5 September 2022
Brooks Brothers
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 would always be stuck on the large main area downstairs where the ties were lovingly squeezed like mummies into small specially designed wooden coffins made of dark exotic 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 with a mysterious desire in me. 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, 30 July, 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 enjoyed wore ties in several schools for a few short years thereafter, my early love for this vivid appendage still lurked deep in my unconscious like 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 trying to be clever, but I didn’t disagree, because I loved the irony. They were actually born on a beach in Australia by a guy in cargo pants, a tee shirt, and wearing flip flops.
But needless to say, I do like all these paintings, three of which were born the same evening. I like them for a lot of reasons, but mostly because they arose out of some cherished memories I had guarded so carefully deep within me, ones that somehow survived my whole life only to surface like the aliens in The War of the Worlds that had been buried in the earth thousands of years earlier.
For me, these pictorial memories rose up to fuse with what Nature offered me as dusk slowly closed its giant doors at dusk.
Perhaps, in the end, it is a kind of catwalk, where each different sky is cloaked in colour and really does wish to be noticed. And by whom? By all of us, of course.
