Stefan Zweig

10 November 2020

Stefan Zweig

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 November, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the second of two paintings done the other night on election day in America. Naturally being in the future here on Australian time I was already on the edge of my seat and I think it affected my otherwise lovely sky. But unlike my shaky uncertainty over the US election, this study came quickly and with a deliberate confidence. 

My friends in America all say that these times are precarious, but aren’t all times precarious depending upon where we live and our own situation? Being an American myself, it’s easy to agree, but I’m also Australian and Irish too so my slant on life is also more nuanced. 

I’m not trying to cute, but it’s a hard fact of life that if one lived in Haiti even during the relatively ‘peaceful boom years’ in the Clinton era in America, life would be miserable with or without money. So everything is relative like they say.  But that said, the advent of another four years of Trump would be nasty for the whole world over.

Personally, I feel really grateful that any anxiety I might have felt in this era concerns itself primarily with the insignificant dramas of just painting painting a picture here on The North Coast of Australia. Unbelievably, I’ve even developed glimmers of hope in this fragile task. This has come about because I think I’ve finally learned to just let it go of the needless worry and doubt about things over which I’ve had so little control all my life. 

So outside of us, in the world at large, where all its random tragedies and precarious restraints can hold us in paralysis, we’re told nonetheless, by the wise buddhists of the East, that freedom is always just inside us. A tall order! And it’s easier said than done, because terrible suffering is so evenly distributed around the globe to both the rich and poor, the healthy and less lucky. So at the end of all this, I wonder to myself; isn’t it just through my own very personal struggles where I’ll find pleasure or pain? 

A few  years back I discovered Stefan Zweig in a small bookshop in Paris. I liked the title and the intriguing cover design, so I picked up his wonderful memoir, The World of Yesterday and ran through it like a marathon in two days. 

This book moved me and has stayed in my memory ever since. It’s a story of his exodus from Austria in the 1930’s before Hitler’s invasion. A beautiful book, an elegiac but spry account of the terrible uncertainties arriving like a tornado for the Jewish people. He writes vividly of the disbelief that so many of his friends and relations were feeling in front of a storm that had already hovered over them. They were frozen like deer in the headlights. “Do we go, or do we stay?”. He writes of leaving many of his family behind as he fled to England. Sadly, after so much horror and misfortune in his life he later committed suicide in Brazil where he had settled and written many more books. I’ve read a few and they are all authentic postcards from another age.

I think of him now as I’ve often thought about so many Holocaust victims and survivors with this rise of Right Wing White Nationalism in the USA today. As bad as Trump is, he’s but the ring leader surfing the tsunami of racial hatred that’s lurking in the swell just underneath. It not only harkens back to Germany of the 1930’s but even further back to the beginning of humankind. Alas, we haven’t learned much. But anyway, we’re not quite there yet in the Nuremberg rally, but we could be in a blink of an eye. 

What I loved and learned about in Stefan Zweig’s autobiographical book is that no matter what happens in life one must try to maintain a curious and reasonably happy mindset. That he eventually killed himself years later in Brazil doesn’t discount what he had written earlier. I got from him what I get from all artists, writers, and musicians; that to live creatively is a wise but lucky choice.

This study was from a week ago, though not fabulous, it works comfortably. I think of it today as a happy sky because we voted Trump out of office. Apparently, he and his henchmen are already trying to steal the election by claiming it was rigged, ha ha. But the world knows that he lost. In fact, we all know that even he himself knows he lost. Ignoble, moronic, and somewhat like Hitler, he’s a conman and he’ll do whatever he plans to do but it won’t make any difference. 

Whew...so anyway, this is an optimistic painting which I took away last week from the beach. Although it’s not brilliant, I’ll take it. I think it’s a fitting bright sky for the election outcome. 

While I was painting a group of kids had come by and circled around me as I worked. They were polite and curious, peppering me with lots of questions. At the end I asked them all what their favourite colours were. A girl said yellow, a boy said blue, seconded quickly by another boy, then red and pink were thrown out by the younger ones. Then, they asked me for my favourite colour, and I said, 

“Because I’m a painter, I love them all! Today, I liked the pink in the sky and the blue of the sea, but also the yellow of the sky above”.

Somehow, that seemed to make sense to them, though myself, I wasn’t even sure why, but with kids, everything seems to usually work. As they were leaving, I threw out green because none of them had cited it. “Oh yeah, I like green” said the eldest girl in a red bathing suit. All good, I thought as they left down the path.  

On the Menu

 

2 November 2020

 On the Menu

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 October, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This study is so unusual that it took me by complete surprise. I enjoyed watching it take form as if I were channeling some Romantic painter from the late 18th century. It was the first of two studies for which I had initially had other plans, but at the same time, it too, had other plans for itself. 

It's disconcerting when I lose control over a picture and yet I secretly cheer it on like it’s a truant teenager inside me painting graffiti over all my noble ideals about art. Try as I might to wrest control over a picture on any given night, alas, it cannot be commandeered at will.

But somehow upon arrival, I even had this prescient feeling that this would be a wild painting if only I could nudge it in my own direction. I had felt like it was already in my back pocket and just waiting for me take it out like it was a map of Tokyo.

So like a chef at the fish market whose choices will dictate the evening’s menu, me too, I rely upon what I find in the sky each day. But although the motif may be on the menu, I still pretend  to be the chef.

An enormous cloud was aflame when I began setting up my easel and palette. Normally, I prefer to wait it out until the sun sets and all this colour dies down enough to give me a more stable path forward. 

Unlike other painters, I think, these kinds of scenes I quietly detest due to their supra-melodramatic nature which can easily veer towards the pornographic in paintings. But hey, it's more my real nature to savour discretion in all things artistic. But I'll confess anyway that with so little time to work these become impossible skies to deal with. I think only a great artist like Turner, who with a set of watercolours, can portray such vivid histrionics. It's also a fantastic scene, and had I not been impatient I'd never have chosen it. But oddly, even then, it seemed to come out on its own volition as if I were just a bystander.  

So I wonder where did it come from? What image provoked it in my private library of visual memories? I cannot account for it, and yet, although it was certainly painted with my own hand, I think it came up from an older template, perhaps one from my early student days when I experimented much more than I do today.  

It's rough-looking too, and because I didn't know how to finish it so I simply left it in its dishevelled state. 

Like for any poet or painter, pictorial images will often arise disguised as memories that are already lodged deeply inside. There, the oldest secrets all congregate awaiting instructions about when and how to surface. Whether in a studio or outdoors, the painter needs to be patient because when these things do surface, they'll need to be organised as they always seem to pop out like children playing hide and seek. 

I’ve found that though memories are cherished in my heart, they're still held firmly in my head for better or for worse. They may appear furtive or hard to reach at times, even asleep or repressed or maybe forgotten, but alas, they're never forsaken. They will eventually force themselves upon the artist or poet who is both brave and curious enough to find order for them. After all, aren't they the keepers of our memories and stories that become our histories, both personal and collective? Isn't this really why we have poets like Homer and painters Matisse? 

Hiroshi Sugimoto

9 October 2020

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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 the 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've already written, Hiroshi Sugimoto was an inspiration for this series at the beach. Having seen his large, long, black and white exposures of the ocean, I wondered, as a painter, what it would be like 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 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 and perhaps not Delphic enough. Concept, also appears a bit too cerebral, so maybe vision seems more appropriate in the end because it implies a sense of the mystery, a state where imagination can arise to fuse with 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 perhaps a larger 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.

I wonder if vision doesn't form itself in different ways? 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 himself 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 poet, though not one in the dreamy world, but one in the concrete and empirically formed world of craft over a lifetime.

So, the other night, I just wanted work with one simple visual idea at a time leaving the studies in a fresh state, primal, as if made by me as a six year old. At the same time, I was also aware that something might happen that had been marinating inside me already for twenty years. So that was my thinking behind the session.

What came out were hardly visionary but like every session I learned something. Perhaps for for me, a vision is something that reveals itself through the work over a long period of time. And like most artists 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 providential event when one receives it because not everyone does in human life. It's an intuition not unlike that of a salmon returning home after a long arduous journey with the aid of the earth's magic magnetic field. The artist arrives home each day because of all those small failures, sacrifices and little adjustments that one makes along the way. 

Brooks Brothers

5 September 2022

Brooks Brothers

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

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'd always be stuck on the large main area downstairs where the ties were lovingly squeezed like mummies into small specially designed wooden coffins made from dark 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 by my own mysterious desire. 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, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 August, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 30 July, 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 August, 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 wore ties in several schools for a few short years thereafter, my early love for this vivid appendage lurked deep in my unconscious with 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 being  cute, but I couldn't disagree, because the irony was that they were actually born on a beach in Australia by a guy in cargo pants wearing a tee shirt and flip flops. 

But that said, I do like all these paintings, three of which were painted on the same evening. I like them for a lot of reasons, but mostly because they arose out of old memories that I had cherished and guarded so carefully within me. After all, they had survived so long only to surface on a beach at dusk in Australia like the aliens in The War of the Worlds which had been buried in the earth thousands of years earlier.

For me, these pictorial memories fused with what Nature offered up to me as twilight slowly closed its gentle doors before nightfall.

Perhaps, in the end, it is a kind of catwalk, where each different sky is draped in colour and really does wish to be admired, but by whom? By us all, of course.

Witches of Macbeth

20 January 2023

Witches of Macbeth

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 January, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I made these three gloomy-looking things the other night which are obviously quite particular. Generally, I no longer go out under such skies any more because I’ve done way too many dark pictures in my life. These days I’m looking for light, so whenever I do find myself under an overcast sky, I’ll muster it up and pry out as much of it as I can.

Actually, I used to relish such weather when I was younger and when I had an abundance of gloomy dark time in my life. But lately has come a strong desire for light, not darkness, which after all, will show up one day at my front door when I least expect it.

But anyway, here are three gloomy witches that paid me a visit the the other evening on the deserted beach. What can I say about them, I’m not sure, because the last two are so unlike anything I done before in this series. It wouldn’t be hard for me to imagine them as my own Three Witches in Macbeth.

They are presented in the order they were painted. But seeing so much lugubrious strife together is almost re-assuring somehow. It means that I still have a taste for the dark and the strange despite my new preference for bright and colourful images.

What I do like in these paintings is that I’m still obliged to front up to whatever strange surprise comes up during a session like I have neither agency nor mood in the matter. 

I hope I’ll do the same for the Grim Reaper when he (or she)  turns up. Though frankly, I really envision a kind of young grey witch with flowers in her hair, svelte, and with a soft crooked smile on her face. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 January, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 January, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm