Marquet, Matisse, etc

 

22 October 2023

Marquet, Matisse, etc

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Weather has finally cleared after a week of rain and I was able to get out two nights ago to make this painting. It so reminds me of Albert Marquet, a painter I’ve always loved. Once in a while I come up with images that feel strangely inspired by him even if he wasn’t remotely on my mind. What was it, I wondered, that felt so familiar in this picture? How do I define it? Looking at it this morning, I perceived that it was really just a feeling. Sometimes, pictures whatever their size or importance, elicit artistic familiarity through any number of ways. Technically, I could note that he used a lot of white paint which he mixed into all his colours giving his pictures a feeling of a soft overall harmony. Here in this painting of mine, it’s also through a gentle sense of light that permeates this simple image. Does it share with Marquet a sensuous thread of artistic DNA embedded in the surface? Maybe, but anyway, it reveals to me an overwhelming emotional complicity with his entire oeuvre. Something else too, I like its subtle plasticity ingrained  in each element of the picture. 

So to say that I am a huge fan of Albert Marquet would be redundant at this point. He was an unabashed sensualist, to whom no doubt I identified with so completely even as a child.  I was drawn in like a humming bird to honeysuckle.

Indeed, in my opinion, he was far more of a sensualist, more intuitive even than his close and dear friend, Henri Matisse, who achieved superstar status late in his career principally because he was far more of an adventurer than Marquet. Matisse, like an inveterate scientist ventured into newer and heretofore unexplored regions of Painting through experimentation.  

To be sure, Marquet was more comfortable within the confines of traditional painting motifs, and because of this, he took less chances. He was a ‘steadier’ painter than Matisse but one who perhaps reached less heights because of it. What I mean is that his brilliance is even-handed. Perhaps I could explain this in tennis terms, if there are any old timers out there; Marquet was to Matisse as was Björn Borg to Jon McEnroe back in the comfortable world of base line tennis.. Like McEnroe, who expanded the game of serve and volley, Matisse ventured far out of his comfort zone (and our own) but couldsometimes miss the mark. When he is on, he is the best, so don’t get me wrong, I love Matisse, but because he was so willing to experiment, he naturally failed more, often producing stilted and somewhat academic work. Marquet, despite his traditional craft, was never an academic. unlike his good friend Matisse, he was tethered to older, more traditional means of expression. he was a true Romantic unlike Matisse.

I became aware of Marquet’s painting in my father’s books when I was still a child with no understanding of painting. I was just naturally drawn to a feeling in his work. Why is that? Why is someone drawn to certain pictures or even certain painters? Whatever it is, isn’t it grand? Isn’t it what keeps art alive in our cultural community? 

Much later in life, I fell in love with his drawings which really got me out into the streets where (and when) I finally realised just how much I had always despised actually drawing from the model and the still life indoors. Marquet’s spontaneous drawings, along with those of Léo Marchutz, were to become my biggest influences later in life when I found my own assurance with crayon and paper. The most coveted book in my library is a thick catalogue full of Marquets ink drawings from an exhibition I once saw. In these drawings I sense that he is a far superior draftsman than Matisse when using ink and brush, though I would decidedly be in the minority on this judgement. Where Marquet is fluid and spontaneous and in a ‘Japanese zen’ sort of spirit, Matisse is stilted and dry, as if still trying to please his staid professors at The Beaux Arts in Paris. Though later on in his life, I think when Matisse began painting more fluidly, he did open up to a more spontaneous way of drawing. His pencil drawings are wonderful.

Anyway, as always, there is so much to say about all of this,,,,,,.  It’s true that at times, I can be harsh concerning Matisse, and my ideas have disturbed a few friends because, after all, he is a kind God, even to the Post-Modernists out there who grudgingly give him a pass despite his colourful love for the figurative world of joy. But is it not for this reason why some painters (and public) really love ao many of his pictures? Is it not for this kind of colourful love of joy? Our affection isn’t always because a particular painting looks good, or because it answers something deep inside us, (though these are reasons enough to love a painting), is it not because as painters, we wildly admire the solutions that are solved within the complex parameters of each picture, and by each painter? And is it not like that for any vocation which is practiced with diligent care?

Addendum:

Matisse and Marquet were very close friends throughout their lives. They wrote each other continously for decades. I’ve read their correspondance in two small books published in France, and they are the kind of small books that gives one hope not just in Art History but also in humanity and the fraternal necessity of community.

Grace in all her forms

 

14 April 2024

Grace in all her forms

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Despite my secular demeanor, I confess (sotto voce) that I have an angel in my life whom I call Grace. She circles around me somewhat invisibly I think at all hours. She’s 24/7, like an Emergency Room, and she is available for a chat, zoom, or interrogation at any moment of the day. She’s omniscient and not shy about showing up at moments when I least expect it. Like a trained hawk she comes instantly when I call out. For example, when I’m about to serve on the tennis court, I’m down 0-40 and in a pickle, I’ll often ask her (politely) “Grace, give me an ace”. To my surprise, she frequently obliges me. I don’t believe in God but I have come to believe in angels.  

The other evening at the beach she showed up as a magpie, but the day before, as a young bush turkey who hung around me for almost the entire session, snooping around my backpack, but believe me, I’m not the superstitious type, not paranoid, nor narcissist or conspiracist. I’m just a painter who has faith in what the Greek poets used to call the ‘Muses’. We mortals have the paws and claws to navigate the hills and dales of earth but they hold the wisdom in the wind.

That said, Grace, for all her generous wisdom and strange beauty, has a voice like Wilma Flintstone. “Coffee Cake!” She calls me out, chiding me gently with her hoarse and coarse voice about something I’ve said inappropriately to someone. But bowing my head, I take it like a novice monk. She’s calm but stern, and she shows exasperation in any number of ways when I don’t pay attention. Though I‘m a grown man, she appraises me with irony like I’m a six year old after spilling jam all over my Sunday best. But that’s just the way it is for us mortals, it’s a contractal thing, I think, and we just have to take it. But for my part I’m all in.

But that’s only one of the many sides of her, for she is joyful too, like when I’ve done something well, especially on the dunes after a productive session. And she’s full of mirth too, at times with the mouth of a union guy from the Bronx. But her humour is wicked, because I couldn’t abide by an angel all stony and cold like in the churches of my youth. But, to be frank, I haven’t quite figured all this out yet. It’s still kind of new for me, and I’m just going with each moment because I see that my life runs smoother with an angel hovering overhead.

This study is the second one of two pictures from a few nights ago. Though I don’t generally spend a lot of time on these things, each of the two, took about twenty minutes each, which is a lot for me. And this one like the first, is a little more developed than usual because I’m piling on more pigment in layers. I’m throwing paint over wet paint which is somewhat tricky. Some are quite skilled at this way of painting but I’ve never been, not in a short session anyway.  

It was a magnificent ‘Bloom’ but it didn’t last long. When I began, it looked like it might it stretch into the night but it petered-out quickly, probably due to the half moon which was watching benevolently overhead. Still, I’m happy with it. It’s more developed than much of what I’ve done in the series. Have I developed more trust in myself that I won’t lose my way in the picture? There is alway so little time to catch something and make it work. Perhaps, all I need is more confidence and faith in myself. 

But to be out again and painting at the beach is both a great pleasure and privilege. After so much rain these weeks (and months), Grace continually reminds me not only to be grateful, but graceful too. And this I find funny because it’s an adverb that few of my friends would ever attribute to me. I’ve always been a bit maladroit due to my uncertainties of living in this lanky body of mine. Her reminders are heeded. I know they’re not admonishments but more like gentle mantras whispered into my ear when she is the wind.

Marcel and Lydia came to lunch

4 June 2024

Marcel and Lydia came to lunch

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 May 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It was thanks to reading both Marcel Proust and Lydia Davis over the past ten years that gave me complete permission to write with abandon, opening up without the fear of seeming pretentious, presumptous or foolish. Proust invited me into the comfy world of lengthy (and painterly) descriptions of Nature, Paris, and love interests. Lydia Davis, on the other hand, invited me to witness her autopsies she regularly performed on her characters, yet all still alive and writhing in pain. In contrast to gentle Proust, I like her sharp incisions through the skin of everyday life. She has a quick visual acuity that rivals Marcel (whom she also has translated). But where he takes a page or two for anything, she pares it down to a sentence; a telegram to a text, as it were.

Writing and Painting are sisters in many ways, but because both are vocations practiced in solitude they each need separate bedrooms. And like Painting, writing is a tricky activity when done with a public in mind. But for me, as I’ve discovered, both activities can only really be learned by just writing and painting a lot. Being an amateur, writing for oneself in a diary, rarely prepares anyone for any reception in a wider world outside but it does connect one to one’s interior maybe even for the first time ever. It performs this mystical adventure by teaching one how to begin stringing sentences together with some assurance. Like with painting, only after much work, and failure, does one begin to feel confident enough to keep at it.

Like Writing, Painting, as a full time activity, can also only be learned by failing a lot. But like most things in life, to fail teaches us how to fail less as we improve. We learn to take it on the chin; no blaming it on anyone else. Though schools are OK, I think both crafts are really taught by the masters, who have already attained greatness, not by teachers. Writers have to read and critically examine a lot of books, poetry, etc, etc, Painters have to look and critically examine lots of pictures. This has been my own education away from the failures at my desk and studio.

Both of these crafts imply style because it’s essentially our creative personality that’s on display. But this, I think only arrives at our doorstep after some successes. How else could we become authentically us? I’m less sure about how style comes to a writer but if it’s like Painting then it poses problems for every student if we think it as all important. In either craft, it can ruin students who are obsessed with discovering it because it actually just finds us. If it doesn’t then we should look for another outlet for our creativity. 

An old friend of mine who has been very prolific in her life as a painter suddenly expressed this problem to me the other day. I was stunned to hear her say this because for me, she has always had a style which is natural and very recognisably personal to herself. She showed me some things from her web site. As it came out, what she really meant to say was that she wasn’t happy with her own style. This is altogether different. So we talked about that for a while. Sure, it can happen that an artist will periodically be dissatisfied with their work. That is something different. This question of style is not that, but it is something which newcomers in many artistic fields do fret a lot about. When starting out, I struggled with a lot of things but somehow dodged that bullet. 

Many years ago, I read a book by the wonderful painter and actor, Martin Mull, who attended Rhode Island School of Design back in the early 1970’s. In it he tells a funny story about one of his classmates in Freshman year who idolised Vincent Van Gogh. This fellow not only went around campus dressed up looking like Van Gogh, but in the studio, he was also trying to paint with Van Gogh’s explosive style much to the amusement of other classmates and teachers. One day, after complaining about not having his own style to the class, his teacher asked him to paint a self-portrait as an assignment. When he returned the next week and showed it to the class, the teacher explained to the confused freshman that any and all ‘mistakes’ in the self-portrait were in fact, his very ‘own very personal style’. His ‘mistakes’ constituted his own way of using a brush with colours on a flat surface. Mull didn't remember what happened to that fellow, but this proved to be a valuable lesson to for him, and needless to say, it would have been a great moment for all the students. 

This study was the first of several a few evenings ago. I had barely started it when I immediately decided to keep in its fresh unfinished state as a study. I saw something in it that I liked and that I wanted to make use of in the future, but maybe larger, and in the studio. It has that flat child-like feel to it that speaks to the kind of pictures I made myself as a child using water base paints. There is also some truth of the moment in it. Does it work graphically? Is there light in it despite its somewhat impoverished colour? In spite of all these things, it created for me a kind of suspension bridge that went right backwards over the arc of time to me as a little kid playing around with paints.

So making these pictures over the past few years has aligned with my habit of keeping a diary over the past few decades. And this ritual eventually taught me to express thoughts that at least at the time seemed authentic to me. When I discovered writers like Marcel Proust and Lydia Davis, I was encouraged enough to believe in my own indulgence, something I think is natural, almost paramount really, for any writer, or painter. Without it we wouldn’t be nimble enough climb tall trees and explore it's fragile branches. 

My diary, to my surprise, was teaching me all about myself.  So when I look back on all those years of writing in museums and filling page after page in notebooks on the likes of Titian and Goya, I finally understood that all that while, I was often obsessing about the hat check girl at the entrance who took my overcoat. 

Goofy

24 April 2024

Goofy

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 April 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A study like this from a few nights ago feels like I’ve lifted the veil away from the classically ‘pretty’ sunset genre. I confess that after painting so many of these rosy things I kind of miss my gloomy side. But in this one I can almost breathe a sigh of sad relief for it appears that I’ve touched a dark corner where I’m equally comfortable. But don’t get me wrong, and I like all the ‘pretty ones’ too. It’s just that my life has been filled with so much melancholy that I’m still distrustful of so much  ‘happy, joyous and free,,,, or pretty for that matter’.  But hey, I’m still getting used to it. Being joyful still takes time getting get used to because I’m an Irishman at heart.

In this picture though, I like certain technical things about it even after just looking at it for a day or two. I’m amazed by those pale lime-colored splotches made from broken Prussian Blue that live up in the rafters of the sky. Like the sound of faint church bells, they’re distant reminders of heaven. But I love how their colours answer the golden expanse that invites nighfallt. But all the same, I cannot (with joy) shake the feeling of an impending tragedy engendered from the whole image. I think the dripping paint in the foreground only re-enforces its tragic air.

It’s never easy to convey pathos in Painting without it seeming overdone or purposefully sentimentalised and manipultive. In other media it’s obviously  easier; films, theatre, opera, photography and dance even. It’s because in the end, all art is about death. And the way to death is of course, through life. Many of us choose to sing and dance our way to the other side in one fashion or another, while others will cry over spilt milk, all the way from the crib to the nursing home. Others still, sit on the sidelines complaining the whole time. And yet, everywhere, in temples, churches and mosques, the faint buzz of small prayers persists like crickets on summer eves. I’m sure this sounds a bit dark, but it’s not, because every second that goes by is a breath and it has its own life, like a metronome. How do we live this great spectacle we call life? 

After so much heming and hawing through my own life, as I’ve admitted in these pages, I finally got the answer for myself, and it’s simply to devote everything to creativity and light. Yes, painting, of course, but also in the participation of spontaneous friendship that I can develop with others if I choose. So hey, we’re all here on earth together, why don’t we all sing, dance and cry together? Is it that hard? Apparently so, but just because we don’t all do this collectively doesn’t mean that we cannot do it in private because many of us also do that. Not all of us need churches and temples to celebrate light. As we all know, human life is brutally hard at times. In many parts around the globe too many people live a life of misery, from beginning to end. And too often, it’s not of their own making for some are born on desolate plateaus while others in a clean hospital in Greenwich, Conn. But suffering also comes equally to both rich and poor for a whole host of reasons also out of our control. 

So at this late stage of my own life, I can make my own happiness and joy, or misery and sadness. So as a result, I choose both art and light, and whether one comes as the main course or the desert, it doesn’t matter the order. It’s after all, my own meal, no one else’s.  

Lot’s of people say that art can change our society for the better but personally I disagree. When and if it touches us, it’s as individuals. Art cannot change a whole society because as I’ve already said in these pages that if Brahms or the Beatles, Shakespeare and Robin Williams, couldn’t prevent Hitler, then, no art can save us. But, I do believe that practicing the art of creativity in any fashion or form, can and will change us one by one on our road to the end.

Lest I sound too depressing, I admit to having been changed for the better by so many writers, artists, and people whom I’ve known in my life. Painting, films, books,,,, so yes, art has helped to reformat my own faulty memory stick of a life.  

Suddenly I remember seeing a video by a conceptual artist back in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s that really knocked my socks off. The artist made short simple videos of various friends and strangers who visted her. In her studio was a box full of plastic cartoon plastic masks; Cinderella, Micky Mouse, Pluto, Snow White, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Goofy, etc, etc...  She would ask her friends pick out one to wear for her project. She sat them down in an old chair in the middle of her large studio. She coaxed them into revealing their saddest, most painful memories of childhood while wearing a mask. It was the most inventive idea imaginable. The one I remember the most was of a woman who had picked out the mask of the cartoon character Goofy. She proceeded to recount a horrid story about incest that involved her father and uncle I think. I was spellbound, and what I learned from this artist’s work is that we can never know the truths behind anyone, no matter what we may think while looking at them. Isn’t that what Art teaches us about ourselves whether we are looking at Rembrandt or Bacon? But on top of that, can we ever know the emotional truth of any artist who is behind the work of Art?

In portrait painting, which actually has a tangential relationship to the video artist because no matter how Goya painted The Marquesa de Pontejos (1786), in the National Gallery in Washington, we’ll never ever know what she hides behind that stoic pose. I think I know more about Goya than his subject just from looking at his portrait. In a work of art, where does the suffering exist, in the sitter or the artist? Inverse to this, the video artist lets her sitters do all the contextual work in this art form. Remarkable! 

So in this picture, the sky, like the sitter I saw wearing the Goofy mask, was real, but its interpretation was an abstraction bound by the rules of my own memory that’s both flexible yet stern.

Kill the Buddha!

 

6 February 2021

Kill the Buddha!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 October 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When I think about how much joy I have in my life today I’m really grateful because it wasn’t always so. In my previous life I believe I was a pretty gloomy fellow and I was always looking for some way out of myself. What is happiness if it’s not small doses of joy each day as if microdosed like an Irish mist of bliss?

To be honest, most of these painting sessions give me great joy. I can admit it now at this stage of my life. This joy is composed of satisfaction but surprise too, it’s as close as I’ll ever get to a pink cloud.

I really enjoyed painting this study from a few nights back. One of four, it was like gulping down a Perrier on a hot day with a lemon twist in it. The bright rich yellow against that pale lime strip of sky also reminds me of the ripe wheat fields of the Luberon before they’re cut in July. Yes, it’s a seascape done in Australia, but it’s also a postcard from France that sends me nostalgia. Is that why I feel this particular joy upon seeing it? Certain wise folks in the East say that happiness is but the by-product of living creatively and making right choices in life. So isn’t this joy of mine the same by-product of just painting a picture after all? Can I think of it as the icing on the cake? 

Although my heart and soul still floats over Europe like I’m a blimp, I’m still reminded that it’s in in my newly adopted country here on the Pacific where a part of me, previously unknown, came alive.

What I know is that I needed to find something different, a new place where I could discover something unexamined in a creative way. I only vaguely felt this before changing continents because I was under the shadow of so many ghosts in France and Italy, but also in America too. 

Having painted in France for such a long time I also understood that I no longer wanted to paint as a student of anyone else anymore. Nor did I wish to have any master hanging overhead like an old crucifix, not Cézanne, or anyone, not even my beloved teacher Léo Marchutz, for whom I owe everything. 

In Japan, they say in some Buddhist circles that when you see the Buddha, you should kill it. I’ve always loved that expression. I think even the Buddha himself used to say it. It not easy to grasp and perhaps it goes against all of what we were brought up to believe in the West. In order to be reborn, even creatively, I think, we must kill even our most beloved parents and teachers whose love has nurtured us and to whom we owe our intellectiual curiosity. We need sharp machetes to clear out a pathway for ourselves. Though my own attempts at slashing away my conditioned responses in life haven’t been entirely successful because I’m still fairly neurotic, I keep at it regardless. I also know that my education in Painting will always be a kind of pale ghost hanging around me like a siamese twin no matter where I paint and I'll always carry around my French palette full of light. 

Stravinski, but also Fields and Kern

9 October 2024

Stravinsky, but also Fields and Kern

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 October 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When asked what his definition of music was, Igor Stravinsky replied that “... music is an organisation of tones, an act of human mind. I remember a phrase of the great philosopher Schopenhauer who spoke in the same terms about music, and the musical tones that inhabit and form a universe of their own in which the human mind has created the materials and reduced them to order.”

When I saw this in a clip taken from an old documentary I was reminded of how it related to the organisation of a painting. Similar to ‘musical tones’, drawings, are for me, like bones that build the skeletal frame that allow a painted image to be assembled from random and disparate ideas through brushstrokes, all of which are assigned an order by the human mind. Whew... I hate getting so pedantic, but hey!   

For myself, I see a painting’s colour harmony acting like all the muscle, flesh, and the skin of its surface. But within that structure there also lies the drawing that either holds an image together or lets it float undisciplined around the picture surface. There are a zillion different kinds of paintings out in the world today and all of them take us on different kind of journey. Like with musical harmony and melody, drawing and colour are both equally important, yet a predominance of one over the other will naturally dictate the kind of painting it becomes. But without either of them, I’d say just to abandon ship. 

Every painter (or musician) finds their own personal form just as water finds its own level. Today more than ever, the world of Painting offers so many different ways of creating, both order and disorder, that it can make me dizzy at times. In many ways I’m glad that I’m no longer a student faced with so many of these vast choices confronting me. 

When I look at this picture from a few evening's ago I see the effort I made trying to walk a tightrope between my attention to a solid idea and one to an ephemeral free-wheeling colour structure. Is there enough delicate form within it to hold this colourful surface together? With such limited time in these sessions it’s easy to get it all wrong. These are precious moments when I sometimes feel like a wizard summarily ordained to transcribe a fragile sacred text in the sky.

This picture is a precarious image but I hope it stands up on its own. But as always, I trust that if it doesn’t, then maybe tomorrow, or the next day, I’ll get closer to getting it right. I always believe in this hope, that I’m on the right track at least in this series because I have faith in the motif to lead me there.

Hope is a funny thing though. I still secretly hope for a lot of things actually, despite the wise Buddhists who tell me that hope is a useless idea. I’ve always wrestled with that because hope is one of those American ideals I was brought up with. Like apple pie, it has a whole narrative all its own, and which comes with a melody that can nudge me gently whenever I feel blue. I have lots of melodies in my head, but my favourite is ‘Pick yourself up’ with lyrics by Dorothy Fields and music by Jerome Kern. BTW, Diana Krall plays and sings a great rendition of it, and it still always cheers me up.

But a world without hope is indeed a bleak one. Many of my friends share their despair to me about the state of the world (but mostly about America at the moment). I commiserate with them but I don’t feel the same way somehow. Yes, it’s bad over there, but it was worst in the 1930’s. We can never forget that awful chapter. But I try not to rub it in because when we’re really blue, we feel what we do. Though each of our pains are unique, like snowflakes they fall equally upon us all.

Though I would never say this to friends who are in a deep funk, I do secretly wish for them to paint the sea in front of a twilight sky. But if not the sea, then anything and everything at any time of day is a worthy subject. Creative acts change our thinking. I say this because, although most of my pictures may never see the light of day, the joy of painting, as any amateur knows, is its own remedy, and it can steel one’s heart from the onslaught of sadness and despair. These fragile images from the beach that give me such electric bliss might also be my own small lamps that I light in this darkness.