San Giorgio in Australia, cont

16 August 2020

San Giorgio in Australia, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Again, because the real ‘star’ of my pictures is the sky, I naturally allow it to define the ‘light’ of the painting, so I begin with it. The sky is after all, just air and gaseous tints of colour created by varying degrees of humidity added in. Consequently, being made of no visible substance it changes shape and colour. I basically had to learn how to treat this perplexing element in a new and inventive manner. 

Fortunately, there have been lots of teachers over the past few hundred years from whom I could avail myself in this adventure. The Dutch, of course, whose light and airy seascapes still shimmer in technical perfection were an option but their pictures were mostly painted in studios and over many sessions. I wanted to cut to the chase and place my faith in the improvised combustion of speed here at the beach. 

The seascape genre is an old tradition, but obviously I still think it has mileage left in it. The Fauves proved this in the South of France where they injected it with a new colourful spontaneity in the early part of the 20th Century. Up north in Holland, Piet Mondrian, before he became a Modernist celebrity, had a giant love affair early in his career with the Dutch sky and he made gorgeous and inventive pictures, but I think they were painted in his studio from sketches. Regardless, the history of art has always been in love with the sea. 

But the Brits too, gave us not only Richard Bonington and John Constable, but J.M. Turner who seemed to achieve a supernatural renown by just waving his brush magically across a blank page. His remarkable watercolour technique was a spontaneous response to the dense and damp atmospheres of both Margate and Venice where he painted the sea and skies incessantly. With the barest hint of colour he could carve out whole chunks of space in the tiny pages of his notebooks.

One thing I began to understand early on at the beach is that there are certain colours which don’t easily render the lightness of air in the sky. There are whole tints of colour that just don’t give much buoyancy to the air. At the beginning back in early 2018, The reds and yellows I was using were too earthy and not suitable for the sky. In France, except occasionally when in Cassis, I didn’t paint the sea and sky very much, so I wasn’t sensitive to this. I frequently used Alizarin Crimson for pretty much everything on the red spectrum, and at a minimum it worked. And yet, it also possesses an ochre componant to it that grounds it to the earth. So when I came here to semi-tropical Australia and faced this equatorial sky I needed to rethink my colours completely. After trying various crimson hues, I settled upon Quinacridone Magenta from a company in Melbourne. Here, the airy sky at the sea wants to move upwards into the violet-blue of the atmosphere but even a hint of an earthly tone will prevent its ascension. I wanted my pinks and violets to rise up effortlessly to resist gravity. So, I offloaded several pigments and adopted newer ones and because of that, a new path opened up for me here.

So although both these studies possess a thickish impasto of Crimson Red and Cadmium Orange, hopefully they still show off that deep rose bloom that certain twilight skies exude here to the delight of both beach walkers and amateur painters alike. 

For me to make any progress, even in these simple studies, continuity became the key to mapping out my own personal itinerary. To go from a small study of San Giorgio in Venice to a beach on the Pacific took fifty years. One would naturally have the right to ask; What has the painter learned? That would be complicated to answer briefly, but one thing I do feel when looking back on my life might not be dissimilar to what Oscar Schindler felt, when, at the end of Spielberg’s film, breaks down in tears while telling his loyal Jewish accountant that he could have done more,,,, indeed,,,, he should have done much more. 

If one is already lucky enough to be able to practice their craft on a somewhat regular basis, that’s most fortunate, because the pictures that come up will usually keep teaching the painter through thick and thin, in this hard seemingly unforgiving world. If they are lucky their style and content will naturally sharpen over the decades and progress will also forge new ideas. Like any artistic life the point is to improve. I like that I've been guided by a flexible compass throughout this series, and it has helped guide me forward and backwards to places of both known and unknown insights.  

When it came to painting, my brain has been hard-wired with stress since I was a kid. So to find any sanity I had to learn to let go and relax because every picture in front of me had always seemed to be a kind of final exam and that made me really crazy. Fortunately, I’ve learned to chill, and to trust my own squigally map. It’s like I’ve not only been given a second chance to return to the child’s playroom, but a chance to revisit the scene of the crime and find peace too.

San Giorgio in Australia

16 August 2020

San Giorgio in Australia

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

We have settled into some lovely winter skies now and these two pictures reveal my deep affection for them. This one, and the one on the following page, done a week later, look like they might have been painted on the same night. I’ve found myself pushing to take advantage of these rosy skies by using more pure colour with less white paint from the start. In them is more ‘body’, more substance than I would typically use for the sky. This makes them feel a bit more ‘muscular’ than usual. 

I remember working this way at the very beginning of my earliest days when learning to paint outside in the world. I was in Venice and made a small study of San Giorgio back around 1974. Like for every painter, this was an important chapter in my life because I think that one’s early pictures usually always reveal a raw innocence, perhaps a bit wonky, but authentic all the same. It’s why one should never throw away early paintings as awful as they may appear to an impatient and demanding beginner.

I also remember that the orange brick church began to appear across the same little white kind of canvas board I was working on at the time in much the same way as I approached these two recent studies. I felt in these two as if I were conjuring up an image from my laptop’s Time Machine that stores a complete memory bank of my painting life. 

In these two, once I put the colour down it was not touched again. All the values were fixed, like set in concrete once I put them down. There were no corrections or sensual brushstrokes to cover any misteps I might have made. 

In this series at the beach, contrary to my painting habits of the past fifty years, today, I always begin with the sky which I jump into first, so consequently, I lock myself into this ‘light value’ that’s responsible for holding the entire surface together. Thus, in this manner I‘ve nominated the sky to be my referential point of ‘light’ for the duration of the painting. Once that’s done, there is no changing it. And by doing it this way, I’m reversing an entire lifetime of habit, because out in the landscape I had always begun a picture by indicating the strongest accents of the motif à la Cezanne. This was in keeping with a traditional method that the Italian Renaissance painters defined as ‘Chiaroscuro’.  The ‘light’ appeared as if by magic through an accurate placement of brushstrokes marking the accents which then ultimately defined the values of the drawing or painting.

In the early Renaissance, fresco painting techniques had created a rather light-filled painting surface but with the advent of linen, and almost all the way up until the early 19th century, painters had been trained to add ‘light’ to the dark ground of the surface. These variants of brackish tar tones were used to protect the wood or linen from the slow decomposition of solvents used to mix pigments. Later on it became fashionable to cover all this with variants of red or ocre tones. Many painters today, still work in this manner. It’s only in the past 200 years or so that the French Impressionists turned everything on its head by painting on a white surface again. And this white surface re-aligned painting back to the early Frescoes in Italy. Only in the Far East where artists generally worked on light-coloured paper did painting escape the trauma of dark grounds.

Forsake the rose and blush thyself

8 June 2020

Forsake the rose and blush thyself

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Whoa, it’s getting cold! Beautiful skies, though I regret the shorter days. It was windy and chilly for this painting from a few nights ago. But in just a few weeks the sun will soon begin its slow arc back up towards the equator. Nice! But to think that in France in this moment, they're picking fat red cherries and eating them right off the trees in the Luberon kills me. 

This study was the first of two from a few evenings ago. It had rained all morning but cleared somewhat by the late afternoon when I arrived to a virtually deserted beach. A large wild-looking red cloud awaited me so I quickly set up and managed to jump into this picture. Interesting, I like the unusual colour harmony  with its cool green sea under an even cooler violet sky, but it works in a curious way. I like especially the free-wheeling sweep of pink sky overhead made of barely three or four brushstrokes. I wish I could pull that off more often because it’s as spontaneous as it gets.  

Someone came over and saw it the other day propped up on my kitchen stove and remarked to me that “it seems so French”. I was unprepared for this particular take on the work, so I stammered slightly before finally saying, “well yes.... I guess so......maybe because,,, I lived there for so long,,,, but also because I learned to paint there”. That was all I could come up with at the time, but it was true.

I was a little taken aback because I couldn’t detect whether or not it was a compliment or a slight. I was surprised by the question, but funny enough lately, I’ve actually been thinking about how schools of art, and schools generally, can form a student’s cultural education. Isn’t it usually after the original innovators had already arrived and made their revolutionary mark on culture that ‘schools of’ sprout up? And doesn’t it also follow, that afterward, the followers and devotees make all sorts of rules and dictums for the subsequent adherents that are sure to follow? This somehow seems natural because there never seem to be enough ‘geniuses’ to go around, at least enough upon whom to fit these crowns. But this is not just reserved for the world of culture, but also to politics, economics, religion, etc, etc... I mean, basically, aren’t we all just sheep?

Throughout the history of all the arts it seems to have always been this way. We've all been influenced by masters, teachers, and great works that have touched us. The trick was for me was to learn to take what I needed and simply leave the rest. Easy enough, if one knows what one needs. But in my own life it wasn’t always so clear about what was going to be good for me. One exception was when I met my teacher Leo Marchutz in Aix. I somehow knew enough that he was the real deal, so I stayed to study with him until his death in 1976.

But because I was a little obtuse, it was usually only much later on when I would understand what it was I needed from a particular experience. Life for the curious-minded is always unexpected, but for the clueless and the curious like me, it was always more complicated.

No longer art students, it seems that for many of us, we bound forth naively and quickly find ourselves far away from our teachers, mentors, and family influences. Yet just as suddenly, we’re alone in our solitary studios, full of questions, and at times, full of despair. 

But all this isn’t a bad thing if it pushes us to discover the right questions which we'll need to ask about ourselves; like, what do we need each day to develop our own authentic voice? If we didn’t, we would likely remain trapped in a prison full of someone else’s ideas. But that is the curse and the blessing of having strong influences in our lives as art students. If one calls oneself a painter, then this thing, we call painting, must become a habit to finding our true selves. Almost all great artists pass this wisdom on to students. 

In the end, for me to be a painter, is a worthwhile activity even when I fall on my face. This has to be my identity, and it’s something I use as both a shield from life‘s cruelty, and a sword to defend myself against it. It may sound awful, or just melodramatic to say this, but there comes a point when every artist must be strong enough to free themselves from their teachers. Like the Buddha himself once said: “if you see the Buddha, kill him”. 

In the end, I have to ask myself: Can there be room inside my own creativity for other authors? Can a bus have two drivers? “Watch the sunset!” I remind myself when I take all this too seriously, or as Shakespeare said: “Forsake the rose! and blush thyself!”

No matter what kind of pictures a painter makes towards the end of his or her life, one would hope to have found glimmers of one’s own real and authentic nature. Maybe painting, as a craft, despite all its ups and downs, is a kind meditational thing, like when people go off for forty or fifty years of their lives to live in a community or monastery ‘to find themselves’. And why not? It’s a good thing to do during a lifetime. I mean, I think it’s a vital thing for anyone to find connection with creativity, because we all need to counteract the cruel craziness of human behaviour sometimes just outside our door. Personally, I prefer studying both piano and painting, which is great luxury because they need time. Isn't anyone lucky to be studying what they wish to investigate? If more people were fortunate enough to practice a creative craft of any sort, the world would be a much happier place I think.

It took me a long while before I could understand this urgency of art. This for me, was like awakening to the urgency of life, the older I’ve become. Doesn’t the practice of anything creative force us to get real with ourselves? The sooner the better I think now, having slept through so much of my life. This search for authenticity has become increasingly vital as I follow my own curved arc through life. And the thing is, art cannot be faked because it’s out there for everyone to see in the work. Is it any good? Was it ever any good? Did one paint pictures to explore themselves or to fall into the trap of seducing the public?Does the curved arc of an artistic life end with a pot of gold like at the end of the rainbow? Or was the pot of gold spread evenly out over a long squirrelly path of curiosity? 

Sophie’s choice

29 June 2020

Sophie’s choice

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So winter nights are here again, and this evening especially, the cold wind feels like a Dr Zeus character with long green arms and legs that slide into my bed each night wrapping its frigid limbs around me. This is one consequence of bachelorhood, but hey!

On the other hand, there is beauty in these crisp black night skies when one can see the Milky Way full of diamonds haphazardly scattered about overhead. I am still lost in this Southern sky and although I regret the shorter days I like these inky black skies and the clement weather.

This week a shy new moon hangs overhead and the ‘blooms’, though brief, have allowed me to work longer. By the third or fourth study there’s just enough light that a faint trace of colour still lingers in the evening air like perfume after a woman has passed by. It’s also been clear this week so most afternoons I get to the beach with high hopes. This is a painting I really like from a few nights ago, it is one of two that evening. Although a viewer would not see it from its warm harmony, I was chilled to the bone when I finished because I’d foolishly forgotten to wear socks or long trousers. Out there when it blows from the South it can be fresh indeed.

When I arrived to set up the sea looked creamy and there were lines of wide ribbons of colour stretching across the sky. I jumped in and had a ball with it. Although it looks a little scruffy around the edges, the overall effect feels complete to me but like all painters would tell you: “I swear, it looked just like that!” 

It came so easily I think because I had initially connected so emotionally with all of it, especially the sky. This is a curious way to put it, and to be fair, it’s somewhat rare actually. But even after a few days at home with it away from the beach, this feeling has only amplified in me. It’s hard to describe why, out of so many other pictures that one becomes a favorite over so many others. Why is that? Was it the look of the sky or was it the session that was so pleasurable? Maybe both, because I’m partial to sassy big ribbons that one finds in deluxe linen shops in Lyon. Regardless, sometimes a painter just has a thing for certain pictures for whatever reason. Might this be akin to what it’s like for a parent to prefer one child over another as awful as that sounds? Is it Sophie’s choice? 

Because these pictures are done so regularly, I’ve come to see them as paragraphs in a long book, a diary of sorts. Like a diary it’s also a dialogue with oneself, and I’m still finding out all these things about myself of which I’ve never looked into before. Isn’t this why people keep diaries in the first place? But because of this steady dialogue I continuously learn about myself also on a regular basis. The pictures that come up every few days are snapshots of things I’ve learned, but sometimes they’re so incrypted I don’t always understand them immediately. I think I’ve always gotten life in drips and drabs, as they say. 

 

So like I said, I really love this painting for reasons I cannot fully describe. But it’s certainly an emotional things, for sure. And why not? It’s art afterall. But also I like it for its discretion. It was painted quickly, maybe in 10 minutes, and that gives it an air of carelessness that I think disguises all the 

elements that make it function quite naturally. There are always loads of problems involved with making a painting, sure, but the painting itself, at the end of the session, is the eventual outcome of fixing all these problems unconsciously. The placement of brushstrokes in these quick paintings create the drawing. In French they call these ‘Ébauches’, or as referring to quick unfinished studies. It was a common slur to the Impressionist Movement as a whole at the time. Today, of course, I think anything goes because we live in wild new world, it’s a go-go period for art writ large, so to make ‘une èbauche’ is no worries at all I think. But as there is no preparation for my own pictures, no pencils indications to contravene spontaneous mood, anything can happen, and it usually does. So when I attacked this already sloppy-looking sky I didn’t hesitate to jump in. I always just say a little evening prayer beforehand to make it come right.

That said, where does the foreground begin in this picture? (and what constitutes the foreground?) Where is the upper limit of the sky? (and of the picture itself?)  Do the foregrounds in both the sea and the sky directly overhead sync to create the illusion of distance to the horizon line? There are always so many questions but I never ask them unless I have problems. Like a surfer here in Australia, doesn’t one just jump in and hope for the best? There is an art to almost everything concerning the sea after all and mostly it just requires jumping in.  

Satie went out without his umbrella

24 June 2020

Satie went out without his umbrella

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I never really struggled with the act of painting, not colour harmony, nor with drawing once I began studying with Leo. Yes, I could still have a hard time but I wasn’t clueless like I had been at art school in university. It was more like starting over, like I was learning French after years of studying Latin. At the same time, I had to learn a lot and work at it, but it had never been so foreign to me even from an early age because I had always had an intuitive sense about light. Studying with my teacher Leo, freed me up finally so I could use it. Suddenly, I had both a direction, and a means with which to construct a chassis to draw and paint an image.

Being able to always draw had been the ticket that allowed me to avoid being bullied in schools because I could do something that others couldn’t. It gave me a pass,,, sort of. On the other hand, I also took it for granted too, because curiously, I also assumed that everyone else had those same skills. My real problem in painting arose from me alone and I had to overcome all of my own personnel issues around creativity to make any progress later on. I was my own problem, but art never was.

But curiously, I found a way into sorting out my issues with painting through learning music in my later years. I had always wanted to play piano but had thought I was too old to begin. That mind-set went on for years until finally, at the age of 30, I bought an old piano, and many beginners from another era, I began learning to play simple things by Bach, Bartok.

It was an unhill climb because music never came easy to me like it seems to for so many others. I had to work at it in a way I never had to work at drawing or painting. This was a great opening but at the same time it revealed to me that I hadn’t ever really worked hard enough on my plastic skills in Painting or drawing. I was coasting, which wasn’t a great way to achieve anything. But at the piano I felt like a mountaineer on a cliff face, always in peril and forever trying to save myself. 

Over the years I’ve managed to learn some musical harmony through the Tin Pan Alley charts that led to some of the great Jazz Standards we’ve all come to love today. Like everyone else, I also learned some Bach and Chopin, but it was Erik Satie who led me through dark tunnels and into the trough of hard work. 

At the beginning of the Pandemic I began memorising the first three Gemnopedies, then the first three Gnossiennes which took me two years, but they now live cautiously in my hands and heart. I suddenly realised that if I could do this then I could certainly accomplish as much in painting. Somehow the work on Satie helped me dislodge most of my worst creative insecurities. It felt to me after so many years that I could finally stuff my perfectionism into a pizza oven and watch it burn out of me as a smoky ghost. Henceforth, instead of seeing painting as a final exam, I could begin seeing it as a just workbook. Why, I wondered, could I not I learn to paint for the pure joy of it as I had learned to do on the piano? 

This moody picture is from a few nights ago. It also reminds me of Erik Satie and his wistful music, but in particular, his set of piano works entitled Pieces-Froides. Erik Satie, the much-celebrated French composer, lived in a tiny unheated room in Montmarte at the end of his life where he died in poverty. After he died, the story goes that a few friends assembled there, and while they all jammed into the small room and drank brandy to remember him, someone opened the closet and dozens of umbrellas spilled out. His friends were surprised to find their own amongst them. They say that he went out with an umbrella even on sunny days, and he apparently had a habit of ‘borrowing’ them from everywhere he went. This is easy to do in France today where cafes and shops provide umbrella bins next to their entrances. 

This image was a bit of a mess because a rain storm came in as I was working and the rapidly moving clouds wrecked my need for stability and structure. But like always, there is that moment in a sky full of flux, when I need to take a stand and really commit to the drawing. In this picture though, in a confused mindset, I kept shuffling clouds around here and there until I could make that commitment. Lucky for me that I had somehow preserved those small turquoise windows of light.

But, I like this picture also because it captures an instant, almost like a Polaroid, and yet it’s a painting done live at the beach under a windy chill. At first, I wasn’t sure about it, but it looks better to me after a few days. It sums up my feelings about that cold and forlorn afternoon when I left the deserted beach. It’s winter after all.

A few days in September

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18

September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18

September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

There is a curious film with the title 'A Few Days in September' which I like very much and still watch every few years. It stars Juliette Binoche and John Turturro, who naturally give great performances. Because it takes place between Paris and Venice there are two suitable younger stars to handle the love angle. And Nick Nolte makes a quick surprise entrance and even faster exit at the end of the film. 

Sometimes when I long for France and Italy I put it into my DVD player and play pretend that I'm there, and that I still drink white wine in a quaint bar behind the Giudecca. 

It's a hazy picture this film, and it's full of uncertainties, just like my favourite evenings here at the dusk hour when I come out to paint. We've had some really lovely mysterious-looking skies (and seas) over the past two weeks and I've gone to heaven there each night. Here are a few that speak in hushed tones and muted innuendos. They were done over these last few days of September.

Like the film, these discreet images seem to be masking the truth about what's really going on in the twilight sky. Because they're naturally fleeting, they also hide their mysteries. 

But alas, the rain has returned, and the metéo says it will not leave for another week or two. 

Anouk, a niece of a friend in France came to stay for a few days while traveling around Australia. A lovely woman who sized me up and immediately decided to organise my kitchen. She reminds me of Marie Kondo, the Japanese wizard of decluttering, known in Japan as 'fusui'. 

I will confess that I've let things go wild around here, both inside and out of my small home, my procrastination also appears to have grown like a long beard these past few years. So it was providential that Anouk arrived, and she just got to work with a quiet determined joy of getting a tough task done. 

Lately, I've felt like one of those lone sheep here in Australia that one sees on a TikTok video, the kind which somehow got away from the homestead, and after a brief few years was so weighted down with wool they could hardly walk anymore. But once found, they are brought home and sheared to resemble baby lambs all over again.