9 October 2020
Hiroshi Sugimoto
The other night I decided to go out and make several smaller studies, quickly, and without much thought. I had to make this a choice because normally I immediately develop ideas rapidly upon arriving at the dunes by just looking briefly out at what the sky and sea are up to. This happens in a flash and I’m barely aware of it. So the other night I had to actually concentrate on not thinking about what I would do. It was an experiment, and it was easier said than done.
I made six small studies, one right after the other as I followed the colours moving through the chromatic descent into the
Springtime gloaming. Not surprisingly, all the studies resembled syblings of a happy family like small yellow ducklings crossing an old road.This one was the first, and it’s super simple. What I like most are the small bits of empty canvas that I hadn’t touched but which appear pink. This is an optical illusion due to the intensity of the cold Lemon Yellow in the sky that compel us, the viewers, to ‘imagine’ its complement in our minds. In this case it’s decidedly a warm pink due to the extremely cold yellow encircling it. In reality, it’s but the white of canvas board.
This visual phenomenon reveals a great truth about how colour interacts as a unit in a picture. The perception of colour is conditioned by the overall unity in a painting. When a painter can exploit this, he is ahead of the game. Think of Monet, especially his very late work as revealed in his Water Lilies which he painted for The Orangerie in Paris. Anything anyone could wish to learn about colour harmony is on the menu in these extraordinary works. Complimentary relationships abound endlessly in extreme nuance throughout all of these magnificent panels. It’s a sensual fireworks on display for the senses.
I like stumbling haphazardly upon Nature’s secrets during a painting session. This is exactly why I keep returning to the Twilight sky week after week, month after month, and now, year after year. It’s a work-out like having one’s own Pilates trainer each week, and like they say, one gets stronger and stronger over time. But it’s also the gift that keeps on giving and giving.
So what does this mean to have an idea in Painting? Is it the same as having a vision or concept? How are these different, if indeed they are different at all?
As I have already written, Hiroshi Sugimoto was an inspiration for this series at the beach. Having seen his large, long exposures of the ocean I wondered, as a painter, what it would be like to try to render the horizon line on the sea in colour. Obviously painting is a different art form, but like all art, I think, an artist of any kind or in any field, wants nothing more than to get his or her teeth into a worthy project, one that they intuit might take them on a long road trip to somwhere interesting in themselves.
Sugimoto certainly had a vision for his portraits of the sea which he extended around the coastlines of Japan. For me here, it began as a lark to try a few studies in front of the twilight sky because it was something I always wanted to do here on the sea long before I had seen Sugimoto’s photo’s. Fortuitously his work pushed me to begin. I generally don’t talk about vision too much because it can somehow seem a bit too grand and lofty. I’m more comfortable using the word idea when it comes to working on a painting, and yet somehow, the word ‘idea’ still feels to me a little too mechanical, perhaps not mysterious enough. Concept, also seems a bit too cerebral so vision appears more apt in the end, because it implies a sense of the mystery, a place where imagination can arise to form something solid and tangible. Could vision then not be an experience that’s built and developed slowly over one’s working life? Is it a quality that has weathered enough success and failure to have shaped one’s craft? But then, there are those unique artists who seem to have been born with visions and through luck or good fortune were able to discover them and mine them deeply. Is vision the same as visons?
Vision comes in many forms. Mozart and Bach come to mind as early prodigies. But a fellow like Vincent Van Gogh had to dig his way out of a chilly stern religious family, then labour through the dark impoverished Belgium landscape before he found his calling and gave himelf entirely to it. William Blake, famously comes to mind when one thinks of a visionary poet and painter whose art existed in the subjunctive world of dreams. But as a painter, it’s Monet who naturally re-appears continually for me when I think of the visionary, though not one in the dreamy world but in the concrete and empirically practiced world of craft over a lifetime.
So, the other night, I just wanted work with one simple visual idea at a time and to leave in a fresh state, primal, as if made by a 6 year old. At the same time, I was aware that something might that has been marinating inside me for twenty years already. So that was the idea behind the session.
What came out were hardly visionary but like most sessions I learned something. So maybe for some of us, a vision is something that comes through the work over time. As for any artist in any craft, the work will naturally develop slowly over time through the intuition that it subsequently engenders over the long haul. In other words, maybe a vision just naturally arrives on its own volition over time. It cannot be willed by the creator. I think it’s a lucky event when one receives it. Like a salmon returning home after a long arduou journey with the aid of the earth’s magic magnetic field, and artist arrives because of all those small failures and sacrifices and and little adjustments that one makes all the time.
