Prosciutto!

8 August 2021

Prosciutto!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 December 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Although many of these small studies are done anywhere between 5 - 15 minutes on average, they can give the appearance of an instantaneous snapshot as if created in a nano-second like a paper-thin slide taken from an MRI scan. This one especially reminds me of the thinnest slice of prosciutto cut from a machine at a Venetian butcher’s shop. 

But naturally I think at a certain hour it's also something closer to home here at the beach, when during a leisurely stroll, a dreamy newlywed points her phone at the sky and shoots with abandon, and out of hundreds of shots caught on any given sunset walk, any one of them could reveal an instant like this image here.

Today’s digital photographer, unlike in Claude Monet’s time, is able to access a multitude of iterations from which to choose a suitable frame. When the shooting is done, the photographer can sit back in an easy chair and scan each burst carefully to decide which ones possesses the best attributes of a certain shot. Is it bold, balanced or blurred? Is it timeless or is tacky?

The painter, on the other hand, also has equal access to these possibilities in this regard, but he or she carries them in their memory so the process isn’t quite the same.

Claude Monet, while in Venice, worked from a specific schedule and he went out to paint in blocks of time usually lasting about two hours at each different motif. Mornings, he might be set up in front of the Palazzi Dario, Cantarini, or da Mula on the Grand Canal. Afternoons would find him in a gondola with his wife out on the lagoon working from the Doges Palace or San Giorgio. He was only constrained by the weather, that when foul, would keep him inside for days in a dark mood according to his wife Alice in her daily correspondence with her daughter. Already in his 60’s when he discovered Venice, he still worked like a demon for eight hours a day when he could. He painted quickly at each of his motifs while at the mercy of the weather and the light. He moved from one site to the next hoarding beauty like squirrel. Each picture was developed slowly, and like a chef regularly basting his roast ham in the oven, he worked patiently with great care on each canvas for weeks and months on end. When he took his leave of Venice, his pictures, even after so many sessions, looked fresh and spontaneous as if seized in a nanosecond. This was just part of greatness. 

But these studies of mine, are executed at high speed because of the sun’s quick arc. Through some fortunate form of grace and alchemy, I’m always hoping to make quick decisions that will also allow me to grab that one ‘frame’ that captures the 15 minute session in front of this mercurial sky. 

Like many painters (and photographers) whose desire is to express an instant of time, whether painted over weeks, or over several minutes, the goal is the same, it’s a blasphemous wish to immortalise a godly instant of a life. Sometimes one’s effort works out, at others it doesn’t. No problem, the joy is in the attempt.

Back in Monet’s time, photography was distrusted by many, Baudelaire, notably, was someone who feared that it would would displace the craft of what he believed to be the nobility of the painted image. But Painting has a way of navigating around humankind’s foibles and it will always somehow find a place at the head of the table. Was Baudelaire a luddite, afraid of the mechanics of all new technology? Was he fearful that photography would wipe out a vocation that had been so closely aligned with those of the poets, and close to the Greek Gods? Apparently, he wanted photography to be confined to factual documentation and practiced uniquely for scientific purposes far away from artistic ones. "Good luck with that Charles" some might have had the foresight to think at the time. And yet, for a long time it had actually been distrusted exactly for that reason; its availability. If Charles Baudelaire lived today, he'd have a smart phone and I think he'd love it. 

Full Disclosure: I’m crazy about taking colour photos with my old Leica. There is nothing like it, because it’s nothing like painting in fact. Neither would it have occurred to me take a photo of the sky the other evening. 

This painting was the second of two from the other evening. It reveals how the pale blue rises up to eat away the pink on top at the end of the session. Eventually, both colours dissipate quietly into the falling night. I’m not completely sure of it but it was fun making.

Endgame

28 December 2025

Endgame

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 December 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This picture from the other evening has a vaguely confectionary vibe to it like the sea is a creamy peach flan. As I've admitted in here not a few times already, I would have loved to be a pastry chef and this image reveals how I get my wiring crossed from time to time. It was one of those warm sticky evenings with a humid haze and perfect conditions for me. The first of two pictures, a shame that the second one went pear-shaped, but I’m happy with this. I like the luminous colours and it says what I felt. 

So though I still go out to paint at the beach here at Brunswick Heads and I continue to write about these painting sessions, this book however, must come to a close somewhere alas. It is fitting that it closes with this ultra-flat, simple painting, one that speaks to the enormous evolution of these studies over the roughly eight years since I began working from the beach skies.

And so as I arrive at the end of these pages I suddenly wonder if I have asked the right questions I've always had about painting. And if I have, did I answer them in a constructive or thoughtful way that might lead both a reader and viewer through new doorways and windows? What sort of painting is this that I’ve been putting up here? Have I opened up discussions for others who may have little experience in looking at painting? Have I opened up a conversation or two with accomplished painters and/or academics who know more about art history than myself? What sort of journey have I been on over these past seven years? Have I improved as a painter, and if so, have I grown more as a painter and person from making all these pictures? Have I expressed a cogent rational for pursuing this eccentric vocation in a world filled with so many other interesting preoccupations? And am I a happier human being because of this experience? I’ll answer this last one first by saying that if happiness is but a by-product of living well and being productive, then yes, absolutely, yes. 

These are questions that I think every creative person will be able to relate to. One thing is for sure, it’s that I’m a more real human being today because of where these written peregrinations have taken me. What began as a lark, quickly turned into mild obsession. What amazes me more than anything is that this twilight motif, a kind of spigot of light, never shuts down. Actually as I have always said, it’s the gift that keeps giving and giving though I admit that much of what I do might bore civilians stiff. 

Recently, I was speaking to a dear friend whom I’ve known for fifty years now informed me that all the pictures she’s seen on Instagram look all the same. Ha Ha, boy,,, that sort of poked me like a sharp pencil. But I understood because even I find many of them boring too. Being a painter has taught me not to worry about what others think of the work. It’s also taught me that it's too worrisome even for for me to worry about. And yes, I was a little surprised to hear it put so casually that way, but hey, isn't it better to understand someone else than be understood oneself? 

Like for any creative endeavour, the work goes through periods of draught and famine, and I've learned to move on with grace, my true friend in this vocation. Over these recent years I've also found myself pursuing a flatter sort of image from a relatively cloudless sky. This is because the pictures have gradually taken me there without much foresight or active input by me. It's really been my intuition that has guided me with little conscious thought. And tomorrow, it will also take into unknown paintings without any real concrete plan of my own. No worries, for I've come to trust in the process, one that is larger and longer than just me.

It’s been really fun to write about Art in so many of its forms. It turns out that what I've written is a rather hybrid diary/memoir about my painting adventure here at the beach, but I've also kind of fallen in love with this writing thing.

I can only ever really express what I know about that painting domain, so naturally that leaves a lot out. On the other hand, it has certainly brought out various sides of me which I had only previously suspected I possessed within me. I found out that I have lawyer lurking within me but a doctor and psychologist too, a really uptight English teacher and a pedantic life coach. But I found out that I'm also a coroner who works well with the homicide squad. All these things came up to surprise me while talking about Art, go figure.

This painting experience has also exposed for me some fundamental questions that a pedestrian might ask about Art writ large: Am I moved by the experience of Art? I think, specifically as a painter, I should always ask: Does the act of painting even move me? What does it teach me about myself, and life in general? 

And, personally as a painter, ditto the same questions. Does my work also open a window to others, or is it just a means of self-expression for myself only? Are my pictures specific enough to convey a cogent feeling from me to another person? And, is my artistic expression a wall or a window? 

I've come to understand that when a picture is not specific as an image it can be just a means of self-expression that might have little or no meaning to anyone outside of myself. Often ‘Abstract Art’ falls into this category as in the American Abstract Expressionist Movement that began the 1940’s. But a risk of this nonspecific genre of self-expression in artistic terms is a risk we take when any of us paint. I engage in non-figurative also in my studio so I am equally confronted with this problem. 

I’ll go out on a limb and push this idea further. In Europe between the two world wars there existed pockets of an existential discontent that helped fuel a thirst in Art for something completely new like Surrealism and Cubism, and other off-shoots. 

These idea quickly went around the world so that naturally after WW2, which, because the Americans helped to win, the cultural flame alighted to New York where American Expressionism was born propagated quickly around the world. Thus the boom of Abstract Painting took root in Universities and Art Schools. Ever ever, we all live in a giant democratic tent of Art. It’s a wild world of creativity and one has to find a place in it for themselves. 

Presuming that most of us wish to be understood in one way or another, whether we’re artists or not, it behooves us all to find a language, visual or otherwise to help us get there. For myself, I’m continually trying to navigate that fragile space between what I think of as the wall and the window in my own work. This means basically that I ask myself whether or not my expressive work leads to a dead end or might it go further out through a window to something way beyond myself and my own feelings and ideas. Is it transferable?  

This is slightly paradoxical because what I’ve also come to understand is that it’s only through a viable form that actually gets me through a window in order to find out what it is I’m actually thinking and feeling.  

To finish on a light French note, there was a melon seller at the market in Aix-en-Provence who along with his mother ran their stand in front of the large cafe across from the Palais du Justice on Market days. When I first arrived there in 1973 he was a young man about my own age. So his mother died and since then, he ran it by himself. He had a wonderful refrain he sang that rang throughout that end of the market. From July through to August and September they sold their delicious melons.

When I was there eight years ago, he was still out belting it out from behind his extra-long table covered with wooden crates of ripe melons from nearby Cavaillon. He sings out with a heavy Provinçial accent at frequent intervals between serving his clients; 

“...toutes les bonne choses ont une fin....les melons de Cavaillon,,, prenez-les vite,,, toutes les bonne choses ont une fin,,, allez!,,, ils sont bon,,, les melons de Cavaillon,,, prenez-les vite...toutes les bonne choses ont une fin, les melons de Cavaillon,,, allez,,,n'hésitez pas!,,, allez!” 

All good things must come to an end.  

Don’t mess with Nature

14 June 2024

Don’t mess with Nature

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 June, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 June, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

These two studies came the other night. It had been a clear chilly sky all day long so when I arrived at the beach I wasn’t surprised to find myself in front of a magnificent June Bloom. I managed three studies but these were my preferred.

Funny, because that afternoon I had not planned to go out. I had been cold and tired all day after the previous night of tennis, so I was comfortably writing on the sofa all afternoon. But from there I could see that the sky might be interesting so the painter inside me suddenly got up and pushed me out of the house. And that was a good thing because the sea was as light as it can be in the winter months and there was a thick cloud over the horizon that caught fire upon my arrival. Under certain circumstances at this beach, I'm always amazed that two paintings done a mere 15 minutes apart, can manifestly be so different from one another. Happily, I was there the other evening to catch them both. Nice! 

The picture below came from another wild evening a few days later. The same bright silky winter sea awaited me but with an altogether different set of colour harmonies. It could be my imagination but these winter months seem to clearly create a different kind of colour harmonies. It's hard to put my finger on it but it's there.    

Tangentially, I recently went to Adobe online looking for a colour wheel to see if I could find a solution for a large picture in the studio that was causing me heartache. I’ve know lots of designers who use colour wheels and for good reason, but as a painter myself, I’ve never felt I needed it. But online, I discovered that it’s pretty interesting because it allows one to find every colour under the sun. And the advantage online is that unlike a Pantone booklet, it’s all backlit with light so the colours are brighter. Adobe's software allows one the means with which to play around with them using the many combinations of compliments, primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, etc, etc,,.  It’s pretty cool.

I was exploring a pink tone which I was having trouble with, so with a quick click on the Adobe’s colour wheel, I found what I was looking for as the little curser opened up the split-complimentary options. Remarkably, it reveals two options of the compliment, one on the warmer side and the other on the cooler. Both hues are related like brother and sister. In this case of the pink hue, the cooler complimentary option resembled the classic Veronese Green whilst the warmer option is a warm yellow green. Both can easily mixed on the palette. 

As I’ve often said, ad nauseam in these pages, the beauty of working out in Nature is that it will almost always reveal to the painter each of the options regarding any colour harmonies if the painter is patient from not colourblind. Moreover, Nature also provides a complete set of instructions when a painter opens his or her own optical senses wide enough to see a motif as a whole unit. Like in Nature, as in the Painting world, everything is connected, especially colours, even when they are on the opposite side of the colour wheel because Nature will always confirm this to the painter. This truth could be carved into granite. 

But for me, this is obviously easier when working on a small canvas board at the beach and not in the studio where I could easily feel allienated from the natural alchemy of colours. Thus, my trip to the computer was beneficial, but regarding my situation at hand, this large surface needed a bit of both pink and green mixed into it for it to fully harmonise enough to resolve the entire surface. In the end it was a clunky task in the studio and with only mixed results. It turned out to be a learning curve which is always regretfully, somewhat great. 

But this kind of resolution is also found in every art form from music to cooking, and architecture to basket weaving. For me, I think of this holistic resolution as our home base. Even Schoenberg’s great atonal piano works found resolution eventually although one sometimes had to meander uncomfortably with him through a sea of discordant melodies before arriving at the end of his pieces. So, too perhaps a musical work is also not unlike a long novel. But contrary to the linear activities of a book or a song, a viewer in front of a painting is confronted immediately with the entire image and is visually processed all at once. The resolution is as abiding as is its dissonance.  

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June, 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Although the resolutions in each creative domain are singular, they're all just the means by which each artistic form returns home to rest. For instance, the Circle of Fifths is a given in Western musical tonality just like the Colour Wheel in the world of Painting. Each is a map that helps the artist navigate a journey and both are replete with unlimited options that allow every creative traveler to choose their own itinerary. 

In each of these artistic choices underlies a landscape where originality can be fully exploited and the logic of harmonic relationships expanded. Artists and musicians can both explore the very distant parameters of dissonance yet still be able to return home again fully rested and resolved.

In the painting world, I've always imagined the Colour Wheel harmony as a language, one wherein the grammar structure is its drawing. And in a similar fashion, in music, the Circle of Fifths is a map of keys that organise musical harmony. For me, drawing is to painting, as a melody is to harmony.

Because I create paintings so quickly, this pictorial organisation needs to be done at the outset of a painting. Unlike in the studio, it’s almost impossible to add different colours in order to repair a faulty colour harmony that I've already programmed at the onset. It can be done (of course), but then it becomes a very different painting altogether though not inferior, if one can pull it off. Still, it’s hard for me to do it in one session at the beach. The Dutch did this sort of thing perfectly well in the ‘perfect’ 18th century, but then, they were masters at the craft of Painting. Their idea of perfection was a different beast than our own today. And besides, like any Modernist today, I'm more interested in authenticity than perfection. 

Perhaps cosmetic surgery is an apt analogy to Painting. When you do chin tuck, you may need to also lift everything else as a result. A little filler here might entail a little more  down there,,,, ad infinitum, hmmmmm........ But on the other extreme, anyone who has worked a lot with Adobe will know that it can be an endless maze of too much choice and too many possibilities. It can drive a person mad, so in these pictures of mine, I try to keep it simple and finish them in one clear shot, even if I fail. Generally, what I make in one session is what I get.  

The lesson? As we say in the Bronx...

“Listen Pal, don’t f**k with Nature!”

A secret hiding in plain sight

24 June 2024

A secret hiding in plain sight

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

With all the cruel craziness going on in the world at the moment, I wonder against all my usual hope, to what purpose is it to keep making pictures? Yes, I know it’s a hyperbolic complaint with an implicit bit of self-pity but I can't help myself sometimes. Is it pointless to paint under the weight of so much man-made suffering going on around the globe?

So when in these states, I need to consistantly remind myself that I’ve already wasted too much of my life worrying about so much chaos over which I’ve never had any control. This is my own personall issue and yet, the chaos of humankind, with all its cruelty and violence, receives so much attention that many of us can forget that angels still fly in and out of our stormy clouds. Art, through all its guises, has always survived because its creators have laboured through thick and thin finding light during history’s dark chapters. I can too easily forget that when I find myself disheartened. So in these fragile moments when I am saddened by a world overun by greedy and hateful people, it’s easy to imagine that a lugubrious filter shades the light of humankind. Against all odds I think it’s the unseen world of the Arts that have always lit up the world by keeping it brighter. If I lived in a large city I would make a bee-line to any large musem, one, full of historical wonders to replenish my thirsty memories of this fact when I feel down about the world. 

An artist, I remind myself, must be resolute and make sure that my heart is as flexible as my imagination in difficult moments when I’m prone to worry about a world overtaken by human cruelty. 

Inevitably, when in this line of thinking, I almost always come back to my go-to black hole and think of Germany in the 1930’s, when the onslaught of barbary and genocide rained down upon Europe. My teacher Leo Marchutz went through the second world war living just outside of Aix-en-Provence at the Châteaunoir. Being German and Jewish, he was constantly pursued by the Vichy Government yet remarkably at the same time he was protected by lots of angels in the form of his local French neighbours. For much of the war he often had to sleep in the caves of Bibemus Quarry. So when I worry that the world is falling apart I think of him, so poor, that he couldn’t afford eyeglasses during the war and couldn't read books nor see his own work clearly.

After a lifetime of watching it all and getting way too worked up, I‘ve finally made a saner vow to follow a life of artistic creation wherever it takes me, even to the poorhouse. More precisely, perhaps, I’ve really made a vow to Light. I couldn’t know it for most of my painting life but now I see clearly that it’s always been about luminosity in every sense of the word. Does it derive from my discovery of light in the South of France? Or was it from seeing Cezanne or Van Gogh? Who knows? But my obsession for it finally kicked in conscientiously during this series at the beach in Brunswick Heads. What a relief to finally understand something so evident about oneself, because it’s been a secret hiding in plain sight all this time. 

So, at the beach the other night, there was a lovely bloom. A vibrant sea of yellow that slowly went pink. I was lucky enough to bring this one home because I blew the second one. It was a shame for I had a wonderful start on it but went too far and too quickly. I should have stopped earlier. This one is in a rather abbreviated and somewhat unfinished but I decided to keep it as a record nonetheless and today it looks more interesting. Regardless, it was a beautiful evening.

It’s colder these days and the evenings are shorter but I am physically well and I’m grateful. I've been dizzy at times and I'm never sure if it’s Long Covid or the effects of heart medication because my balance is sometimes so poor that I often walk the streets like a drunken sailor. Like my father always said, “When you have your health you have everything”. Amen.

 

Spinach Omelette

31 December 2023

Spinach Omelette

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 December 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So Christmas is over now, and we welcome the New Year, and like most people I call into my dear, and close extended family of friends to say hello. 

One of them is Bernard Tessier (AKA Poussey K.) who  owns the Châteaunoir just outside of Aix. I check in with him every few weeks and because he’s an analogue kind of guy he doesn’t have a mobile phone. I have to call his old telephone at home and catch him around lunch time when I know he’ll be there. When we chat I ask about everyone which invariably leads to general gossip and secrets which he freely passes on to us all because the one thing you can say about gossip is that it cannot be hoarded. In Provence they say that a secret is something you can only tell one person at a time. Naturally, this gives us a broad lattitude for our dicussions. He not only knows everyone in and around Le Tholonet, but also in Aix too. Who’s suing who, who’s sleeping with whom? That sort of thing. “Are the nightingales there yet?”  I ask timidly ,,, “and how are those wild boars? and the deer?” “and how are your small mésanges?” which he feeds and are chickadees in English. What we both love about them is that apparently mate for life.   

The other night when we spoke I pushed him further back in time towards his family connections which often I like to do. He’s coming up on eighty now and like everyone his age, he loves to talk about the past. I asked if he remembered a second cousin from his father’s side whom I had met 50 years ago when I had first moved into the Château. “Oh, she died a long time ago”, he told me quickly. I figured this because it was indeed a very long time ago, even the both of us. Already, by then, she must have been a woman in her 70’s by then. I asked if he remembered when she had last come to see the Château on a spring afternoon. I had been sitting with a friend Alan, in my kitchen when Poussy K was leading a trio of elderly people around the courtyard in which the famous bust of Cezanne that his grandmother had cast in bronze was mounted upon a stone plinth. As they walked around my place, one of them poked their head into the kitchen where we were sitting, and Poussey K introduced us to his aunt. They apparently lived in the North of France. I invited them all in for tea. His aunt was wide-eyed and very curious about seeing everything on her visit. She was a very handsome woman of a certain age and one could see she would have certainly been a great beauty in her day. I made them tea and she began regaling us with stories. I slowly understood that she wanted to visit the Château for perhaps the last time in her life. She remembered my kitchen that had once been a set of rooms where Cezanne left his materials between painting excursions around the property. Poussey K’s grandmother who was a very skilled sculptor, was one of the very few people around Aix who actually believed in Cezanne and saw his greatness. She befriended him, and he apparently had free rein of the place to come and go as he pleased. He certainly made good use of it by painting everywhere on the property, even up to Bibemus quarry where he made a monumental series of pictures at the end of his life. There also are numerous pictures of the Château from several vantages points in the forest. All these pictures are now spread around the globe in museums and private collections.

This aunt told us that she had often come to visit the property as a child and recounted to us that on one afternoon when she was maybe six years old, Poussey’s grandmother took her by the hand and told her, “Today, I’m going to introduce you to a very great and famous artist”, whereby they set off on one of the paths leading into the forest. Just a short way in, they came across an opening where an old balding man sat on a stone bench looking at a few canvases that were propped up on some bushes surrounding him. In her telling, “he scared me, and he looked like a wild bird of prey.” she exclaimed. Both Alan and me were on the edge of our seats by this point. But, as she continued, her fear quickly subsided when they were introduced and he put her on his lap so that she too could also look at the pictures surrounding him. Then she told us the most astonishing thing of all. She said that the paintings she was looking at resembled a spinach omelette (“une omelette aux épinards). I was dumbfounded by this extraordinary memory that seemed to fly off a page of John Rewald’s book on Post-Impressionism that I was reading at the time. Afterwards the trio departed and Poussy accompanied them back to their car. 

This memory would stay with me forever, and to this day whenever I see any of Cezanne’s pictures from Bibémus Quarry, I think of this lovely woman who filled my imagination with history that eventful day. I knew it was true because who else, but an imaginative child could come up with such a fitting visual association with those paintings? 

So, here on the Pacific Ocean and so far from my youth in France, comes not only this wonderful memory but also this painting from the other evening that displays the colours of Bibémus Quarry. We’ve had some really splendid blooms lately, skies that have knocked me over with the weight of their ferocity. But this evening bloom from the other night was gentle and friendly-looking.

Because of certain skies, sometimes people imagine that all these studies look alike but I take in stride because I see them all like an extended family and because I’m so familiar with them all I can see look at them differently despite their strong resemblances to each other.  I understand all their quirks that exist underneath their colour harmonies and drawing structure. Although I’m the author, I’m also the kindly grandfather who loves them all in spite of their character flaws and unlikely rapports. And like they say about snowflakes, seeing a sky full of them they’ll all look alike but actually no two snowflakes are ever the same according to God science.

Observing the sky on most days, I still always marvel at its behaviour as it takes me into dusk. When it’s tactile enough to allow me in to find a solution for a picture I’m always grateful.