The chariot of the goddess Selene

30 November 2020

The chariot of the goddess Selene

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This week I was looking at photos and videos from visits to London and I came across many from the British Museum where I used to draw from the marble reliefs, especially the famous horse’s head at the Parthenon Sculptures. 

When in London I usually make a beeline to the National Gallery where I visit with Piero della Francesca and Paulo Uccello. The next day it’s to the British Museum where like many tourists I’m haunted by the head of the horse on the far right display of the Parthenan. It’s one of the exhausted horses that draws the chariot of the moon goddess Selene throughout the night until dawn. If not sculpled by the master Phidias himself, it was at least drawn by him and executed by ones of his assistants in the 5th century. There are two which bookend the immense display (two other horses and Selene’s torso are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens.) But on each corner of this pediment, the time of day was set by the chariot of Helios, the Sun God, rising at dawn to carry it until dusk when the chariot of Selene would take over. At the end of the night her chariot sinks beneath the horizon, its stoic horses exhausted from fatigue.

 

Though it’s hyperbolic to admit, these works are at the height of technical perfection, and at the same time, synchronised with an intuitive feeling of pathos unique to rare artists and artisans in history. Like so much that came from the Mediterranean basin these works seem to be infused with a feeling of profound tragedy, so naturally, a guy like me is quickly drawn to them. Like Netflix, which has a category entitled, “Movies to see in your lifetime”, these antique reliefs and sculptures that make up the Parthenon in the British Museum, are things to also be seen at least once in a lifetime by everyone.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Both dawn and dusk have been celebrated for thousands of years on earth. So I, too, celebrate dusk in my own way here at a beach on the North Coast of New South Wales where, among other places in my painting life, I’ve been drawn to the twilight hour like a wolf. Unlike most beach lovers, I shrink from the arrival of the dawn light like a vampire when the intense blazing light rips me away from all I cherish in the shaded nuances of the night.  But full disclosure; I was born at 8 AM in the morning and pulled from the comforts of a womb entombed in dark ignorant bliss. Was it was the bright light of the delivery room at New York Hospital that marked me forever with this distress? Could be, all I know is that though the dawn heralds great promise for most, it’s a great let down for me and I fills me with a general unease that’s impossible to explain. I’m a nocturnal creature who rouses from the dark shadows when dusk arrives driving its black hearse, sometimes he sees me and waves glumly and I wave back with good cheer. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

So naturally, I also perform better as the sun loses its grip over the bright landscape, when twilight sinks into the earh like a shower of fine fairy dust. These three pictures were all made under such an uncertain light. They were painted over the past few weeks and each seem coloured with tragic loss that made me think of the horse at the Parthenan. Many pictures done here at the end of the day appear bright and colourful and exude optimism at the start of a session. These four, on the other hand, like cabooses, arrived at the end of the session when their cryptic light transmitted my feelings for Selene’s tired horses.

They speak to the night that arrives by its on own volition no matter what the day has wrought. Weddings or funerals, love discovered, or discarded, a child is born or dies but the terrible events of any bright day consistently comes to an end, first by dusk, then by dark. Compared with so many other paintings in this series that so often appear to exude a kind of beaming and quiet hope, these possess a gentle gloom. I like their casual finish too. They look a bit scratchy and beat up, insouciant even. My diary tells me that I was reasonsbly happy with them but not much more. 

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As we approach the summer months the days seem to yearn for humid heat which brings a haze to the late afternoons that I already can see in these pictures. They speak to the transistions that go on under the surface of life. The obvious one for me are the nuances of colour that reveal the earth churning away from the bright light of our days into the comfort of night. These are simple studies and could be like frames taken from a film of each evening’s descent into the darkness. They appear transitory, fleeting even; more there, than here. 

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

So yes, it’s true that I’ve always had this melancholia deep within, but better to finally accept it than pretend otherwise with a faint false smile. In truth, all the paintings from this series reveal the many different parts of me. Isn’t that the point of becoming any kind of artist in the first place? If it isn’t about self-discovery why do it? How could it be otherwise than for my own melancholic soul to really shine in such divine darkness?

Like the tired horse, me, the rueful unrequited lover, still entangles myself with this twilight motif most evenings to foolishly behold all her beauty from afar. Sometimes, after a painting session I’ll even languish a while and await the first few stars to come out. It’s a resplendent moment and without any artifice or human input, just the night silently falling and it still surprises me.

Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

22 April 2018

 Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been tormented and bursting with water over the past few months giving me some wild paintings. Here are two real curiosites from the same afternoon last week. This one, to be fair, is bit of wreck if one judges it through a sanitary lens. Like many of the things I’m doing these days it’s messy and far from conventional in every way. It does however convey a feeling of storm clouds over a dark mysterious sea. It’s the sort of sky that's generally impossible for me to capture and condense quickly, so maybe this is why I see something special in it. But I admit that it’s also a tormented, and it's a brooding image that might not be easy many viewers.

For the longest time I couldn’t pull this the picture together until out of frustration, I took a larger brush and began sweeping it with circles as if I were using a small broom like in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To my surprise it worked and I stopped in just time to let it be. What holds it together are the small pink bits of open sky in both the right and left hand corners. Like fingers, these fragments of pink space grasp the whole form and appear to hold everything firmly in place. I like that it’s so full of colour despite the deep twilight hour when the sky barely brims with luminous pinks and violets. 

It’s a scruffy-looking picture too, as if it had been kicked around like a old ball on the beach, but personally, I kind of like all these spontaneous bits of slap-dash marks made naturally during its creation. These impromtu scars remind me of how animals, both in the wild and in the deep sea, can appear in old age after a lifetime of survival. Though importantly for me, this ‘mark-making' as it’s now called, is but a by-product of painting from a motif and never the destination itself. These wounds sometimes skulk around in many of my landscapes. One either likes them or not.

But what I really like in this image is the way that both the sea and sky seem to be glued onto the same plane and flattened as if like dried flowers and compressed into a book of fairy tales by a young girl who locked them into a coffin between two pages of her diary. These flat massive and menacing clouds have been pressed into time immobile, yet still full of ruptured energy.

I think it manifests a certain feeling I’ve been aware of within me when working here at the beach under such skies. Although it wouldn’t perhaps appeal to a large public, some painters might see something in it. I secretly wish I had the formula to paint others as easily as I painted this one today. I can still feel like a beginner all over again each time I go out there to work, but it’s a better gig than that of poor Sisyphus.

Another thing I like is that the effect of the picture is immediate and in your face whether you like it or not. It might even appear ‘ugly’ at first glance, but as Baudelaire reminds me in front of such images, “All truly original paintings often appear ugly at first”. F.Y.I. He doesn’t say ‘great paintings’, just original ones.

But Baudelaire was not only speaking of great artists like Van Gogh and Igor Stravinsky, but of so many others too, professional and amateur alike, who all linger like me, in the shadows of Art’s long and wiggly road. I feel confident, even arrogant enough, that he may have also been speaking about an image like this, one hundred and fifty years before its creation. 

It’s always been in me, this desire to create pictures as things ‘alive’. In front of such a picture, I wonder if I don’t simply desire to feel that ‘poof’ of a feeling like at the optometrist when given the glaucoma test. In a fraction of a second the machine punches out air at high speed at your vulnerable eyeball, testing it for pressure on the cornea. In this painting I want that visceral sensation thrown out at the viewer in the same way; ‘Poof’, either one gets it or not in one blow. 

To me it also reveals an unusual aspect of Nature, one from a very particular perspective; close up, and cropped. It doesn’t display a concept or a conventional viewpoint, it derives naturally from a wild Nature. It’s a set of clouds mushrooming over a sea at dusk in almost miniature scale as if selected by a 75mm telephoto lens. It evokes for me, a Thelonious Monk, off kilter and in your face, a sloppy primitive voice in all the right places, where Monk’s genius is camouflaged as an autistic child. 

An architect says

 

10 March 2021

An architect says

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What motivates me is work on disappearance, on the limits between a presence and an absence of the architecture. 

Dominique Perrault (1953- )

This morning I was able to get into town for some errands. Everything still a mess and most shops are closed while people still clean mud from everywhere. Mullumbimby, was already a quiet town, but today it had an unnaturally eerie and sad air about it. Piles of soggy furniture and rugs lined the streets everywhere, whole families were still out cleaning up. It’s awfull. I spent yesterday helping a friend mop up his house. The weather has been unstable since the floods, but got out the other day. Yesterday looked been blocked up in the West but clear to the East so I took a chance. 

I like this quote from the French architect Dominiquue Perrault, in a concise little book entitled The Architect Says, which according to the editor, is full of “quotes, quips, and wisdom”, as advertised on its front cover. It’s one of those diary-styled books of easy consumption and comprised of one quote per page. It’s the kind of book one keeps on the bedside. I keep mine on a low oversized, coffee table from Bali, a gift from my sister-law. They are the go-to lounge tables here in Byron Bay where traffic is heavy between the two places. 

I like this quote especially in regards to this picture from the other day, although I’m not certain to be sure to get his cryptic meaning. I only understand it metaphysically. I wasn’t familiar with him so I went on online to forage. His most famous work (among so much) is The Bibliothèque National de France, and from that I deduced that he was speaking of empty space and its rapport to the material substance of a solid building structure. So then, I wonder, is he talking about relationships of spaces like we do in paintings? Not sure, but somehow, I can equate it to this picture from the other evening. 

Architects appear to me like one very large family wherein its members possess all sorts of secret histories and intimately nuanced understandings that are communicated silently through some private channel configured only among themselves. They even appear to use an arcane and singular language all their own; a vocabulary of proportion and mass, one that’s privy to themselves, and guarded by an aesthetic status to the exclusion of everyone else. Actually, I’ll confess that I‘ve always felt excluded from this cryptic circle and I’ve felt full of envy when in their presence.  

Their grammar speaks of space, light, and volume, I think maybe in the same way that some painters still do. But their concerns are bigger and bolder, more important than just flat surfaces with colour imposed upon them. They appear more concerned with grand schemes and seem to worry about how we as humans, writ large, cohabitate amongst ourselves in rural settings or in cities. If judged by Art Fairs today, my mild regret, or rebuke, would be that painters on the whole, seem less serious than architects, certainly more insignificant. They even seem more frivolously narcissitic and irreverent than the serious and consequential gang that both house and home us all. I’ve come to see painters like poets, important, but left behind the real art form of the 20th century; films. Alas, mostly what we do, when we do it poorly, is solipsitic and without meaning. But when it’s sublime, it’s divine. Painting today, is what so many of us creative types do to dig deep into ours souls, exploring the hidden parts of us that we don’t really need to explain to anyone else. So it has a purpose, still. But it’s not part of the zieguist that it maybe once was a few hundred years ago. Some painters crossed over to make films like Julian Schnabel who has made two careers for himself. But the art world is so vast that honestly the only people who seem to make a regular income from it are the galleries. It reminds me a bit of the records labels that sprang up in the 20th century that spread popular music around the world and made oodles of money. Unless they hit it big, the musicins scraped by are like the painters. But hey!

So being a painter, I must now wade back into this discussion and either put up or shut up. I was thinking of this picture from the other evening to illustrate my thoughts about Monsieur Perrault’s quote. For me, this painting reveals a delicate range of light, one that permeates a surface of the image with the barest hint of matter. This notion of ‘presence and disappearance’ is what really appealed to me about this quote. In painterly terms, it’s an attempt to capture something as fine as light itself, so fragile it could shatter just by staring at it too sternly.

In contrast to that, the sea is solid like a building, a deep dark violet mass that contrasts sharply with the light airy sky overhead. There is an Emerald green strip at the very forefront that acts like a doorstep in the first plane of the picture, and it allows the viewer to peek into the image like it’s a room. It helps to create a chilly distance all the way up to the horizon line. 

It’s a cool picture with little warmth, save from a hint of the pale pink of the clouds which are in fact, just bits of the unpainted white canvas board showing. And this is a great example of how our eyes always will compensate for a missing colour hue. They appear pink to us due to the cool complimentary colours around them. 

Though the sky appears almost empty like a vacant lot between buildings, it’s still space, but it’s made of air and water vapour. It’s an atmosphere composed of diaphanous clouds that stream across it like loose ribbons, they’re so pale and translucent, one could too easily misread what is cloud or what is sky. That effect is what made me think of this architect’s description of presence and absence, even if I’m not completely sure of his own meaning. 

Dreamers

2 July 2024

Dreamers

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 June 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In paintings, my taste will habitually move towards the sensual, though admittedly, my idea of sensuality might not be yours. In music, I also love many of the European Romantic composers of the 19th and early 20th century where there is a great infusion of emotion. Much of it came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when at its height, gave the world some of its finest artistic contributions ever to humankind. And yet, sadly, all that great feeling and intelligence still couldn’t prevent two world wars which also destroyed so much of everything including our faith in humankind. One should ask God: (if they were a believer) how was it possible that in spite of all of our problems in life, that world peace didn't persist after Brahms wrote back the Three Intermezzi for piano, Opus 117 back in 1892? God might, I suppose, throw his hands in the air and rightly answer that Art’s beauty and truth is no match for mankind’s cruel and greedy heart. And let’s face it, it was mostly the men who warred and whored, not the women. All this terrible violence is always hardest on the sensitive soul, those might, against all reason, somehow believe that Art could be a shield against all this human brutality in the world. 

I’ll be honest I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in angels. And Brahms was one of so many who lived by art. He described these three Intermezzi written towards the very end of his life as his "three lullabies of my grief".  

Brahms reminds me that it's OK to be a dreamer and a romantic. Although they are not vocations, they are apt descriptions for most lovers of art in all its forms. Being both a romantic and dreamer myself, I've come believe in Art. But I admit there's a downside, for it might be like an alcoholic living on a street corner who is certain that a bottle of Montepuliano will fly them away to Tuscany for the evening. Trust, but verify, I say.  

Dreamers and romantics of all kinds, seem to be guided along in life by a compass heading that points always somewhere between fiction and truth. And if you are creative, that can certainly work for you, but if you're not, you're in trouble. The beancounters would throw you out of their sleek offices in a flash because  they can smell a dreamer from down the corridor. But no matter, a life of fiction might not be so bad for any of us after all. There are dangers to both alcoholics and romantics, I know, for I was both. I was a drunken Noah who listen to Brahms late at night. 

So, I will always be aligned with those of great feeling in all things artistic. A Robert Wilson fan, never,,, but Mahler, yes,,, forever. That’s the way I am, and the proof is in these pictures, for they too, are not just exercises in pure unabashed romantic sensuality, but they're dreams come true.  

Ever since I was a kid I only ever wanted to play with anything that made slurpy marks, ,,,, the gravy and mash potatoes on my plate, deep mud puddles on the way to grammar school, and then finger-painting. Working in oil paint came much later and became the stepping stone to what I thought of as ‘real Painting'. This also connected me to the long and wide avenue back into the Renaissance books of my father.

Yet, like so many other dreamers, the obsessive question for me has always remained the same: How do I convey my deepest feelings through an act like painting to another person? Isn't that one of the main functions of art? I admit that I secretly want to express emotions in the same way that I feel when listening to music that moves me. And because I’m a Romantic at heart, I ask myself that if I am not trying to express a feeling, then just what the heck I am doing any of this for? OK, sure, painting is fun for me, but what about about the viewers? Am I not a viewer too when I look at a picture? Am I not at a recital to feel what moves an artist like Neil Young or Cecilia Bartoli?

So for me, like a writer or musician, these studies of mine act like bridges which I first need to cross in order to figure out what it was  that I was feeling at the beach. Only after completing them do I discover what they were and might then be conveyed to others. But importantly in this wide circle of emotions, I’m only interested in feelings not sentimentality. 

Of course, so many different Abstract schools are also motivated by what might be called ‘pure feeling’, Cy Twombly and Basquat come to mind, but not Keith Herring, whose work I like, but which might be better described as ‘ironic graphic-pedestrian’. I remember the first time I saw a small white dog of his drawn on the lip of a sidewalk on Bleecker Street in 1979, I think.

I was thunderstruck. But many of the American Abstract Expressionists, like Pollack among many, also sought to ‘express’ unknowably dark emotions hurled right out of can of paint. Though he isn’t a favourite of mine, he did bring speed to the Painting act and this is something I really appreciate about his work.

But that said, I’m not after a dreamy airy-fairy head-space in which to work, I’d like my own work to embody an emotional quality only as a by-product, not as the principle idea of the work. The painting has to have four strong legs to stand on its own, I think.

But all this is a difficult discourse, and the artists and the public all bring such different points of view and feelings to a work of Art these days. Social Media has changed the way people not only see themselves and everyone else, but Art too. Creative culture today, is a brave new world of A. I, and it’s a fast lane where ‘digital creators’ seem to cruise along the center lane of our current zeitgeist with solipsistic abandon. It might be a world where Art, as we know it, could disappear sooner than Science Fiction had planned.

But I persist no matter, come rain or high water, like these Romantics whom I adore, Brahms, Fauré, Mahler, even Satie, through all his layers of poison ivy, I’ll continue in this vein because it’s in me, and to do otherwise would be inauthentic. I’m an old guy, an analog guy, one who doesn’t trust Siri or A.I, though I do use spellcheck and stream music. I like friends in my life but I don’t look for followers, I’m basically someone unprepared for this new age of digital popularity. Unlike many apparently, I’m someone who has chosen a life in the shadows though my work like to shine in the sun.

This picture done a few nights ago came out of a beautiful winter bloom. It was one of two painted on a chilly clear evening when the sky held the colours tightly in its fist until dusk. It’s an unusual picture, perhaps due to the crisp warmth in the winter sky that had dropped so comfortably into the sea. I like that I wasn’t shy about using so much crimson red. I would have made one more study but I had run out of canvas boards, and also I was freezing, so I stopped and went home happy.

Cinderella, answers and prayers

4 May 2017

Cinderella, answers and prayers

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 April 2017, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It amazes me after such a long hiatus that I’m back to working from the motif most nights here at the beach. Nice! And what an adventure, it’s not only one of my favourite places, but I’m exercising a noble craft, and it’s worthy of my time and despite my own doubts and no matter what others may think. 

The feeling in this study is a little like something I came across the other night while reading How to Write a Sentence, by Stanley Fish, a thin but rich book about the art of writing from the inside out and starting with the nuts and bolts of a sentence. This is about the very basics of writing, no airy fairyness about emotions or some divine purpose; just nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and how they hinge thoughts together with periods and commas. 

He mentions Walter Pater, whom I never studied but only know about through random bits of epicurean wisdom that surface periodically in other books I’ve read. Apparently, he professed lots of ideas about beauty and art, writing back in the 19th century. As Stanley Fish relates it, Pater sought in art, a brilliant intensity that promised “nothing but the highest quality to one’s moments as they pass, and simply for those moment’s sake”.  

Amen, I would add that whether one is painting a picture (or just taking in one), it seems spot on for me in this harried world of smart phones. But even in his rarified world of 19th century London, reading a book was hardly a pastime readily available to many people due to a still widespread illiteracy despite the prevalence of schools. Ditto for museums and concert halls, but I love his sentiment all the same. 

So, my task here as a painter is to find a solution for this otherwise ordinary and banal view of the sea. It’s one, which when lit up by the early twilight, is transfigured into Cinderella at the ball. 

This is a scratchy, Expressionist sort of study from a few evenings ago that bristles with subtle colour even though it may not please many people. There is no doubt it is rough and crude in a shocking way, but I find some truth in it nonetheless. It had been a sky full of fire with clouds crossing over it from the South. My criticism of it might be that it feels like a fragment, a mere cut-out from a larger picture and an excuse that lazy painters exercise in desperation. I confess that I’ve done it from time to time but never with any success. That said, I still find within this picture a visual life that hopefully with time can solidify into  a more formal image. In this state it feels like the rough cut of a diamond that needs to be polished. But nevertheless I’m encouraged by these sessions which auger well because I’m using my eyes again, and I have to believe in them. They have opened up after a long sleep it seems.

Even just after a few months at this twilight beach I am beginning to see colour harmonies anew, ones that make me feel like I’ve been colour blind all this time. When I paint, I see better, it’s a simple fact. To see colours is already a remarkable feat, but to paint them is like being rocketed into the fourth dimension. 

So I begin to understand that these small inconsequential studies at the beach are my questions and answers out here at the twilight hour. But they are also my prayers and meditations.