Running with Fauves

28 April 2020

Running with Fauves

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 February, 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the third out of four studies that came near the end of a session a few nights ago. It looks wild and impulsive because the sky was indeed crazy and out of control. Normally, I’m a 

restrained painter so it felt really good to get out to exploit my untamed animal at least for a short seance at the beach. The truth is that I’ve rarely been able to let go of my repressed nature and it’s an embarrassing secret, one of many. Neither have I been a rule breaker nor a bar-room brawler, or a guy with a fast car who scuffled with cops. Alas, quite the opposite, I’m the obedient, helpful, polite, and obsequious guy who was never the badass even when I knew it would get me more dates. I‘ve always followed rules and norms unlike many who seem compelled to break them. Among school mates, I wasn’t the thief but the guy from whom who they stole, but none of this doesn’t mean that I haven’t been a jerk either.

I’ve only come to discover all this rather late in life curiously enough. I figured it out gradually after digging away inside myself with miner’s hat on. Most of what I’ve pulled out is just dirt, but occasionally I’ve found a few diamonds. So basically, I’ve come to see that all this ego-restraint came to me early in life, and my fear of authority didn't just happen because I was a choir boy. This conditionned response to life and people is not unrelated to a strict Victorian upbringing right in the middle of suburban America. But hey! Everyone’s dealt a hand of cards, and those happen to be mine. 

And this is why I always identified with Alfred Hitchcock who himself, was also terrified of authority. I remember hearing him once in an interview talking about it. He recounted that anytime a police car got behind he and his wife while driving in sunny California he would find himself in a panic. He drove his poor wife crazy with his dread, but of course, subconsciously or not, he exploited it brilliantly in many of his films. Clever guy! I’m not sure I’ve yet found a creative way of putting my bogeyman to use. 

But Hitchcock was somewhat of an anomaly because most dramatic screenplays and books draw us in slowly like someone recounting a long ghost story until the surprise ending. Hitchcock's villains, on the other hand, almost always showed up early on letting us know who the killer was so that we would sit on the edges of our seats waiting for them to get caught.

And so, in the world of Painting it's not dissimilar because the artist lets us know instantaneously what's up, unlike in either music, films, or books, all of which, reel us in slowly like a calculating confidence man. 

A really, really great painting is like the perfect spouse who knocks you off your feet from the the very first instant of inspection, and from there, it’s usually a long happy marriage. Alas, poorly painted pictures are usually discarded in our mind’s eye in a flash of editorial hubris because the bad picture, like a bad date, will be soon forgotten and deleted forthwith from one’s memory and phone. Yes, it’s brutal, because it’s as rough out there in the art market as it is in the dating world.

Another sad thing about all this, is that a painter who wants nothing more than to please his public at every turn is like a co-dependant lover, full of low self-esteem and desperate for approval. This overwhelming desire to please the public, though understandable, is a deadly trait for any artist, but it's possibly even worse for the ingratiating lover.

But today, happily, I don’t worry too much about what others might think of my work, although that wasn't always the case. What proved catastrophic for me was when I didn’t like what I had painted, and this was a consistent feature of my life. I was too easily crushed and driven to drink by my own self-diagnosed sense of failure regarding my painting. It was a creative form of OCD but with a dash of perfectionism thrown in. But like I said, that was a long time ago, and today, because of these paintings at the beach I feel cured. 

I saw the 1991 film Tous Les Matins du Monde from when it came out many years ago and it made a big impact upon me. It's the story of a master cellist who at the end of the 17th century had retreated from public life with his family to the countryside and refused to play ever again in the Court of the King. He became a recluse and practiced in a garden shed behind his home.  One day, a young cellist with promise arrived at his door searching him out for lessons. Hearing the young man play he agreed. Of course, being a French film there’s a love angle concerning both betrayal and regret, but what the master cellist confides to the young man at one point is something I’ve never forgotten all these years on. He said (as I remember it), that "he only played for the dead and for those not yet born". It’s as if his selfishness was book-marked between two generations that excluded the present moment. 

Curiously, today, I see it all so differently than I did thirty years ago when I had embraced his message. At that time, I only heard what I obviously wanted to hear, that a painter should only wish to please the great heroes of the past. I really liked this at the time, I suppose because I must have been living in a time warp where I had only respect for my own heroes, and little for my contemporaries. 

I've certainly changed, and I hope that this has changed too, but in my own secret dreamworld, I think I still harbour a sort of yearning for approval from certain artists of the distant past. For instance; What would Delacroix or Uccello, Giacometti or Morandi have to say about my small studies for instance? I don't think Cezanne would matter because he’d be too cranky, but Lautrec, Yes! And, yes, I know it's a silly proposition but I think all artists of every kind will at times glance over their shoulder after too much whisky or wine, to wonder.

Today, though it would seem obvious for any sane person to grasp how selfish it might be for a great, but stingy musician, to not share his music to the world at large, this notion didn't occur to me at that point in my life. 

After much digging into myself, I think it was because I saw the artist as a kind of recluse, a creature alone, misunderstood yet pure. This is a cliche, but it was also how I must have seen myself at the time.

Today, I still see the artist as potentially pure, if indeed their work is authentic. Being an artist, I think, means being strong enough to withstand not just the solitude, but the disinterest of others, because ideally he, or she, has fully accepted mortality. Time, for a painter, is a prison with lots of empty walls to fill.

So, it’s a good thing to re-examine one’s life from all its various stages, to check in and see what is real or not, from all vantage points. How sane have I actually been all this time? For me, I’ve replaced my older and out-of-date emotional files with others more open to these present uncertainties. Today, I mean what I say, and I say what I mean at the risk of upseting everyone, which I do.

This small unremarkable painting, unruly as it appears, isn’t even one of my favourites, but it’s different enough to include here. I like it because I feel like I’m running with Les Fauves even if I trail behind them by a long shot. That’s good enough today. 

I’m not a surfer like so many around here in Australia but I feel akin to them now when I’m riding a long, smooth wave in this series of work. In my previous life of discontent, just like in a Hitchcock film, whenever I began working, I already knew at the start of the session who the murderer would be. It was always going to be me. 

Throughout my life I was rarely satisfied with my paintings and this made life very difficult, virtually impossible, let's be honest. But because of a few seemingly random events, the course of my life was radically altered and I found that I was able to align myself more closely with the life of a serious painter. This was perhaps only possible because already inside  me, lots of templates had been formed years earlier out of my many heroes in this Painting racket. So you see, in the end, a dialogue with one's heroes can be useful.

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy part three

 

6 April 2022

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy 

part three

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Because painting and music are brothers and sisters in this family of act, one could also ask if our beloved craft of Painting will be overtaken by the dark magic of A.I. as more and more students and artists find dexterity in this new means of expression. And what of our cousins in the world of Fiction?

Will writing be reduced to the input of mere ideas, then written by software? And now that the art of cinema, already a fusion of several germaine artistic skills we’ve known for the past century, will it too, be fashioned from a software with no more need of any ‘pesky craft’ or human input? 

But alas, I’m getting depressed just writing about it. I must sound like a luddite, but I pinky promise, I'm not. But it does worry me that once the derailment has begun it’ll be a tsunami flooding us all like Chinese Whispers at a drunken dinner table.

So yes, even at the pharmacy, my imagination can go wild in the vitamin aisle where I’m looking for a solution to longevity and where I’m convinced that art, like my body, is in decline and that somehow it needs to be saved like some abandoned dog in an Instagram video.

While still at the counter to wait and pay, I drift away from A.I. and into how capitalism erodes our very ideals around what is great in the arts. As I pull out my bank card, I tell myself that we must never allow ourselves to be overtaken by the bean-counters of the world because I suddenly worry that the system only makes life easier for the rich and no one else. With money, the bean counter's only tool, would they displace someone like Thomas Aquinus with a character like Donald Trump to become the sole arbiter of all things cultural and creative? It would be like Rome all over again, and I chide myself for being so melodramatic while still worrying and waiting to pay for my scripts.

I further worry to myself that we’ll forget how to read and write and lose our ability to speak our native languages. Will grammar and syntax eventually dissolve into an incoherent word salad? What happens when we no longer know how to recognize a really good book because we’ve forgotten how to read one? Then I wonder about Painting, will we have forgotten how to look and feel just because we’ve forgotten how to see? Have our art schools substituted the development of critical vision for the mere clever? Would it be only the cynic among us who asks if the Contemporary Artist has just stolen wit from the marketing gurus thinking it was the fire of Prometheus? Oh my, oh my,.... I have found myself in a sudden internal spiral whilst at the counter this morning. But somehow in the end, I managed to reflect that Painting will somehow be okay. It will always get in the last word because indeed, without it, someone like me would otherwise just be another crazy poet without any means of expression.

So, in any event, this last picture from the other evening came to me as dusk had firmly settled in and I felt like it took its rightful place. Dusk, as usual, was gradual, but then sudden, like death in a home after someone has passed after a long illness. I like what I could see of it in the failing light. Afterwards, I packed up my things in the dark and found my way on the small path back to the car in the Parking. Like this sandy path, these three studies from tonight are much like three stepping stones taking me further along my own road I thought as I got in my car for the drive home. 

So thus, this evening, without a hint of irony, I also think to myself; "Thank God I paint out there at the beach because this act of painting cleanses my mind of so much heedless thinking." 

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy part two

6 April 2022

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy

part two

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Meanwhile, the Autumn skies are upon us yet hide behind these rainy afternoons. But today anyway, this evening’s bloom was unabashedly robust, like the rosy cheek of a shy young girl in love. It opened up widely in the sky like the small fan she might have carried to an opera house centuries ago.

In this second study the bloom really kicks in and the peachy-coloured sky has dropped into the sea and illuminating the entire picture plane. The light shimmers, and right in the middle of the picture, I remember briefly musing to myself like a tourist in front of a cathedral, “Isn’t this extraordinary?” 

And speaking of cathedrals, being at this beach under certain skies like this one will often makes me feel like a child walking into a great big church for the very first time. Anyone who has entered Notre Dame or Chartres will know what I mean. Standing in that gulf under the vaulted ceilings of space, the expanse still seems to go on forever in my young imagination. These churches were designed to convey a sense of movement upward towards the heavens, and indeed, they seem to grow up and outwards quite naturally like any poinciana tree here in Australia. 

And at the beach too, that universe is only limited by the far ends of the horizon on either side. But for all this space, there are limitations, and the painter being me, must create something within the constraints of a rectangle. He must define them through the drawing and this is where one’s own sense of abstraction is so vital because it requires an original vision. A painter needs to see the sky through the lens of his or her own feeling. Anyone who watches a child of a certain age paint the sky can witness this originality at work because the child decides how big the sky is through an abstract feeling and is guided by precision.

But despite this expanse of the sky and the imagination of the painter, this ‘seascape’ genre has still been around the block too many times and it’s worn-out, like the working women on Parisian street corners portrayed in too many paintings (by men) from a bygone era of sad and rundown charm. It is a motif both used, and abused by generations of painters, and like facing an object of naked beauty, it can easily rob them of all their noble intentions just to be in front of such magnificence. And yet, like in all things concerning desire, the seascape can also also be endless too, if one were to develop devotion in their affection.

Many of my studies are not great by any means, I admit it. No worries, for I see them as studies and nothing to really get worked up about. But occasionally, they do open up with something new and surprising which speaks to any talents I might possess. It’s in these three studies I’ve gotten closer to my future, and it’s for this reason I keep coming back for more and more, always hoping for a picture that might just astonish me first and for most. And after all, as many aspiring and wise painters know in their hearts, the best pictures are always the very next ones, the ones that will be done on the following day. For the artist, like for everyone  else of every stripe, aren’t there just two basic choices we all wake up to face each day? Isn't one to be sour, the other, sweet?

But anyway, throughout this series I’ve learned that the beach is an open-ended subject with endless possibilities despite its long storied history. I’ve also discovered that there is no earthly boundary imposed upon its parameters except by the painter himself. Under this great cathedral of emptiness, am I clever enough to invent a new way to express it?

As I say a lot in these pages, I listen to France Musique thanks to the extraordinary fact of satellites cruising every which way, miles overhead and mostly unseen. Like other older folks I’m always a little amazed at this and I never take it for granted. I listen to it a lot because, frankly, I get home-sick sometimes and this soothes my anxious heart. The other day at the pharmacy counter I also got this crazy idea about what might happen if ‘Classical music’ became obsolete because nobody cared about it anymore? What would happen if music schools dwindled down to nothing but a few machines with loaded with brightly coloured buttons because nobody had the patience to learn how to play instruments anymore? As the world moves further into the demands of a quick easy production, will students of the future be just learning music through electronic consoles? Will musical instruments become relics of the past and collect dust in Natural History Museums around the globe? 

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy

 

6 April 2022

Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy (part one)

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

While hanging around the pharmacy counter waiting for an order the other day I was suddenly bombarded by a burst of ideas about Art. I’m not sure why I was triggered there but it can happen to me in the most mundane of places. And besides, it’s not out of the ordinary for me to think about painting at odd moments of the day. But I think it may have been triggered by Putain’s war on Ukraine which is on everyone’s mind these days. Many, like me, are also shocked by the immoral barbarity in this young 21st century. But perhaps like others, I mused at how regrettable it is that such awful people seem to be running the world at our expense. Why can't we have great leaders in the world today? Then I began wondering about Art in our contemporary world and where its greatness might lay. 

In fact, I’m always on the prowl for any inspiration when it comes to great people, and most especially so in the Arts. Most of all, I think, because without a notion of 'greatness' in all parts of life, how would I navigate these big tents we call Humanity and Art? I would be but a voyager at sea on a cloudy night without the North Star to guide me safely to critical clarity.

Unlike the aesthetic realm of the Arts where critical clarity can lack morality, the sphere of politics and leadership leans solely upon it. Though I mostly avoid politics in here, the recent invasion of Ukraine by the dictator of Russia is immoral. Ukraine never declared war on Russia and yet it must defend itself like a small Morandi in the corner of a large collection of Contemporary Art.

But in artistic terms alone, what do we generally deem to be great? At the pharmacy this morning, this was my very thought as I waited for my scripts to be filled. Precisely, I was thinking of what Thomas Aquinas wrote regarding art way back in the 13th century when he postulated that “art is the measuring stick for art”. My teacher Leo, so loved this that he passed it on to me within weeks of meeting him, and it still speaks to me at very odd moments like this morning. With this bare utterence, Thomas Aquinas defined in the simplest and most compact of terms, the very essence of all art. Nothing more, nothing less, and with acute brevity and wisdom, he managed to demystify the substance of what makes a work of art great. But how, and what does he mean? 

I’ll wade into it as a painter. Quite simply, he means that Painting will be the sole arbiter of what Painting is. And more broadly, by the same token, I think that any greatness defines any greatness in every aspect of our lives. It’s how we qualify things in general. It means that anything ‘great’ will define greatness in everything else, because great men or women of ages long gone, still define what it means to be a great man or woman today. At the same time it sternly reminds me that quality begets quality. But if we’re after ‘great’, then we have to understand that quality first, and let’s be honest, not everyone cares for greatness, look at our politicians and some of our art today. But we don’t vote for greatness, we vote for what we like. In the Painting world, preferences do not determine quality, they determine our taste which is a different animal. Great pictures determine the quality of great pictures and the difference is like a tiger and a pussy cat. 

So, we need an education, in this case an education in Painting. And yes, I know, I know, Post-Modernists are surely cocking their shotguns and putting pens to paper in rebuttal, but I freely admit that I have little defence, at least not here and now. And, I will admit that my own taste is full of prejudice as is my own critical intuition but it's at least hewn from decades of looking at art. As a painter, it’s also been formed by lots of failures in my own work. But it’s these experiences that have been critical to forging an awkward path forward in my own life. Like everything, there are a few exceptions to this axiom because I think there are great pictures made from those who have never studied Painting. They have been blessed with a gift that defies any notion of ‘art education’. But that said, their exceptional work can still be measured, valued and judged by all proceeding art. 

Of course the reverse of this hypothesis is also true, but this can be for many varied reasons. For instance, a really bad painting might also define what constitutes a bad painting, and this can inform a student of Painting about what to avoid if one is lucky enough to understand this. It could even maybe help an ardent lover of this unique craft to appreciate painting even more. And so as Aquinas says that Art is the measuring stick of Art, it is surely true that human perfidy will also be defined by perfidious behaviour because Hitler, for most civilised folks, still remains the template of the profane.

But sticking to Painting, what happens if we lose sight of what it is as a vocation or craft and we consequently get lost, like maybe getting on the wrong train to go somewhere other than where we intended to go? If Thomas Aquinas knew what a train was, he would simply tell us to get off at the nearest stop and board the right train. But then, he might even add that we'd need to find the right model too and put all our creative faith into action so that our artistic intuition could grow from there. 

So after all this pontificating, I must put my money where my mouth is. This study was the first of several from the other evening. There are three here that will accompany Thomas Aquinas over the next three pages. They are presented in the order they were painted. It had been a really stunning bloom and one most generous to me. This first one is self-explanatory and it depicts the very start of the bloom. I like the way the sky came out, it’s not often that it comes so naturally nor as easily. It was made in seconds. In the sea, there’s drip that I partially attempted to wipe away but quickly realised that I rather liked it. It's one of those marks that declares that it's a picture and it was made by an imperfect attempt at verisimilitude. 

Mellow Squish

12 February 2025

Mellow Squish

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 February 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

We had been definitely under the spell of El Nina all last winter and thus this summer has been cooler here on the North Coast but there’s still lots of rain so I haven’t gotten out as much. Long gone are the sunny afternoons when I would show up each day like an obedient child. Now like a teenager, I’ve grown up, and I’m picky about what I like and don’t like. But I’m also in the studio more these days as I try to scale up some these small studies into 150 X 150 cm pictures. But also, tennis calls me out two nights a week rain or shine.

Two pictures came out of the other evening. It had been a quiet sky with little personality which put me off immediately upon arrival but although initially feeling stuck, I made the best of it. I can get in a jittery state when I arrive at the beach and don’t like what I see. This happens more than I’d like to admit. But hey! I always find a solution (with me) but also the problematic sky. as well. In both cases I simply invent what I need to and this usually works because inventive imagination is the only way to go.

Besides, it’s hard to be angry at Nature, let’s face it. It’s like being angry at a loved one, I mean, how long can one hold out? Don’t we always need to relent and forgive to find any peace? We cannot always be in a state of displeasure can we?  “That would be a lot of heavy energy”, as my cousin Jeannie would say. So it is with me for just about everything in my life; Let it be,,, like the Beatles sang. 

But then as it often happens, I softened, as did the sky and it morphed into a lovely mosaic of muted tones and shapes as small clouds lazily rolled through. In a complete reversal of mood, I soon found myself playing freely like a kid in a sand box and this is what came out. But I think it only happened because the sky opened up enough to allow me in. It may not please many because even I find it a bit strange, and yet there’s a nice colour harmony that works for me. Maybe it’s also because I’ve come to know this sea and sky so intimately, and I've felt this gentle mood here many times before. 

I really like the soft spontaneity of forms that make up the sky. It’s a mellow sort of image, and looking at it today, I’m surprised that it appears even a little coherent in contrast to my confused state while painting it. I also sensed that it had conjured up something rich from my childhood. This ancient creativity also always amazes me for it has a sovereign life all its own, even outside of its creator. It’s as if it's formed gradually over time through all the paintings both good and bad, through all the temper tantrums and the quiet grief, it prods a painter on that seemingly pointless task.

As I look at it now, it makes me think of the work of Alexander Calder for some reason. I wonder further if he might have made an image looking something like this one, had he been a painter. 

Looking back over these last eight years from the vantage point of so many studies I see each day lining my bookshelves, I understand that I have changed in lots of small ways. Firstly, of course, the pictures have certainly evolved, hopefully for the better, and they’ve grown more sophisticated. By that I mean that they might foster more spontaneous relationships within an image that can make a picture more authentic. Consequently, this means also that I’ve grown as a painter. Would I have grown as much in the studio or in front of other motifs during the same period? I cannot know this, and it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s like being happily married to a person for eight years but suddenly then asking yourself if you would have grown as much with anyone else? 

This is a twilight motif, one that specialises in subtle colour because after all, there isn’t much else to do from it. Did I choose it for that reason? Or did it choose me? In any event, it was exactly what I needed for this last chapter in my life. Regardless, it has become my friend, and one which offered me deep companionship at a time when I didn’t know I even needed it.

 

Success and failure

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

It's been raining so much these past six months that I'm developing a green tinge, not quite Gollum but close. Not that I care too much but it's been really awful for the painter inside me who needs to get out to paint at the beach mostly for therapeutic reasons in these dark times. But hey!

These two are from the same evening last week when had I arrived to find a monstrous cloud sitting upon the horizon line. I was immediately uninspired and had to wait out the usual melodrama until it coalesced into something workable. This really puts me in a bad mood when arriving to face a cloud on fire. Yes, yes, I know, most watercolorists love this sort of easy emotion to work from, but I don't. First of all, they change colours too quickly making it impossible to work from with oil paints. Secondly, Sunset related skies can be too cheesy for me. Anyway, I got over my irritation and made a palette, and waited it out, as it will almost always mellow into something more abstract with less kitsch. But this afternoon I got tired of waiting and just jumped in hoping to make order from it. I'm not that crazy about it, but at least I got out into the windy sky and got some fresh air at the beach. Sometimes it's just that simple.

The second one was an after-thought of sorts and I liked painting it. The sky had cleared on one side of the horizon and a delicious set of colours were still teeming with light so I grabbed another canvas board quickly made the one below. I'm not that crazy about this one either but hey! That's life. Maybe I'm just crabby about all the insanity going in America at the moment. Painting not only teaches me a lot about life but about people too. It's not so much about the successes, but really about all the small failures that one needs to accept before one can move on in a sane fashion.