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 still could 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 Eric 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 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 was that moment in a sky full of flux when I have to take a stand and really commit to the drawing. In this picture though, I kept shuffling clouds around until I made the 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 summoned up my feelings of this cold and forlorn afternoon as I left the deserted beach the other evening. 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. 

 

Fragrances

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 September 2026, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

This is from about two weeks ago when I began painting on smaller canvas boards which allow me to grasp the images faster. More compact, they’re better suited to painting the rapidly changing colours and they allow me to casually swipe paint across them with greater ease. I've made a dozen of them this week but this one particularly pleased me. 

Though this would not be for everyone, a fragile study like this seems to be what I'm after in this moment. The marvellously strange thing about it is that I couldn't have known I was after it until I painted this. (!)

This was the last study of the day and the sky appeared to be blushing with a delicate pink colour harmony. After a few years working here, I’ve come to see that these faint secrets overhead are what the sky gives away when it thinks no one else is looking. 

It’s at this fragrant moment when colour sails away like perfume diffusing into the night air. How many people would imagine such intimate goings-on in the sky just above their heads? Not me until I began painting at this hour. How could I have known otherwise?

The weather has been cooperative so I’ve been out most evenings and the blooms are bold but short-lived. Nice.

Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

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Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

J.M.W.Turner (date ?)Gouache and watercolour on paper 188 x 227 mm

I was sent this small Turner watercolour recently by a mysterious gentleman, whom I didn’t know, a certain Peter Shear from Indiana who is a painter. I believe that he stumbled upon my small blog space l’Air de Rien which has been the skeleton for this book, Evening Prayers at Brunswick Heads. This was a nice surprise. He understood not only what interested me but was kind enough to pass it along. 

It was a shock to see it, for this unpretentious little oeuvre, lacking in any visual presumption is just so perfect and beguiling that I can only weep with envy. Its innocence speaks of a rare and simple vision, one which could likely only come from the hand of an assured artist or perhaps even a very creative young child of rare sensibility on a very lucky and insightful afternoon. 

There is, at certain moments, an awkward honesty in Turner’s voluminous record-keeping of the sea and sky that reveals such a playful abstraction that one could think (if they knew little or nothing about Art) that indeed it was made by a child. But this would be a fairly cheap value judgement by a smug, smart-aleck whose sensibilities are but ruled uniquely by the left side of their brain only, for this is a masterpiece of invention.  

For me, the brilliance of this tiny and unobtrusive little souvenir is beyond description. This child-like innocence belies a profound vision, one that was not only cultivated by a lifetime of looking at Nature, but also by a lifetime of experience and talent that is buried deeply within the structure of these four corners and behind its quiet and simple design. 

But also hidden within this simplicity are the essentials of picture-making. There is a foreground, a middle-ground, and background, which all together, seem to come racing up to the viewer all at once as one plane, and it replicates how the visual world operates. In Painting, this is called abstraction, and it has to be learned not only through patience and practice but also through a generously extensive understanding of Art History itself. 

This is because our eyes don’t naturally allow this to happen due to our inability to focus on all planes simultaneously. It is therefore left to the artist to reconfigure this physical impossibility so that we, the viewers, can imagine it. But this sounds way more complicated than I am making it out to be. To put it simply, our eyes generally only reveal to our brain, at nanoseconds at a time, an entire organic view of the world as we look out at it, one instant after the next. It is why some painters will squint their eyes whilst looking at a landscape in order to ‘see it’ as one whole organic form in their mind. But to paint it as one whole viable form can only be achieved through an abstract process, one by which, both a gifted child and a painter like Turner, perform so intuitively. 

This means that normally, we cannot, without practice, perceive a landscape as painters have learned to make them because they were re-created using a kind of abstraction built by planes that move forward and backward on the two dimensional surface.  There is no doubt that a landscape painter will surely look out at the world quite differently than a gardener whose macro-view of intimacy is at a different scale. Conversely, imagine a mouse suddenly seeing his familiar landscape from 100 metres above in the claws of a hawk? 

The painter must be inventive. For instance, he or she needs to build a kind of visual scaffolding that can fashion a foreground, middle ground and background, which when viewed all together, might not be readily apparent to the rest of us because our eyes don’t naturally take them in as one. This is a necessary invention, an  'abstraction' that all painters, from early toddlers to professionals, devise to create their own personal systems with which to make pictures. 

Viewers don’t realise any of this because they don’t have to think about it, it’s a given, and it’s instantly taken for granted. Though most serious viewers of art can sometimes detect when an image falls flat, it’s less evident to discern the attributes of a painting when it succeeds. But the ones that fail usually do so from small bruises throughout like on a fresh pear.

But a painter like Turner, through his experience, knows how to ‘read the room’, intuitively. Like other great artists, He understands intuitively how to reconfigure the visible world through a connivance of both talent and gumption to reconstruct the logic of a landscape and to fashion it into a painted image. Alas, for the gifted and clairvoyant child (and a few lucky painters and visionaries) it’s always innate, yet for most painters it needs to be learned. I was a painter who had to learn it because I had already lost my own creative child much earlier in life, so none of this came intuitively to me until much later on when I re-discovered my early love of painting. 

Put another way; the ‘Academic Painter’, of which there are many prestigious adherents, are trained to paint Nature (landscapes and models), as a compilation of separate parts, attaching them through a painting technique alone. I think that an academic painter appears to be trained to only see a picture as separate parts, things to be attached to one another and joined bit by bit. Consequently, the end result resembles a patchwork quilt, albeit maybe full of skill. But worse, the academic painter only seems to look at the landscape just once,  and at the very start. They then proceed with that concept already established in their vision. A fellow like Turner would naturally be assessing the ‘motif’ from start to finish and yet might even be loyal to his first impression. I know this from experience because I’ve had problems trying to understand this dilemma of working spontaneously over a shadow of memory. 

But unlike this process, a painter with a vision like Turner’s, sees everything as an organic whole image, and one all at once in his mind. The secret of this mind is that it has learned to make sacrifices in order to achieve a whole picture plane, one that we call a painting surface. This is why Turner is such a great example of seeing the ‘motif' as a unified visual idea, one already formed mysteriously in his mind. Like so many other really great artists who produced large pictures in the studio, he managed to hold onto his vision (and memory) throughout the long process.

Either because of his long experience or his immense talents, or both, he saw everything as one, not unlike a poet whose stanza has been stripped away of the extraneous to expose the bones of his feeling.

Dazed

 

This is a reprint from 29th December 2009 when I lived in France. I couldn't resist putting it back up 17 years later.

Finally, to the poterie studio where I have put off too much work before I leave for Australia on friday. Yikes! But I'll get it done.

Its easy work but I need to be inspired and I can easily burn out after three hours

I end up feeling like these teddy bears look, dazed and confused. 

Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

These are simple pictures, they’re not big enough to be considered ‘great’ and they don’t pretend to be so. The idea was just to catch all these wild colours swimming in the twilight sky. There is a time limit to these sessions unlike ones made in a painting studio that can stretch on leisurely for weeks at a time. At the beach some sessions are short, but on my luckier days they can go on and on into the night.

Just as each picture can be so different from one day to the next, I too, am quite different. Somedays I’m joyful, sometimes not, maybe I’m tired and a little grumpy with a mind full of problems, real or imagined. But because I go out there as a habit to work, nature has a way of opening me up to it regardless of my state of mind and as a result, I am always changed by the painting process. Over the years I’ve now been transformed by it and it’s why I still go out there. As a painter friend has always reminded me, “when one paints, one lives better.” 

These studies have also opened me up again to exploring a limitless expanse of the grey half tones that link together all the colours as they cycle around the colour wheel. What surprises me when I take a few steps back to view the whole ensemble is that most of the paintings, even though they obviously share my fingerprints and DNA, they are usually so manifestly different due to the weather.  

Many of what I call my Evening Prayers have been moving gradually towards a flat and graphic disposition. I like that. When I compress the motif down to just a few horizontal stripes of subtle colour is when a small bell rings inside me and I feel good. This is where my compass naturally wants to point on its own. 

I bring all this back to my own desire to see the motif as fresh as if for the very first time, each session, day after day. This means approaching it quickly, seizing it, and subduing it with whatever experience and craft I possess. By working this way I’m able to avoid a sentimental view of nature, something I deplore in Painting. This isn’t a recipe for everyone, it’s just a way I discovered for myself because I am an anxious person, and in this series, I need a colourful frenzy at the end of the day to find peace. 

In summary, I initially thought this project was about colour but to my surprise I discovered it was really about light, without which, there can be no real colour. And because the drawing is fairly easy and without real complications, I can really focus on colour. This is something I began to appreciate over time. By consequence, when I get out there to paint it feels a little like I’m getting into a Waymo self-driving car because I have so few concerns about anything else except to take in the view and enjoy the ride. After all, I’m just looking and seeing.

Addendum, editing this book has taken almost three years. Two and one half years longer than I had originally imagined it would take. It’s been a great experience, the richest one of my life actually, but because I wasn’t a writer I needed to find an authentic voice and become one. So of course I also felt like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde due to all the editing I faced every day. Passages I had thought polished and complete, would over the next day or two, look like someone else had written it. Basically I needed to learn to write. 

 

Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction

                 February 2006, Tombo pen on Muji paper, 15 x 10 cm

For the past eight years, I have been making studies here at the beach on Brunswick Heads on the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Done at the end of the afternoon when the twilight hour approaches, they represent a visual diary of my evening sessions which I came to call ‘Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads.’

Many years earlier, I had seen the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto who spent years travelling around Japan making large black and white studies of the horizon line that appeared to cut it in half. He used an 8 X 10 camera, often with long exposures during all kinds of weather and in every season. I was deeply moved by these things. And although prior to seeing his series, I had never been too fond of black and white photography, in his case, I was taken aback by the painterly nuances of black, white, and a vast multitude of greys. 

Although his images were the inspiration for my own series, I only wished to explore the horizon line in colour using oil paints at the dusk hour. Like so many people, I had spent a lifetime of walking the beach at dusk, and I had long been intrigued with the idea of painting twilight skies. But while Sugimoto’s photos were created using a long exposure, my own in complete contrast, are painted with lightning speed due to the quick colour changes at that hour. 

Although I call it a series now, when I began I had no idea that it would become such a long project. Initially, I had simply wished to get back outdoors to paint again and have some fun mixing colours from the evening light at the beach. I had been previously working in the studio for a number of years where the creative process is so completely different. But one evening I just went out with an easel and a backpack full of colours, rags, and turpentine, to see what I could make from it. Nine years later, I still go out regularly when the weather looks interesting.

I now practice two kinds of Painting forms simultaneously, one complimenting the other. One is done in the studio while the other is out in front of this motif at the beach. They both bring pleasure yet in different ways because they speak to different corners of my curiosity.

Although at the beginning of this exploration at the beach I hadn’t imagined these paintings as being ‘site specific’ or even a serious project of any kind. The early pictures just naturally became a series without much thought at all. It was more of an accident because I had no idea I’d still be painting out there nine years on. Only later did I understand that it might be a kind of ‘site specific’ term to describe it. I had assumed that ‘site specific’ referred generally to a site chosen, then altered by an artist who subsequently documented it in one way or another. In my own case however, it turned into a series simply out of repetition. And though I haven’t altered the site in the least, I see now that I have certainly been altered by it. 

Because the motif is so inherently abstract, being just the sea and sky separated by the horizon line, I use colour as the principal vehicle with which to push the foreground backwards into the painting while at the same time bringing the background forward up to the surface. This is for me one of the greatest lessons from Cezanne, who in the 19th century, single-handedly ushered us into the era of truly Modern Painting by demolishing perspective and breaking down distance. 

During these years I’ve made lots of studies, and through many failures, I’ve learned a great deal while at the same time also growing into the ‘motif.’ I’m always looking for a pictorial resolution in each picture that carries its own illusive logic. I’m interested in the unity of the whole surface as being one that creates a formal integrity for each visual idea. Consequently, if these studies appear scruffy or a little sloppy and unfinished, it’s because I’m certainly more Expressionist than Impressionist. But personally, I like all these spontaneous and accidental elements in my own work and in others’ too. It’s a matter of taste.