Monday! a day for Piero della Francesca!

6 March 2021

Monday! a day for Piero della Francesca!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 March 2021 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Monday! A day for Piero della Francesca, whom I can never get enough of. They say (some idiot back in the day) that all roads lead to Rome. Well, in the world of Painting, I wonder if all roads don’t just lead us back to Arezzo and Piero della Francesca. I think somehow that there is enough in his whole oeuvre to please just about everyone who loves art, even the Post-Modernists.

Although I try not to speak with others about politics, art, or religion, I sometimes cannot help myself because in the news the other day was an article about all the idle rich people who travel around the globe looking fabulous. At the same time, I had been looking at some photo details I had taken of the Piero della Francesca’s at the National Gallery in London, and it occurred to me that no matter how rich one might be, one still has to face one’s ageing body and mind as well. Nothing, I think, will decay a mind faster than spending all one’s time and money being fabulously rich. But hey, that’s me. There are those (usually in Europe and Asia) who can sometimes handle immense wealth that has been kicking around in the family for centuries, but on the other hand, too much old money can also cast longer shadows over a family lineage. Being American, of course, we know about being rich, but far less about preserving culture, which is a kind of wealth unrelated to the size of a bank account. It may sound obvious but I think in the end that it’s better to be a poor and happy person than a rich unhappy one. And, I can personally affirm that being a poor but happy artist is also better than being an unhappy and rich collector. Though I’m obviously in a tiny minority on all this, I think that culture is a quiet currency that cannot be withdrawn at the cashier. Culture, unlike money or possessions, cannot be stored in a vault.

The solution to all this lugubrious thinking is of course to spend some time with a fellow like Piero della Francesca, whose light will quicky banish all darkness from a tarnished soul. Being a painter, I am assaulted by a multitude of questions in his presence: How does one construct a picture? How do colours work together in order to create an overall harmony, and why is this necessary? Could we paint without it? And what is Light in a painting? And more importantly, is light the same as luminosity? And as painters, how do we look at his work, then how do we the see it? How do they lodge in our memories, and what do we then learn from them?

When in London, I’ve always visited him in a small room in the Sainbury Wing at the National Gallery. In front of the frescoes there I am astonished by the bright colours which appear to have been seeped in light, even bathed and pampered in it, like a newborn. This colourful luminosity had never before seen the light of day, and though many have come close, no one had ever painted like Piero, either before him, or since. We had to wait until the harsh Provencial light of Cézanne to witness again anything as supernaturally as effervescent. Both he and Cezanne evoked the sheer joy of painting pure light. Both also employed chiaroscuro with great subtlety. 

I approach him not as a professor nor as an historian, because I am neither, but thankfully just as a painter. His frescoes are not to be understood in a book or indeed even lectured about, but to be seen and grasped with all our own shortcomings as painters in the 21st century. His vision demands that we respond to him through our own work as painters. After all, is all his delicious work just a remnant of a distant past and simply disconnected from the world of art today? I don’t believe that for a second because personally, I see the future of painting in it. 

I have had this lurking notion inside me for a while now, it’s that when a painter (like me) looks around at what others are doing I can quickly feel lost. The zeigeist of today is a unicorn, like a rainbow that everyone wants a part of, but the thing is, it doesn’t exist in the current moment. It’s only a moment in the past that we retroactively ascertain as a time of great important change from a future vantage point. So the zeigeist is really a cul-de-sac for a practicing artist. Personally, I think the future is usually found in the past, not in the present moment. Though we all do it from to time, it’s a precarious pastime for artists to be looking around ourselves for validation. 

Now, after all my pontificating, I must also speak about my own endevour at the beach the other evening. Due to the floods last week, I hadn’t been able to get out at all but the roads have cleared enough for me to go to the beach the other night. The clouds which were forecast in the afternoon never arrived so it was a delicious sky. This is one of two from the other evening. It gave me that age-old feeling that I had somehow missed my vocation of being a pastry chef. It’s not brilliant or anything, but it felt really good to be out painting again on the dunes. I do like the swab of thick bleached peach sideswiping a bit of lemon-yellow, already encrusted and pasted over a thin sky. If there had been any light left to see my palette I would have continued as the sky was still quivering with energy. By the time I left the beach there was no one to be seen anywhere. And besides, at that hour, most people would be scurrying home to Netflix and not up looking at the waning twilight sky. Had they, they would have seen sky still teeming with colour. 

Searching for a family of light

28 February 2021

Searching for a family of light

    South Beach, F.I. August, 1974, oil on canvas board 20 X 15 cm

This tiny painting, (approximately 15 X 12 cm) was made sometime in August, 1974, at South Beach, Fishers Island, N. Y. It was the favourite beach of my youth, and like Brunswick Heads, it too was almost always empty. The dogs loved it as much as my brother, who took them most evenings for a walk there. I was introduced to painting in France that previous year, and I was learning to paint out in Nature for the first time. This was one of the rare survivors I managed to keep from those last weeks in August. 

It interests me today because it reveals something about my emotional investment in deserted beaches by the sea. I mean, who doesn’t love that? It’s also a reminder that like many others living near the sea, I’ve always been enamoured by the light over the ocean at all times of the day and in every season.

It’s as if I expressly became a painter in order to emotionally connect with life through these elements. This tiny little image marks the very begining of me being an artist, and not just a painter. This is because my love affair of working at the sea appeared to go deeper than just painting. There was a personal connection with all the colourful elements.  

I remember working on masonite at the time which I had clumsily coated with gesso. They were small because I felt small in my life a the time. Like everything that’s really personal in life, it’s usually too complicated to explain. But, I had small my ambitions, if any at all. Looking back now from the rickety perch of age, I undertand that it was certainly so that nobody would notice me. 

I was only there for a month that year and I only went back a few more times before France swallowed whole. Most of these studies that August were done on masonite for some reason. I don’t have it anymore because I offered it to a friend in France who liked it. 

By this time, I was already under the early influence of Cézanne’s watercolours, and this is apparent in the delicate handling of everything. The drawing is almost minimalist, and there is a paucity of material which lends itself well to a pale sky. There is a real distance established between the foreground, middle, and background, though quite subtle and almost imperceptible. Looking at it now after so many years, I am simply astounded that I was able to paint it because today, it seems even well beyond my pay-grade, now fifty years on. I know this because I have floundered and failed from so many other motifs which were far easier things over the years. 

What I cherish, is it’s light, a white New England light of the fading summer at the sea. And thus today, fifty years later, I find myself painting from a dune at a beach on the rim of the Pacific Ocean. The beach looks almost the same, nothing but dunes as far as one can see, so much like at Fisher’s Island on the Atlantic ocean. But here, the light is more vibrant and generally less subtle than up in the Northern Hemisphere.

On the following pages are two studies from a few nights ago that reveal that I’m still quite obssessed with light and its effect on the sea and sky. Done within days of each other, they also display the great variety of weather that churn through here on the coast in any season. They also have distinct personalities because I’m a painter who adapts to whatever Nature throws at me. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 February, 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 February, 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Kill the Buddha!

6 February 2021

Kill the Buddha!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 February 2021 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm 

When I think about how much joy I have in my life today, I’m really grateful because it wasn’t always so. In my previous life I believe I was a pretty gloomy fellow and I was always looking for some way out of myself. What is happiness if it doesn’t come in small doses of joy each day as if microdosed like an Irish mist of bliss?

To be honest, most of these painting sessions give me great joy. I can admit it now at this stage of my life. This joy is composed of satisfaction, but surprise too, and I think it’s as close as I’ll ever get to a pink cloud.

I really enjoyed painting this study from a few nights back. One of four, it was like gulping down a cold Perrier on a hot day with a lemon twist in it. The rich yellow is set off by the pale strip of lime sky resting overhead. It also reminds me of the ripe wheat fields of the Luberon before they’re cut in July. Yes, it’s a seascape done in Australia, but today it’s also a postcard from France which sends me nostalgia. Is that why I feel this particular joy upon seeing it? Certain wise folks in the East say that happiness is but the by-product of living well and making right choices in life. So although my life hasn’t been a great example of this wise adage, I wonder if this small image isn’t but a joyful by-product of simply painting a picture by the beach? Some might even think of it as the icing on the cake. 

Although my heart and soul still float over Europe like I’m a blimp, I’m still reminded that it’s here on the Pacific Rim where I arrived ten years ago, and like a seed blown across the oceans I found fertile soil. 

What I do know is that I needed to find something different, a new place where I could discover something unexamined in a creative way. I only vaguely felt this before changing continents because I was under the shadow of so many ghosts in France and Italy, but also in America too. 

Having painted in France for such a long time I also understood that I no longer wanted to paint as a student of anyone else anymore. Nor did I wish to have any master hanging overhead like an old crucifix; not Cézanne, nor anyone, not even my beloved teacher Léo, for whom I owe so much. 

In Japan, they say in some Buddhist circles that when you see the Buddha, you should kill it. I’ve always loved that expression. I think even the Buddha himself used to say it. It's not easy to grasp perhaps because it goes against all of what we were brought up to believe in the West. And yet, what I understand in it, is that to be reborn, even creatively,  we must kill even our most beloved parents and teachers whose love has nurtured us and to whom we owe our intellectual curiosity. And we need sharp machetes to clear out a pathway for ourselves. Though my own attempts at slashing away my conditioned responses in life haven’t been entirely successful, maybe because I’m still fairly neurotic, but I keep at it regardless. I also know that my education in painting will always be a kind of pale ghost hanging around me like a siamese twin no matter where I paint, and I’ll always carry around my French palette full of light. 

 

Chopin’s spiderweb

28 November 2020

Chopin’s spiderweb

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 November 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This morning as I moved around my home I was listening to Chopin’s Études (Opus 10,) all the while glancing at a few pictures on the walls which I had recently framed and hung. 

“Hmmm, that’s it” I thought to myself.....“these small studies from the beach have something in common with these Études.” In an instant I saw, and heard a fragile bridge between them. It was a poignant realisation because from the very start of this series at the beach about three years ago, I had also imagined these pictures as studies  I think this was because I didn’t take them too seriously, but also perhaps because I needed to somehow protect myself against failure. If I had a shrink I’d certainly be exploring this idea. But at the same time, I don’t wish to reduce Chopin’s iconic Études to the simplicity of these small works of mine or to compare them artistically. The rapport between them is from personal observations and not based upon aesthetic qualifications of which I’ll try to explain.

Like so many lovers of Chopin, I’ve heard the Études a million times, and compared to his other works, I’ve always felt a great spontaneous eruption of emotion in them. He moves through all the harmonic keys like an obssessed explorer travelling the world in search of hidden continents. From within each key, whole regions are opened up and musically examined, exploited even.

There are also quirky and sometimes frenetic variations within many of them with which I identify in my own small pictures. Like his Études, each of my own small studies in this series has its own emotional logic embedded in their brushstrokes, and this is a repetitive motif that cycles through the colour wheel in much the same way that Chopin cycles through all the keys, one Étude at a time.

Each picture of mine has its own particular idea, one that arises intuitively out of how I proceed to treat the sea and sky on a particular afternoon. What’s the weather doing? How is the light? Bright or diffused? Is it dry or humid? And the clouds? Because my simple studies are without a whole host of complex relationships which might have been housed in larger and more complicated pictures, there is room only for one idea at a time. This is a constraint of time each afternoon but perhaps it also suits my nature.

When one listens to the Chopin’s Études I think one can understand that they too, possess one simple melodic idea but which he fully exploits harmonically. Therein lies his greatness. (BTW, he first wrote one set of them, Opus #10, when he was just a teenager, then another set, Opus #25, when he was only 23 years old) Sacré Bleu!

What a talent. Yes, they are Études, but they are also complex studies that embellish an idea and they’re only constrained by the chosen key. This does not seem at all too dissimilar to that of a painter’s austere oil sketch like mine, but that said, they gave birth to the Concertos where Chopin develops a greater spiderweb of grander melodic harmonies that fill out like a tree in its summer bloom.

Another similarity I felt, was that each of my pictures are as distinct to one another as are his Études. They are parts of a family wherein each picture is as original as it is different to one another, as one sibling might be to the next. Yet seen together in the metaphor, there is always a family resemblance somewhere, however obscure. They are connected by a feeling in the convergence of brushstrokes. But this resemblance isn’t just physical; it’s not just the eyes, the ears, the smile, the hands, or even the feet. These subtle particularities are more nuanced and they can relate to the voice, the laughter, the sense of humour and the weird singular twitches so often shared in common between all siblings, yet not so easily discernable for an outsider to pick up on. 

These are for me, in painting, the indescribable little quirks of a picture, the inexplicable brushstrokes and erasures, even the marks of mistake that render a picture so distinctly original. It’s a fingerprint, and it’s so human, like hearing someone play piano. This reminds me that art runs parallel to nature, in that nature’s logic is as original as it is repetitive in our visual world. And one only has to hear the first few bars of his music before one easily recognises the hands and the soul of Frederic Chopin. And so too, is it also with a painter, whose originality is visible for all to see at the very first glance. It’s in the signature of the hand that is revealed by the brushwork and for a serious eye, it cannot be faked. 

This picture from two nights ago came from a lovely bloom that lingered on for the longest while. This doesn’t always happen so I’m super grateful when it does. It was the first of three. I had liked the second one and was tempted to use it but in the end this one behaves more like a successful picture despite my emotional attachment to the other one. This one is loyal to the simplicity of its design, and everything sits rightfully in its place. There is distance in it too. A cold dark green stripe at its base acts as a doormat to welcome the eyes. Then the textured chilly blue sea leads out and up to the horizon line. The sky clearly illustrates a phase of twilight wherein a red ribbon of violet hugs the sea beneath it. Overhead, a rich buttery layer of warm yellow connects to a cooler pale lemon sky that reaches up to faded Prussian Blue still higher up. To describe it in these terms I almost feel like a coroner who examine's death through the eyes of a painter, but I’m happy with it.

Inmates without doctors

6 September 2020

Inmates without doctors

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This came from an odd experiment the other night. I had seen something in the sky I wanted to re-create so I had gone out to paint with this idea in my head without paying attention to the motif in front of me. Basically, I wanted to impose a visual idea upon the session, and this is already an il-fated proposition. But because this idea had come out of something I really liked the night before, I couldn’t erase it from my head. Maybe like a delusional person, I so wanted something to appear that I imagined it would magically the following night. 

So, on my palette I began preparing for a sky which would have a few olive coloured clouds I’d seen the previous evening. I was so sure they would re-appear that funny enough they actually did briefly at the end of the session only to quickly dissipate at dusk when I had already finished and had even forgotten about them. But even still, I left with this study that for some strange reason reminds me of a sticky date pudding.

But I like it anyway, it feels compact and centered around the nebulous block of sea that I had just left in a deconstructed state. I packed up a little early because the sky had died out, but to be fair, I was also distracted by an eccentric fellow who has dug out a small camp not ten metres down below where I paint in the dunes. He sleeps in his warm swag on the beach each night in an oval shaped foxhole that he’s dug out of the sloping dune and he reminds me of a crab because he’s continually digging away at the ever encroaching sand. But he does it happily, and I’ve come to admire him, he’s like Sisyphus, but when it rains, he raises a colourful canvas top that distracts me. He has showed up these last few years for several months at a time. He is fabulous fabulist, and for a while, he had me going. He was a secret millionaire, a yachtsman, a learjet pilot, an entrepreneur with several properties around he world, etc, etc. He amazed me with a steady stream of carefully crafted name drops, ones where stars fell under his magnetism and who put him up for weeks at a time in mansions aroound the globe. Yet here he was, sleeping on the desolate beach at Brunswick Heads. And like so many places, Australia, in the end, is a small pond where all the minnows know each other, so through various friends I eventually had him figured him out. But despite all his fabulations, he might have actually know several big shots around the world but maybe just had a falling out with many of them. I say this because he and I eventually had a falling out. But despite this, I had sort of liked him in a certain way because I like many eccentric folks trying to thrive in in this square world.

Sadly, he was always trying to get away from this ‘horrid’ country and back to some unnamed Italian town on the Amalfi Coast. Me, on the other hand, I had only just arrived here and I really love Australia. But somehow, through his charm and my laissez-faire affection for oddballs (not unlike myself), I left ajar the precarious door to reason and let him into my life like I would a stray cat.

So the other day, he had come to say hello while I was painting and he quickly launched into a nervous pitch about how the skies were crawling with UFO’s. Apparently, he watches them intently each night from his small foxhole and he loves to tell anyone about how amazing they are. When I arrive to paint in the afternoon I’ll hear about how fast they move until “they stop on a dime, hovering over the horizon for a bit, but then just as quickly, they’ll zip back overhead glowing with colour”. They return to repeat the same patterns again, and again, much like his fabulations over and over again. So as the weeks and months have gone by, and the UFO”s have gotten bigger and faster. I smile and feign interest only because, like I said, he was kindly, a little crazy, yes, but a gentle soul I thought nonetheless. 

There are lots of curious souls who inhabit the many small corners of life around here in Brunswick Heads. They are off the grid and many of them are ‘doing it tough’ like they say here in Australia. As I move through this contemporary life of craziness, I discover that it’s often hard to discern the bona-fide inmates from the straight civilians in this seaside town. And, I sometimes wonder if there is a doctor in the house, and would they even make beach calls? But at the end of the day I look at my own life, and wonder to myself if painting this mysterious sky night after night is any different than watching for UFO’s? 

All artist’s I know, need use of their wild imaginations, but at the same time, they still need to be tethered to earth and have a roof over their heads with enough money to buy food each day.

But I’ve wondered also just how long can all this last? Rents are impossible, and I don’t know many poor souls who could live in a foxhole on the beach for too long. We are soon coming up to the end of winter and there are too many young mothers with children who sleep in cars and camper vans around here. It’s heartbreaking, and like they say here, “They’re doing it on the tough”.  

Meanwhile, I continue to exercise my own sort of madness as I try to glean something from the sky. I like this picture from last week. There is something mysterious about it, is it the deeper winter light?

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

5 June, 2020

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer

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

While America seems to swim in turmoil at the moment, I find myself in Australia living a quiet life near the sea and centred around my painting and far from the chaos. Many years ago, all of this would have certainly raised my anxiety levels enough to paralyse me but I've changed, maybe aged, is a better description. Resistance to mask mandates for protection against COVID-19 seems to be right up there with racism as the social divider at the moment. I've noticed that as some people grow older they become brittle, while the lucky ones become more flexible. I’m also old enough to realise that there is little I can do to make our society any better than to simply be respectful of others, kinder even, and without consideration of race, gender, or religious denomination. Be gracious everywhere, is my prayer these days. And yes, although I’m a polite old-school American liberal from the East Coast I can still be a jerk.

This painting, was the last of three from the other evening. The session had seemed to be coming to a close and I was about to pack up when I suddenly looked up and saw a pink field within grasp high overhead. It could have been my last handhold before reaching the summit I imagined, so I decided to grab another board and tempt fate.

A winter chill set in and I regretted not wearing a second tee-shirt under my hoodie. Twilight was stealing the last warm ‘glow’ from the sky, and yet something skeletal of it still remained, both above me, and in my memory. It was a bit like when you have stared at a bright colour for the longest moment only to then quickly turn away and see its complementary replacing it in your mind, fleeting and intense.

This hint of colour was just enough to invite me to improvise this small study. The ‘bloom’ had mostly faded away by now, but what remained in my perceptive field was enough to allow me in to invent this. It’s pretty conventional, perhaps even a little boring. Looking at it this morning, it appears straightforward, and though it's nothing to write home about, it feels correct and ticks all the right boxes. And if that’s the case, then it might just live on for a while longer if it pleased someone enough.

I think paintings like this just pop up once in a while on there own volition, as if to say to the painter: “You may not have wished to paint an image like this today, but we, the Muses did,,, so there!” 

It’s funny how, like in a communist country, you never get what you want, you get what they give you. I think of the Muses in this way regarding my own work. I've even gotten somewhat used to their capricious antics. 

It’s just one of those quirky facts about being a painter, and like every creative person, I’ve become adaptable to things unseen and unexpected. Back in 1986, I was once driving in my VW through Bulgaria when I stopped in Sofia one evening. Tired, and just looking for something to eat with no fuss, I found a pizza joint. To my amazement there was only one kind of pizza on offer; cheese with meat. Not a meat eater, I ordered two of those to go and had to scrape off the meat and get outta town as fast as I could to find a place to park and sleep.

But, there is a ring of truth in this small study regardless, because it’s so simple and everything is in its rightful place. There is a foreground, clearly delineated, and the warm grey clouds sit comfortably on a firm horizon line. By this, I mean that the process was authentic, but hopefully not mechanical. I often need to re-assure myself with descriptions like this whenever I’ve just done something that appears a little boring. But the more I look at it, the more interesting it becomes as a picture precisely because all these mundane elements appear to work together somehow so easily. 

The truth is that when you paint a lot, there seem to be less fireworks to each session. Like a regular sex life over the years, the act can often be just a cheese sandwich, not always caviar. But this has gotten me into a lot trouble when I’ve tried explain that to various partners. 

And yet, like a partner one has loved through thick and thin, it may also be why a painter returns again and again to the same motif at the beach. Not only has this twilight sky proven its fidelity, but it’s shown me my own innocence and vulnerability in front of such beauty. The pink glow at dusk and a young woman’s blush have killed this painter many an evening.

Addendum: I really like the sky, those small spontaneous blobs of blue violet that break the swarth of the pink field high above. Their delicate footprints were the reason I wanted to attempt this image in the first place. To have seen them, and actually painted that whole zone is enough to make a painter happy for a week at least.