James Salter’s time stamp, (part two)

19 September 2021

James Salter’s time stamp (part two)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So, to plunge a little further into James Salter's theme around the transience of our lives and the unalterable fact of our ultimate end, the question is always posed, how do we live? 

First of all, I think artists of all kinds are lucky because at least when nothing seems to go right in our relationships, family, jobs, and even health,... basically everything, we can always retreat into the back room of artistic calm.

This reminds me to focus on how I use my time here on earth. James Salter seems to have used it well, enjoying both work and pleasure. Lucky guy! But for most of us, making our lives richer and using our time better can be difficult. The question is: Does life make it more difficult or is it just me?  

So because I have skin in the game, like they say, I usually speak up for Art, writ large, because I believe that an artistic vocation is a worthy one despite its reputation around the world. Is it because too many people think we're dreamers and that we waste our lives (Of course we are, but don't tell anyone). 

If an artist doesn't play, how would he or she, ever discover what's on really their mind? Speaking for myself alone, I need to write or paint just to find out what I'm thinking most of the time and to help focus, my hand needs a pen or a brush. And my mind needs to be shaken up a lot. It's like one of those snow globes with the Eiffel Tower inside that sits on a paediatrician's bookshelf. Without a small jiggle, how would I figure out what the weather's doing? 

But do we waste our lives? Pas de tout! Besides, everyone is a bit of a dreamer to some degree or other, and at least I, like millions of others, can put it to good use in my vocation. 

What's that famous American nursery rhyme from the 19th century? 

‘Row row row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.” 

But being a dreamer doesn’t mean being passive, nor is it about ‘passing time’, ‘killing time’, or ‘wasting time’. Some of us dreamers can get up to a lot of frenetic and kinetic stuff while passing ourselves off as slouches because living life can be done on lots of levels all at once. We can even chew gum and tobacco at the same time. 

According to the great British poet, Percy Shelley, “.....poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.....”

If only that were true, but I admire his sentiment anyway. It’s noble. I might broaden it out slightly to include all creative souls, potters and basket weavers, gardeners, nurses and doctors, and all those who take care of stray children and animals around the globe. All these too, are the unacknowledged and essential practitioners and legislators of the world and should have a greater voice.

It took me the longest time to find out that 98% of the world doesn't get an 'arty life'. Unless our work is marketable and deemed to be valued by money alone, they will wonder just what the heck we are doing with our lives. Value is a complicated notion when one applies it to art. Depending on the season, a banana here in Australia costs around 50 cents, but duct-taped to a wall and auctioned off at Sotheby's it's worth $5.2 million dollars. So like they say these daze, it's complicated.

If an artist has a reputable gallery, or died a gloriously premature death, maybe their value goes up. Let's face it, in the eyes of most people we’re oddballs who don't know how to make a buck.  

But all this is cool with me as long as I’m happy and healthy and live a productive life. It’s really okay because even if I’m poor, I’m at least a lot better off than most people on earth. Being poor and miserable would be hard, but not as bad as being rich and miserable.

James Salter also counsels his wannabe writers to use it all up on whatever it is they're working on. Don't hold anything back for 'the next project', 'use all your notes' and 'burn it all up', is what he sagely tells us all. It reminds me of all those coaches who exhort their teams in locker rooms at halftime; “Finish the job, don’t leave anything out on the field!” And who can argue with that?   

He also speaks not only for writers but for all artists when he says that everything disappears unless it's recorded. He reminds us of our collective history and he speaks for the laws and legislations that hold all our fragile communities and nations together when elucidated into written documents for all to recognise. Without them, we might still be living back in the time of Attila the Hun.

Speaking as a painter who loves to writes, I think pictures and stories are made out of nothing but an idea, a visual sensation or maybe even a dream of faded memories. The passage from an idea to the finished product is through a state of formlessness, and either one gets comfortable with this all unresolved uncertainty pretty quickly or they go slowly crazy. But this I believe, is the alchemical furnace that moulds books, paintings and music too, among so many art forms.

But I think it's difficult if one stays in a formless state for too long because a picture, a story, or a POP song risks to dissolve into a vague inconclusiveness if it doesn't resolve at the end of the creative process.  

If it's uneven or doesn’t come together to live securely on its own, it's hard for any creation to live very long without a viable form holding it upright. Worse still, if an idea is not solid enough, or if its poorly executed, it may not live long enough anyway. Generally, the idea is to survive not just the near term, but the decay of eternity. 

Tangentially, I think to really believe in art is to not only believe in the unknown but to have faith in it too. But patience and planning are two invisible ingredients in this solitary process that can enable a creator to survive the messy process. At least, for me, this is how it's been.

I don't want to sound too melodramatic, but as long as we're on the subject of messiness, I think that to make art is about facing death. Of course it's a metaphor, but it's an apt one because every picture, poem, or song, is a form of resistance against all those barriers in our lives, and death is certainly the biggest one at the end of the street. Like any soldier in mano- mano combat, an artist puts his, or her metaphor on the line with each onslaught. 

  

And though most of us will do anything to avoid the subject of death we all seem to flock to dystopian disaster films all the same. Is it because they remind us that at any moment all we know and cherish in life could be washed away and we'll end up all alone and afraid? Everything we hold dear in life, our friends and families, our most precious keepsakes, both remnants and memories, will all disappear some day. We get a sense of mortality's close breath when our partner or spouse dies or leaves us for another. Unless it hobbles us, we will nonetheless live for another day and brace ourselves for the next brush with tragedy. So I think that artists face their own end without ever even leaving their own studios, writing desks, or pianos.  

Since time immemorial, to combat this metaphoric end, humankind has attempted to mark its time and place on earth in hopes of leaving something solid behind. Despotic rulers and poets alike, all desire to make a mark somewhere, anywhere, whether on a canvas, or on a women's heart. We want our stories to live beyond us. Which artist in a cave in Lascaux would have imagined that their drawings would fascinate future generations 18,000 years hence? 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm 

Regarding my young ‘female’ (above) from the pair the other night, this was the second painting done after the colours had mellowed and  dusk crept slowly into the sky. For me, it’s an image that embodies so many womanly qualities that one can love about the feminine spirit. It possesses a soft and organised harmony which is delicate but with a firm carriage, and it's rather composed, a bit more Jane Austin than Jane Fonda. There is a radiance in it that is not in the other picture, the ‘male’ version. This has that quiet assurance that reminds me of so many of my favourite women friends. 

There is a subtle intensity beneath its hidden warmth. Its beauty and intelligence is discreet without any ostentation. But you might ask me: “How can you pretend to know so much about women?” And I would reply that I’m lucky enough to have had far more women friends than men in my life. 

And so finally, like at the post office when letters are sent off to other places around the neighbourhood or across the globe, each article is stamped with the time and date. Being a painter from the other side of the world and living DownUnder, I, too, can put my own ‘time stamp’ upon these pictures each afternoon. This act thus reminds me that I was here on this beach for even just a fraction of a moment on this remarkable Earth. These small paintings are proof that I was there, out on a dune at dusk, and facing the Pacific Ocean on all those wonderful evenings.

Flag

 

6 August 2022

Flag

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

This study was the last one painted from a few chilly nights ago. The air and the sky had been crispy clear all day. It’s one of those compact images that reminds me of how much I love and embrace the simplicity of a great-looking flag. Though I certainly didn’t think of this when I painted it, I'm not surprised that this visual fetish appears to haunt me in front of certain types of skies. But not all flags, mind you, just ones of simple design, ones that speaks to bright and happy graphic clarity, and ones that look good from a great distance in weather both fair and foul. I like ones that are colourful and lucid and fade gently from the salty air. This one already looks weathered like it has survived a season of typhoons. What small country would have such a flag?

I really love this pale Prussian blue that on certain evenings often starts at the horizon and pushes the after-burn of the warm pinky roses and yellows carefully upwards into the evening. It’s an elusive stage, particular to paint, and I’ve rarely captured it with truth or success. This picture gets the colours right, although a little on the bright side due to a waxing moon overhead. Normally, there is a delicate deliniation between the colour bands at this stage of dusk but I went in for a more crisp graphic design in this one.

I think I never realised how important was space until I began trying to paint the sky over the sea. How do I reduce everything down with proportion in order to reconfigure what it is I find visually relevant? Sacrifice, already a crucial  element in all painting, becomes even more important. But this graphic space in painting also evinces something else, something also found in music where the pause becomes a rest note and it translates into an expanse that invites both the viewer’s eye and the listener to calmly roam the quiet surface. Emptiness doesn’t exist haphazardly in either music or in a picture, I think everything artistic is deliberate by choice, whether elective or random. It represents space, a pause, which for me is something tangible. 

 

This idea of space or pause, leads my imagination to another level of its meaning and reminds me that there are also spaces and and pauses that are essential for any creative life. It came to me from learning to play piano but also learning to write too. Every work session in either of these activities push me into my conscious zones where I’m actively using my brain. But when not actively ‘working or thinking’ I’ve discovered that there is another more subtle zone where the  unconscious side of my brain takes over for anywhere from 12 to 24 hours afterward. This ‘space’ of non-active attention seems to be where all my understanding arrives as if I’ve been lifted up several hundred feet above my life like on a drone where resolutions begin to appear and settle within my receptive mind. The more aware of it I’ve become the more it seems to work. 

Yes, I know it sounds obvious all this, but for me, I’ve never used this space in this manner before. As I’ve written previously, I was always the child in the corner of the classroom trying in vain to jam a square peg into a round hole. It never occurred to me to pause, to stop, to invite in this ‘pregnant pause’ as many call it today in order to allow a solution to form. Most people learn this early in life but I never did, it came to me from this ‘holistic space’ that surrounds two parts of learning a creative task; in my case the intense practice of the craft, but then the easy hours that come after it as if it gestates leisurely in my mind. It’s where all the real non-linear understanding silently filters through me. The next pages I write or set of measures I learn on the piano come easier as if by magic and it's over time that one sees the result.

Athletes know all about this. they work out intensely everyday, then rest, and over the next days and weeks improvement follow. In fact most people learn all this in life. Only the late-bloomers like me seem to take forever picking it up. But I’ll go a step further out on the limb and say that all those spaces between the intense workouts, whatever they may be, are also really sacred spaces that also need nourishment and rest through detachment. When I think back on all the mental and physical energy I’ve wasted on taking action of every kind to battle my way through life’s tasks it dispirits me. The wise guys of the East always focus on this empty pause between action. I finally got it late in life, like they say, better late than never.

But again It was really both my piano study and learning to write that taught me these things, I’m not even sure that Painting could have done that for me. It has to do with the way my active brain works while painting. I don’t have to think consciously when working in this series from the sea and sky. Everything comes naturally without much thought, and yet, there is also improvement over time, but it’s a different kind of process. In the studio, yes, I consciously think when working on larger pictures, it's another story for another day.

Studying music has also taught me the importance of space between practice sessions. ‘These days off’ are when a whole part of me wakes up to assimilate all the actions I’ve taken at the piano. It’s where my unconscious awakens to integrate everything from my conscious practice. Though it's rare, sometimes three days might go by when I don't play, and though I'm an amateur, I always notice it for the better when I resume.

Learning to write also confirmed all this to me. It’s like a secret that many writers seem know but don't talk about. Perhaps they just take it for granted, lucky them. It’s as if there is an unwritten rule that amateurs must discover it by themselves, and for themselves. 

Again, I only wish I had learned all this when I was still in school because everything seems to come to me now when I’m patient and awaiting a response from my unconscious. 

A palazzo in Sorrento

 

6 May 2022

A palazzo in Sorrento

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 May 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The other day I was looking at a very small landscape I had made while in Tuscany back around 1986. I’m not sure where it is now but I am fortunate to have photo of it somewhere. Immediately upon seeing it’s sloppy technique I was quickly reminded of the fact that I’m still a sloppy painter even after all these years, but it’s a fact that I’ve finally accepted. I’ve also come to see that it’s part of the way I am in my ‘civilian’ life out in the big world. Though I learned a few healthy habits at summer camps and boarding schools, I still don’t make my bed each morning or fold my laundry, do I nor organise it it all into drawers. I’m clean, but I do lead a messy domestic life such that it’s no surprise that I’m a bachelor today.

Like my messy life, my ‘style’ (the way I paint, simply put) has always been as loose as a goose too. This, I cannot change either. Like the study from Tuscany that expresses the dry and terrible heat of an August afternoon in Siena, this picture, though made in Australia a few night’s ago, also conveys a specific moment at the beach through my own loose lens. Looking out at the placid sea of this small sensuous image, I wouldn’t say that it’s a sloppy study per se, but its structure is rather freely articulated by my own handiwork and isn’t that one of the elements that gives a painting its mark of originality? In my own case, it’s surely the most visible of attributes. But there are others too; subject matter, a drawing idea, colours (and their harmonies). There is always so much that affixes a painter’s persona into place on a canvas. What’s a picture after all, if it isn’t a window into someone's reality? Could it be that the gauge into a picture’s quality is how inventive is its novelty?

So, curiously, this small study reminds me of Italy, not exactlyTuscany, but further south on the coast near Napoli. There is a gentle feeling in it that pulls me back in time to those sensual Italian pictures made in the late 18th century. I could even imagine it being a small fragment somehow extracted from a large fresco in some abandoned palazzo near Sorrento. Might it even be a hazy antique patina stolen from a summer evening that had somehow smoked the dusk light into the picture surface like in an old mirror? Would it not give one a feeling of standing on a crumbling terrace in Sorrento or Amalfi whilst looking out at sea under an 18th century summer sky? Yet despite its minuscule size against such age old elegance, I would hope that it still evokes an aroma of time and place. All this I easily muse this morning from my antipodal life here on the Pacific rim.

I imagine that even to like or understand this study, one would have to accept that it’s inherently abstract at its very core. To miss this, one might misread the road map I’ve created and perhaps become lost. Even if I work figuratively from a motif in Nature, I’m always only interested in the freedom of paint because I’m basically a messy guy. 

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood, but God too

 

26 October 2021

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood, but God too 

Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Garman, painted London 1947, 

Caroline Blackwood, painted in Paris, 1952

I love these two portraits by Lucian Freud. The one (top) is his first wife Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Garman, painted in 1947 in London. The one (Above) is of his second wife Caroline Blackwood, painted in 1952. They have everything I love in a portrait, sensuality, detail and humanity. They feel so differently,  perhaps because they were created in different mediums but also because they’re separated by several years, and of course, they are two different wives. In any event, his rigorous discipline to detail commands my attention. It’s a great gift when this skill doesn’t get too busy and damage the overall pictorial, or graphic unity. 

Lucian Freud had a very colourful love-life to say the least, even for a man who was married just twice. Unlike his paint-laden portraits which came later, these early pictures appear sober, stylised and minimalist. The left one of his first wife Kitty almost feels like an illustration, a poignant yet slightly antiseptic expression, and for the life of me I cannot decipher her thoughts. Is it ambivilance, or just impatience for the ordeal to be over already? It’s a mystery. Because of the oddly complacent cat, held firmly in her right hand, it feels like a whimsical cartoon, the poor cat! There is obviously a hidden joke in here somewhere, maybe, even an erotic one. The British are wonderful with this kind of wry, eccentric humour in Art. 

This portrait on the right, of his very young and new wife Caroline Blackwood in bed, is my real favourite. Its sensuous rendering in oil is delicious. It’s a mastepiece of technique but of great humanity too. It’s as good a portraiture as has ever been painted I believe, and it rivals the best from any century. Like a hummingbird, this modern spirit of Holbein seems to hover over and around every one of its delicate details. It fascinated me so much that though I haven’t yet read a biography of Lucian Freud, after seeing this portrait of Caroline Backwood, I immediately ordered the biography about her called A Dangerous Muse: the life of Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger. A great read. 

Though I’m sure many Americans would disagree with me, this is the kind of thing that Andrew Wyeth, for all his technical virtuoisty and talent, just couldn’t attain despite his devotion to both realism and  humanity. Personally, I think it it has to do with the luminosity that pervades every tiny millimeter of Freud’s surface. It’s ‘plasticity’, so apparent yet subdued, defies the era of Modern Art being made at that time in both Post-War England and France. Of course, at that time in America, being so obsessed with ‘self expression’, this old idea of Renaissance ‘plasticity’ had already been jettisoned by The Expressionist Movement.

There is so much to say about Caroline in Bed 1952 that it almost makes me dizzy so I won’t, not today anyway, another time perhaps. It’s a thing of such rare and singular beauty that it wipes away all those ineffectual adjectives normally employed when looking at Art. But, I will cite what Freud himself once said about Painting that I like enormously:

“An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.” 

James Salter’s time stamp (part one)

19 September 2021

James Salter’s time stamp (part one)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Clear and chilly for this picture from the other night. The beach was practically deserted but for a few hardy runners and dreamy beach walkers. And me too, there, like the nut on the dunes because for sure I’m known as that.

It had been clear all day and I was hopeful for a colourful sky. This one above, was done first, and is my preferred because maybe it feels less structured or less rehearsed than the second one below. Looking at these two images, I'm suddenly taken back in time to visits I used to make to the rear galleries of the Mesopotamian Wing in the Louvre. In long dusty glass cabinets in the Louvre reside lots of small clay figurines that disclosed both male and female forms, and these small things fascinated me by their primal simplicity.

So for some odd reason, I think of them today while looking at my own two paintings from the other night which also feel to me like male and female forms. Brother and sister perhaps? Possibly conceived in the back room of my mind, or in the back rooms of the Louvre years ago on a beach in Australia, but born the other night? 

It may be a fanciful observation, but all sorts of allusions can be evoked easily from images in my own fertile imagination. I admit that my two austere paintings might seem uniquely spartan for the common seascape, perhaps even childish, yet for me, they both intimate a ripe and fertile nature at the height of their fecund possibilities. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The one (top), feels to be the masculine figurine, virile, more bones than flesh, maybe even more tormented than its sister below. I sense him more ill at ease, anxious, more worried with stress. She, on the other hand, is decidedly feminine, fuller, motherly even, more organised, and more at ease with herself both on this earth and the canvas board. In every way her spirit feels open to me, expansive, and somehow more forgiving in a curious way. One might find this fertile take on these things excessive, but a painter can indulge in such whimsy because after all, everything comes from his imagination. 

When I packed up to leave I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about them, but as always, I was glad to get out to the beach and work as I had been feeling cold and lazy at home. I’m forever impressed by the sovereignty of action which for me seems maybe like an older and wiser brother who kindly takes me by the hand and leads me on an adventure that I may have been unable to make on my own. In my dreamy mind, I still live with this invisible hero by my side.

Though I like them both for different reasons, I identify a little more with this one above for its anxious feeling and its repressed energy within. It also reminds me, of me, in fact. 

As a picture, it appears to teeter on a place only just fractions away from an impending creative shipwreck. As a seascape it’s hardly credible either, as I admitted, but it feels like I managed to channel something mythical from out my childhood (yet again), and I really like that. There is a naivety in it that is less defined, and with less ‘structure’ holding it all together, in contrast to the second one which in painterly terms, feels more orderly, and a much ‘safer’ avenue as if I didn’t risk as much to attain it. 

As Philip Guston once wrote,  “Where do you put form? It will move around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not be paid for, or a form that has not been lived through....”

Like Guston says, I can shuffle through all I’ve lived through in these images after years of working from this motif. And as with all these pictures, every moment begins and ends with what I can glean from the sky when its colours cycle through the chromatic changes brought on by dusk. Most evenings, I use what’s on offer so it’s all improvised by choices made on the spot at every stage of the session. And in this way, painting can get close to the art of writing, for in the end, it’s all about what one chooses to use, and what one decides to leave out. But in this case there is no editing allowed at the beach. 

Perhaps these painting sessions of mine are more similar to a comedian's set because when they’ve got their shtick and technique down, they'll step out on the stage under the bright lights and wing it by going with the flow of the audience. They either flop, or they bomb.

I’ve just finished reading a small book by James Salter, it’s a compact volume made from three talks he gave later in his life. I’ve been a big fan, and I’ve read all of his books, some of them many times over the years. The talks are filled with stories, for like many writers, he loved anecdotes and like most writers too, he was a story teller. But unlike shy writers, he really loved talking and telling stories so I’ve been told. Although I had already read in his other books many of these same sumptuous tales, they were a pleasure to hear again. He has been described as a ‘bon-vivant’, ‘a Francophone’, and ‘a gourmand’ who loved friends around the dinner table with oodles of talk and wine on hand. But again, all writers are not like this, some are listeners, as discreet as church mice and mostly somewhat invisible too. But then, I imagine he also might have been both those things on any given day depending upon his mood.

As a painter, what really stuck with me is that there are many points in this book where he reminds us, somewhat existentially, that every thought, idea, conversation, or musing, would disappear forever if not recorded, even just dashed off on a napkin in haste. He describes his own rigorous habit of noting everything down no doubt to be used at some later date, maybe even tomorrow after breakfast. I think he aptly describes the habit of all creative people. 

“....Everything not written down,” he explains, “disappears except for certain lasting moments, certain people, days. The animals die, the house is sold, the children are grown, even the couple themselves have vanished, and yet there is this poem.”

This ‘poem’ he refers to, is actually his lengthy novel ‘Light Years’, published years earlier. As I remember it, it's theme speaks to the great arc of all things in one's lifetime that shine brightly for some of us before returning back into the soil at dusk.

So, as a painter who 'records' this twilight sky at a beach in Australia, it's a confirmation that his advice is sound, practical even, and polyvalent across all the arts. And as obvious, or idiotic, as it may sound, any creative work completed in one's lifetime is already a great accomplishment. Hopefully that's secretly felt with pride by anyone who takes a chance.