On the Menu

 

2 November 2020

 On the Menu

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

This study is so unusual that it took me by complete surprise. I enjoyed watching it take form as if I were channeling some Romantic painter from the late 18th century. It was the first of two studies for which I had initially had other plans, but at the same time, it too, had other plans for itself. 

It's disconcerting when I lose control over a picture and yet I secretly cheer it on like it’s a truant teenager inside me painting graffiti over all my noble ideals about art. Try as I might to wrest control over a picture on any given night, alas, it cannot be commandeered at will.

But somehow upon arrival, I even had this prescient feeling that this would be a wild painting if only I could nudge it in my own direction. I had felt like it was already in my back pocket and just waiting for me take it out like it was a map of Tokyo.

So like a chef at the fish market whose choices will dictate the evening’s menu, me too, I rely upon what I find in the sky each day. But although the motif may be on the menu, I still pretend  to be the chef.

An enormous cloud was aflame when I began setting up my easel and palette. Normally, I prefer to wait it out until the sun sets and all this colour dies down enough to give me a more stable path forward. 

Unlike other painters, I think, these kinds of scenes I quietly detest due to their supra-melodramatic nature which can easily veer towards the pornographic in paintings. But hey, it's more my real nature to savour discretion in all things artistic. But I'll confess anyway that with so little time to work these become impossible skies to deal with. I think only a great artist like Turner, who with a set of watercolours, can portray such vivid histrionics. It's also a fantastic scene, and had I not been impatient I'd never have chosen it. But oddly, even then, it seemed to come out on its own volition as if I were just a bystander.  

So I wonder where did it come from? What image provoked it in my private library of visual memories? I cannot account for it, and yet, although it was certainly painted with my own hand, I think it came up from an older template, perhaps one from my early student days when I experimented much more than I do today.  

It's rough-looking too, and because I didn't know how to finish it so I simply left it in its dishevelled state. 

Like for any poet or painter, pictorial images will often arise disguised as memories that are already lodged deeply inside. There, the oldest secrets all congregate awaiting instructions about when and how to surface. Whether in a studio or outdoors, the painter needs to be patient because when these things do surface, they'll need to be organised as they always seem to pop out like children playing hide and seek. 

I’ve found that though memories are cherished in my heart, they're still held firmly in my head for better or for worse. They may appear furtive or hard to reach at times, even asleep or repressed or maybe forgotten, but alas, they're never forsaken. They will eventually force themselves upon the artist or poet who is both brave and curious enough to find order for them. After all, aren't they the keepers of our memories and stories that become our histories, both personal and collective? Isn't this really why we have poets like Homer and painters Matisse? 

Hiroshi Sugimoto

9 October 2020

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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. 

Brooks Brothers

5 September 2022

Brooks Brothers

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Several studies from over the past few weeks, a couple of which were done on the same day while others, the day before, or the day after. But they all seem to be born from my often not so discreet obsession for anything striped. 

It began early in childhood on the main floor of the old Brooks Brothers store on Madison Avenue in New York at 44th street. My father would take me shopping there when I came to visit him. It was an immense building with at least 10 or 12 floors but I'd always be stuck on the large main area downstairs where the ties were lovingly squeezed like mummies into small specially designed wooden coffins made from dark wood. There were hundreds of them in rows three and four deep, and they framed a kind of open square around the center of the room forming an octagonal space wherein busy clerks and salesmen wrote up orders and watched for patrons coming in off the street, ready to pounce. It was an atmosphere embodied in all those films from the 1940’s that revealed a conventional world of white businessmen. Myself, I never needed any assistance and they didn’t fuss with me too much. I just wanted to hang out around all these striped ties. I was like an art lover searching through an exhibition on the hunt for something special so I prowled the racks intoxicated by my own mysterious desire. My kind gentle father would offer me one tie most visits, but sometimes two or three if we hadn’t seen each other for a while as if to make up for those lost months. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So for some secret reason, I was infatuated with these multicoloured ties but I wouldn’t understand the affect of it for another forty years. This cacophony of colourful stripes, all assaulted the young inchoate painter inside. It was for me, a visit to Ali Baba’s cave of treasures and I wanted all of them at once, and forever. And though I only wore ties in several schools for a few short years thereafter, my early love for this vivid appendage lurked deep in my unconscious with a sartorial perversion. In my closet, there are few relics of this long chapter but they are no linger striped (because I’m not a Republican), just three sexy ties from Nina Ricci, Givenchy, Valentino, all of which I secretly enjoy wearing to funerals. 

A French friend remarked to me recently that many of these pictures reminded her of a model on a Parisian catwalk that screamed “M'as tu vu?” (look at me!). I thought she was just being  cute, but I couldn't disagree, because the irony was that they were actually born on a beach in Australia by a guy in cargo pants wearing a tee shirt and flip flops. 

But that said, I do like all these paintings, three of which were painted on the same evening. I like them for a lot of reasons, but mostly because they arose out of old memories that I had cherished and guarded so carefully within me. After all, they had survived so long only to surface on a beach at dusk in Australia like the aliens in The War of the Worlds which had been buried in the earth thousands of years earlier.

For me, these pictorial memories fused with what Nature offered up to me as twilight slowly closed its gentle doors before nightfall.

Perhaps, in the end, it is a kind of catwalk, where each different sky is draped in colour and really does wish to be admired, but by whom? By us all, of course.

Witches of Macbeth

20 January 2023

Witches of Macbeth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 January, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I made these three gloomy-looking things the other night which are obviously quite particular. Generally, I no longer go out under such skies any more because I’ve done way too many dark pictures in my life. These days I’m looking for light, so whenever I do find myself under an overcast sky, I’ll muster it up and pry out as much of it as I can.

Actually, I used to relish such weather when I was younger and when I had an abundance of gloomy dark time in my life. But lately has come a strong desire for light, not darkness, which after all, will show up one day at my front door when I least expect it.

But anyway, here are three gloomy witches that paid me a visit the the other evening on the deserted beach. What can I say about them, I’m not sure, because the last two are so unlike anything I done before in this series. It wouldn’t be hard for me to imagine them as my own Three Witches in Macbeth.

They are presented in the order they were painted. But seeing so much lugubrious strife together is almost re-assuring somehow. It means that I still have a taste for the dark and the strange despite my new preference for bright and colourful images.

What I do like in these paintings is that I’m still obliged to front up to whatever strange surprise comes up during a session like I have neither agency nor mood in the matter. 

I hope I’ll do the same for the Grim Reaper when he (or she)  turns up. Though frankly, I really envision a kind of young grey witch with flowers in her hair, svelte, and with a soft crooked smile on her face. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 January, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 January, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Tiepolo

30 September 2023

Tiepolo

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 September, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From this past week came several similar variations on a theme close to this picture of which I’m not quite yet sure what to think. It had been a crazy week of psychodelic-looking skies reminicent of the age of hippies. But these rich warm skies creep into the Springtime evenings like appetisers on an ‘Al Fresco’ menu. Because of this, I awakened this morning with the feeling that I have a lot to look forward to. The Spring afternoons beckon those giant, red apple skies that linger over the purple seas, Mmmmmm.

This week I found myself thinking about how, when and why, I became a painter. It came up for me as a result of a discussion with an old friend on Facetime. We were complaining to one another about the art world when somehow it turned into how each of us got pulled into this life of creativity.

How did I became a painter? he asked. I told him that I just “slipped into it” because as a kid I drew well and with ease. Then I told him about watching an old Italian guy who was painting scenic views of Italy all over the large walls of a friend’s parents living room. It was a huge place and he was decorating these idyllic landscapes of forests and villas that were filled with dancing and prancing figures in 17th century costumes. For me it was amazing. I must have been about 11 or 12 at the time. This old guy obviously knew what he was doing but he was on the sullen side and pretended to not understand me when I posed questions. But because I was at my friend’s home a lot, I used to watch him mixing colours and wiping turps around to create skies while my friends played football outside. It made a strange impression upon me. Much later if I had to think about what it looked like, it sort resembled the Venetian Tiepolos, father or son. But anyhow, the whole vibe was definitely Venice of the Otto Cento as I came to understand it later on.

I soon realised that having an ability to draw heads and faces with a certain likeness gave me a cachet with friends and it kept the bullies away. It gave me an admirable and mysterious identity. It became my invisible cloak, something I never had in my own family. So naturely, I drew a lot but mostly for others, something I understand now. For myself alone, I was less interested because I seemed to have had an empty heart, one that could never be filled. Why bother? I must have thought at the time. 

But it can be a problem having even just a little talent for something because in my own case, I never had to work at drawing. It came easily as a child. In fact, I’ll confess that as much work as I’ve done during my life, I still feel I haven’t worked hard enough, nor have I devoted my entire life entirely to it. The truth is that I could have done many other things with my life with equal pleasure. But I always had a feel for painting, It was like a seedling that gradually bore fruit as soon as I met my teacher Leo in Aix that first year in France.

Because I didn't appreciate my own gifts I grew up with a distorted idea of myself and the world at large. In my head I was living in a jail cell trying to cajole the prison guard for attention.  I cannot speak for anyone else but it was only when I got clean and sober did all this confusion begin to clear up. Suddenly, I questioned everything. “What had motivated me all my life? Love? Sex? Success?” It certainly wasn’t Art, though that had always been my identity and talent. Strangely enough, It was only when I fell into this series at the beach that I began to completely work all this out for myself, alone and 100%. It's been my therapy.

I’m not a Conceptual Artist so I don’t work for an audience, in fact, I really don’t need one. I work selfishly for the challenge of this artistic task in front of me and the unique pleasure it gives me alone. I see now that I’m part of a community of creative souls who go back thousands of years. Only when I understood that completely did I realise that I could be free, and it was these Evening Prayers that guided me into freedom. They say it takes a long time for some of us to wake up, and I’m a slow-poke. So all this I got into with my friend last week on Facetime, and I found myself surprised at all that came out of it. 

This picture has grown on me as I’ve been writing these words. I accept it for what it is but also for what it isn’t. Naturally I like that it’s been reduced to a flat picture plane but also that it gives a hint of a light-filled sky. But it might need an imagination to fall in love with it. When I think back to my early memories of watching a crabby old Italian artist decorate the walls of an immense room, I see now that it was surely an invitation that took me sixty years to answer with these small studies in Australia. 

Turner at the riverbank

 

18 November 2022 

Turner at the riverbank

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 May, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

At the beach the other night came this study, one of two from the evening. All day it had been extremely hazy and humid, and a stickiness in the air seemed to glue everything together. When I arrived at the beach it felt even worse than at home so I set up quickly then went down to slip into the sea. 

Once I got to mixing colours on the palette I jumped into this intense yellow sky. After almost a month of not working at the beach, I felt typically nervous, ambivalent even about getting into my car to drive there. Although I’m in the studio working, it’s an awful feeling not wanting to get out to the beach for my therapy seesion. As is always the case, whenever I show up there, I feel instantly better. 

About a million years ago I read the first chapter or so of a biography about J.M.W. Turner but I couldn’t get into it for any number of reasons. I was in the South of England and somehow I thought should read about Turner after visiting Petworth. But I do remember an anecdote recounted by one of the sons of George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, whose patronage of Turner made him a frequent guest at Petworth House in Sussex, where he made many gouaches of its interior and conceived large paintings from around the vast park. 

According to one of the Earl’s sons, Turner could usually be found down at the riverbank and fishing with the young boy. Although Turner always brought his small bag of watercolours, brushes and pads, the boy claimed he never saw Turner painting because he seemed so obsessed with fishing. I love that the great prolific Turner took time off to fish.

This study was left in its current of state of suspension because I liked it that way and wanted to preserve its freshness. I also saw that there was little more I could to do to make it any better other than to completely reconfigure everything so better to stop and make another one I wisely thought to myself. A good choice, but sometimes I’m not so smart. This is what it is, in this netherworld of the unfinished. I does however possess something for the future, I’m sure of it.

Regardless, what amazed me was just how fast my feelings came out while painting at the beach. It’s like going on a date when suddenly one is flushed with both expectation and terror.

I saw a short reel that came to me on Instagram the other day. It was a painter who filmed herself working on several things in her bright airy studio. She said it was important for her to leave the works in a state such that “they left the viewer with an open-ended space to interpret the image". Seeing a few pieces in the video I could understand what she meant and it opened up a whole dialogue within me about what constitutes an image. This is after all, a valid question in this time of so much change in the multi-disciplinary fields of Art, and yet I was left feeling underwhelmed by her work somehow. Either it took me nowhere, or I else I didn’t like where it took me. But I liked her cool attitude, her vibe as it were. But, as we do, I immediately began thinking about my own motives. Where am I trying to lead the viewer? 

As I have already admitted, the initial motors for me in this series of rapid oil paintings, were J.M.W. Turner’s watercolours of the sea and sky that he made in Venice. Of course, he made them in lots of other places but it’s the works of Venice that the painter in me remembered most vividly. As ‘abstract’ or ‘non-objective’ as so many of them are, there is a persistent structure inherent within them that directs a viewer specifically towards both what was represented, but also all that was left out. Looking at his small, abbreviated watercolours, I always get the feeling that they were born not just in his eyes but in his mind also. 

 

What does it mean for an image to be evocative of the original motif? How much space does an ‘interpretation’ require of us to see what the artist had in mind? Is it on a graded scale? Is this even important for an artist today? If it is, then what does any artist wish for their viewer to see and feel today? Does it even matter?

Everyone will have their own answer, but mine would cautiously follow in J.M.W. Turner’s footpath. His watercolours, made over two hundred years ago, are innovations unparalleled in what we call Contemporary Art today. Indeed, for me, these small things which he made on the fly, often eclipse  so much ‘abstract’ or ‘non-objective art’ created in the whole 20th century. A large portion of his entire oeuvre in watercolours is an existential threat to Non-Figurative and Expressionist Painting. I say all this with caveats of course. There are many Non-figurative painters whose work I personally love, two of my favourites are Joan Miró and Philip Guston. But there is so much to say about all this, for another day because I too, make non-figurative work in my studio.