close to my vital organs, my heart, liver, kidney and spleen. How could I dislodge it? Where does one go for this kind of surgery?

Eventually, after half of my life had washed over me I was able to make peace with it as if I had gone through some weird form spiritual alchemy. My anger and all my deepest resentments and shames from an early age had gently lifted up and out of me. Surprisingly, everything burned out of me except the memories, which like smoke, just mingled with the wind, then disapeared. My portraits went from angry and severe to just sad, which I guess was good progress. A little later on, I realised the mother of all truths; that my closest connections to others had always been born from sorrow not joy. The one great truth about practicing any art form is that one has to dig deep into themselves, but they must also be ready for what they discover, whether it’s a diamond or just donkey dung.

In any event, the act of painting will always unleash many secrets for the amateur of art when one is ready to handle them, at least that’s the way it’s been for me. Painters, if they are authentic, are also a particular breed of people who are generally quite sensitive and who are often on the edge of life even when they’re screwed into it with ordinary domestic and social concerns. If they are loners without family for whatever reason, they can be difficult and prone to excess drink and what-have-you. Luckier are those with a family perhaps, one filled with household vitality and the joy of children hanging about. But with just one life to live, (as far as I know) a painter’s sense of time is both precious and private because, like everyone knows, artists are selfish by nature. 

 

Wild horses

March 26 2018

Wild horses

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, March 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Autumn rain has arrived and it’ll be on and off again for another month or so. Meanwhile I jump into the sea most nights before working. Nice! 

It was a beautiful evening for this strange picture, the sky was full of giant, dark, elephantine clouds that seemed to rise up out of the sea like monsters from a Greek myth. There was a small moon overhead which allowed me to work later into the evening. On lovely evenings like this I always seem to think to myself, “these are wonderful moments in life, and I’m just smart enough to know it, right here, right now”.

Though this is a messy and frightful-looking thing, I find it compelling and exotic. But best of all: it’s flat, and this compression is something I really like.This is definitely not a picture for a pedestrians. Looking at it now, I see an impatient painter who cannot seem to get it all down fast enough. Yes, it’s scratched and a bit sloppy, but I love all this stilted imperfection of haste, it’s a map of battle scars, bitten by the wind out on the sand dunes like an older Great White Pointer one sees in undersea photos. I admit that it’s not for everyone who expects from Nature, elements more refined, more reassuring, and easier to digest, but what can you do?

I can’t help it, this is what comes up and out of me in front of such a sky. Like most painters I’m intuitively searching for solutions to the endless problems of painting each time I work. It can only really come to me while I paint, not while I’m comfortably thinking about it elsewhere although this can be part of the process. Once one has sorted out the problems of colour and drawing in one’s life, next, it’s how to bring order to chaos. But of course, there many others who delight in throwing order out the window just because they can, Art is a big tent, after all, and it has its own order of democracy, but Form appears to be my steady white whale.

In this picture I’m walking a knife-edge because this could appear too wildly eccentric to be a seascape, something so awkward that it’s either really good, or just a big flop. The sky appears to be pressed and pasted to the canvas board, and the sea stands up flat, almost rigid like a defiant ridge that one still needs to traverse. Personally, I love seeing oceans that stand up vertically because they remind me of old Chinese ink drawings of cliffs that tower over the sea.

So this was painted with sloppy haste like an Expressionist, but my aim like for all these things, was to grab hold of this motif like it was a wild horse, tame it, then make it my own. This is the kind of image that a painter like Philip Guston might have liked. But any self-expression or mark-making within it was merely a by-product of the process, not the means to the end like the current trend of mark-making that is so popular thses days. So on this particular path I’ve chosen, there seems to be a way forward even if I can’t take anyone else with me, life-vest or not.

Hiatus

 

8 February 2017

Hiatus

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 February 2017, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I seem to be back working from Nature again and I’m so grateful because it feels like hooking up with an old friend after a long while and one remembers just how much the relationship has been missed. And being at the beach, specifically at dusk under this immense sky is wildly comforting in its own strange but familiar way. But at the same time I’m again facing my old fears around perfectionism in front of such an wild motif. But it’s also like hooking up with a new painter inside of me which makes me feel special again, like an actor returning to his favorite stage. 

One could say that this motif is a cliche of beauty, a photo for a tourist calender, the mundane postcard of a beach and sky that encircles all of Australia. It is this of course, but I’m sure I can make something new and different with it. I have a strange and perhaps unreal belief that I can. At the dusk hour when the colours of the sky are unleashed upon the sea it is so pictorially intoxicating that I’m reminded of my early school days in front of a messy blackboard when I felt mesmerized by the cryptic beauty of algebra class. But in this case, it’s in technicolour.

I am careful when using the word beauty because it is such an emotionally charged idea these days. Like God it can put many people into a tizzy of 

discord. However hesitant I am in public, with close friends I use it freely. As an adjective, beautiful is even trickier. But I think beauty is still a deeply personal idea despite how John Keats equates it with Truth as if they are brother and sister in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn. But, like we say these days in popular films; it’s complicated. But it’s nuanced too, because Post Modernism is still like a spy hiding behind every grammatical slip.

Beauty certainly projects an idea even more personal than other highly over-hyped words like, genius or love, for instance. Obviously, being a Romantic in the historical sense, I’ll stick with John Keats on this even if am considered old-fashioned,,,, but Hey! 

Essentially, I’m a simple painter who is grateful to be part of a vocation that is one of the oldest of humankind. I desire is always to convey a visual idea to someone through the craft of painting. But this isn’t the reason why I paint. I paint because, in this crazy world, it’s one thing that grounds me and makes my life more fulfilling and consequently I can live with more hope.

It’s been about a month since I began a series of small studies done just as the sun has dropped down into the West and behind me. Being on the eastern side of Australia, I’m naturally facing the East. This is that time of day when most things in Nature prepare for sleep and the shades are drawn. Dusk and twilight, both equally sensual in meaning can still be altered with a slight twist of a sentence. For me personally, it’s always been the time of day when I’m happiest. The French call it ‘l’heure entre le chien et le loup’, but we know it as just ‘The hour of the wolf’. But for me, being like a vampire, it’s when I awaken.

Anyway, what really interests me what happens before twilight, dusk, however I refer to it. It’s really the prequel, when with delicious speed, the sky prepares the world for death like a nurse putting a patient to sleep. It can often feel like a primeval rite, one shared by millions of beachcombers each afternoon all over the world.

Facing the sea, with my back to the setting sun I can watch every colour of the sky interact chromatically with those upon the sea below. It’s more an 

exercise of the eyes than of the mind. The eyes see it all before the mind can arrange it. And because one has such a small window within which to 

operate, one must be quick and fearless at the same time. Unlike my usual state of daydreams, here at the beach at dusk, my whole attention is focussed on the small painting on the easel but at the same time as all the hell breaking loose in the sky out front. I’m the guy on the bow of the ship like 

Odysseus, who had himself tied to the mast during a storm in order to hear the song of the Sirens. Turner, too, in fact, had himself tied up to the mast of a ship during a storm so he could also feel it. I love that, something about these acts strike me as the same kind of eccentric passion that pushed Vincent Van Gogh to put lit candles on his straw hat so he could see his palette while painting at night in Arles. I love these guys.

This strange study of the other night bothers me. It feels too crude and poorly designed as a picture and yet there is something in it that when seen at a distance might work. My new resolve, a promise to myself, is not to destroy anything just because I don’t like it. I want to develop patience and this will be an exercise so thus, I will keep them at least for now because Time is also Truth in the world of Painting, like Truth is Beauty according to Keats.

In any case, at the end of a long day, painting these small things is becoming a friendly habit again in my life. Nice! 

Past and future

9 February 2022

Past and future

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This will sound banal on the surface, but as a painter, I’ve come to understand that each instant has its own picture embedded in it. My experience reveals that painting the sea in the late afternoon has made it easier to witness the  incremental changes that go on imperceptibly during each moment of the day. And within these moments are pictures available for anyone who is there willing to capture them. I imagine that working in the desert would be a different visual experience by altering my responses to a dry landscape that holds and diffuses light. But here at the beach, the light is very much conditioned by the sea. A painter only seizes those fragile instants that are available to him or her, in a specific condition. If one follows what Nature offers up in those moments there is a window, one only offered to each artist. Of course, this is an obvious observation, but because I'm feeling nerdy today I'll point it out. 

This study was one of two the other evening. It had been a hot humid summer day and puffy low cumulus clouds were drifting in with a lazy onshore breeze. It can sometimes happen when the conditions are just right that these small balls of cloud catch the last rays of the setting sun and turning them bright orange. They appear so low you can imagine just picking them like oranges right from the sky. Behind them, at the same time, a hazy dim cloud base of broken violets remains in retreat like a theatre decor on stage. I love it when these elements line up to materialise all at once. Luckily, this happened the other night and I was there to catch it. 

I really like this effect and I also understand that it might even reveal to me something from my future. It can happen in a session, or on a particular picture that I’ll suddenly find myself in the right elevator that goes straight up to a future version of myself. Somedays, it only goes to the second floor, but on others, it may take me right up to the top penthouse with a great open view of exactly what I really, really wish to do.

How does a painter’s path work in life anyway? Nobody can know but the Muses themselves. Usually, one’s very earliest work will already manifest in the soul of a painter in tandem with their mastery of the craft. But at times, it’s the opposite like when the young painter appears early on in a messy tangle of inchoate form. But it's different for everyone I think. Everyone comes to their calling differently.

In Florence there is a slab of marble not more than about fifty centimetres high that Michelangelo carved an Annunciation into when he was just 17 years old. The Mary mother is in profile, and over her shoulder is a figure of her son carrying the cross in bas relief. Not only does it reveal all the greatness of the sculptor Michelangelo to come, but the future of his vision as well. I saw it many years ago at the Casa Buanaroti and it made a huge impression upon me. The bas relif is no more than a centimeter in depth.

Curiously, on a program on France Musique the other day, there was a sublime piece by Shubert being played. Just afterward, the conductor, who was being interviewed, simply said about it, 

“It is religious without god”. 

So, though I don’t think I spent more than twenty minutes on this small picture here, I like the feeling in it. And without it being too obvious, I think I caught it as it was, plainly visible in just an instant, not too early nor too late. I can also already see in it, a picture from my future, one that's always still reshaping my intuition despite my longer shadow I cast in this lifetime. I guess this why we improve with time if we stick with our chosen craft. 

That being said

4 October 2021

That being said

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Most of my life, I think I have only ever been drawn to the misty, shrouded fog. I think it goes back to childhood when I somehow I felt more protected under the rainy shadows of clouds than under the happy, naked and expansive empty sky. I’ve always loved the uncertainty of transitional atmospheres, the nuances of everything in life from the weather into art and language. It’s strange that it took me so long to see this fact about myself when today it appears so clearly evident. 

I found this old entry in a diary from a painting trip in Italy. It’s from one I was transcribing last year. I have been trying to get a page or two into the laptop daily but it’s Herculean task. Suddenly, I was surprised at how this image correlated with an entry from tonight.

Venice, 18 September, 1986

“My spirits are lifting day by day but I have no idea why. These studies don’t come out the way I want and yet I still feel hope, like a climber making his way slowly up the backside of the mountain while the summit remains still hidden from view. 

However, I am finding my way very slowly each day, the images come up for me more easily despite my hiccups. This morning, I found my way into a rather curious vision of San Giorgio at sunrise. Half-hidden in a shroud of purple/orange fog, San Giorgio looms out over a green orange sea. Needless to say, I enjoyed the haziness because maybe it’s what I really want in the end. And immediatley as I write this, it makes me think of Monet, Turner and Whistler, who all also adored these obscure visual sentiments while making so much from Venice. I shall not be afraid of these influences. But increasingly over the past five days, I have been wondering to myself what it is that I really want to do here? I am certainly not at all interested in replicating the physical charm which Venice presents to the world… these wonderful and unique details of windows, balconies, bridges etc, etc, etc,,, It’s all been done a million times before by far more competent painters than myself. One really has to know what they want to do in a place like Venice or they’re wasting their time. What I begin to see are images that lurk between the off-hours of twilight and daybreak, images born from the misty boundaries between sea and stone. These are fog-filled days when nothing is what it seems and in these small moments when there is a of a sliver of sunlight, it is bliss for me.”

So thirty odd years later it should makes perfect sense that I found my way into a series of twilight studies here at Brunswick Heads, N.S.W. Australia. It’s like someone at the Sunday tennis crew who kindly said to me; “What took you so long?” when I showed up to play one day. I smiled and jumped on one of the courts. What I didn’t tell him was that I had felt too inferior to their game, but since I’ve improved I stepped up. The one thing you don’t ever want to be for a casual afternoon of doubles is the worst player. I made sure to bring new balls each time as if to pay-to-play, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, as Uncle Boris in the Bronx used to say. It’s an easy crew of nice guys who take over several courts on Sundays for whoever shows up to play. Basically I wouldn’t have joined it unless I could carry a good rally for a while, it’s all about just getting the ball back over the net no matter what. That’s at the very minimum and I can handle that. Like any sport one loves practicing, the better the opponent, the better one becomes oneself. So, I finally got on the tennis court with some strong players far better than myself and they haven’t yet thrown me out so I keep going back each week with new balls. 

So every step up in life is always a challenge like this colourful sky which for years kept me away out of fear of failure. One day I just stepped up and began working. 

This dark picture from the other night came out of a dreary evening full of clouds and truthfully, from the start, I was depressed at the thought having to make anything from it. I think I even resented it like running into someone on the street whom I don’t really like. But that said, I threw myself into it and eventually managed to find a few glimmers of light in the clouds which I then used as handrails to climb into the painting. Some evenings are like that, you've just got to get a rally going and see where it goes.

"Oh"

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 October 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Sometimes one paints something that gets right by them, and only later do they take a double take and think to themselves; "Oh.... did I do that?" 

It's a funny but nice feeling, and one to cherish for sure, but of course it was painted back in October so it's easy to forget about. But it surprises me especially because it looks like a painting that was done while facing the Western sky with the sun just hidden behind the horizontal cloud. But it was actually painted, like all of these pictures, facing the East with the sunset behind me. If I were a viewer and didn't know this fact, I might easily assume that it was painted of the setting sun in the West. Maybe this is too trivial a detail for anyone to get excited about, but for me, it reveals something about these paintings of which I might take for granted.  It has to do with the light, because I always seem to anchor into a light source no matter how much luminosity is actually present in the sky. Am I improvising it? It's possible, because each of these pictures are improvised. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, a light source in the motif is found and I exploit it for all I'm worth. But in any event, I am surprised by this picture from last October and I'm happy that I was able to paint it because it looks above my pay grade somehow. This is why I can say: "Oh"... did I do that?".

In this image I also really like the black sea even though I don't use black paint. It was made from Prussian Blue, a deep red, and a bit of yellow. And like a chef preparing soup, there's a dash of witchcraft. But I also love nothing more than a variety of pinks smooching up against a discreet black. It's my Art-Deco fetish.

I'm always amazed when I come across older pictures which I had forgotten. If there are really good like this one, they remind me when I awaken each morning that I'm worth more than how I feel in those first ten minutes of my day.