Morandi’s light and brief shadow

10 October 2019

Morandi’s light and brief shadow

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 October, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is a very relaxed painting, almost like a pair of stone-washed jeans. Actually, it also reminds me of the way I dress evach day;  a clean but rumpled white tee shirt and old jeans. 

It was the first study of three when the sky appeared as a pale Prussian Blue with a hint of lime to it. The cloudbank had peaked in pink, its state just before veering into warm red and the sea below was almost black. I was happy because I always look for an occasion to put black and pink together, but the sea and sky aren’t always so cooperative, nonetheless I’m crazy about the Art Deco feel to these colours. The sky today looked soft like when one wears a grey cashmere jumper on a cool afternoon. 

I like it better than the other studies I made that evening. Sometimes, I just like something for the feeling I get from it and not because I think it’s particularly good, successful or not. I am grateful for that because it separates me from an academic mindset of perfection. My primary reaction to any art is always how I connect with it through a feeling first and formost. From there I go off to figure it out, its assets and faults. But I don’t just accept anything that pleases my feelings, it’s but the front door to get me into the home of the art work whatever it be. I may just like something for a few moments, days or weeks, years even, but conversly, I might dislike something for days or even years, then change my mind because thankfully, I’m human, not a binary machine.

But to be fair, I think a lot about painting, most of the time actually. Like any vocation or sport, one exercises with devotion, it’s hard to get it out of one’s mind because it’s always there behind everything. It’s like the sun overhead despite the weather. Come to think of it, it may even be like being a teenager in love. Sometimes it’s intense and one withdraws when they’ve have had too much of it, or just less success at it, but they’ll always go back.

And although I can frequently think about other painters and their work depending on the moment, I generally go out to paint at the dunes with an empty mind and ready for anything. Seeing how the sky looks on one afternoon might suddenly re-kindle other images that still simmer in my imagination. Just like old flames, I don’t think we ever completely forget anything or anyone we’ve loved deeply. But do I think of other painters when working? No, never. Not even Turner, and I am glad for that. 

So curiously, looking at this dishevelled-looking sketch of a study today in my home, I see that it reminds me of my early love for Giorgio Morandi. That may be a stretch for others but it’s a personal thing, there’s something in it that reminds me of the simple sensuality in some of my favorite things of his. I think of just how much Morandi’s whole oeuvre has infected my artistic sensibilities over these 60 years or so. He was one of the first painters I immediately responded to as a child. My father had lots of Art books and at least one was about Morandi. I looked with great wonder at how his intimate oil paintings seemed so alive to me. 

Even so young, I was somehow keenly aware of his sensuous use of paint that made them real for me. In some of his intimate assemblies, the squiglly and unctuous layers of light that cast brief shadows have also managed to long stick with me like an early childhood crush. These are memories, layered with mysterious feelings that possess their own flexible logic, yet at the same time they’re fixed too, because they’re firmly attached to my painting life today.  

My father was also a painter, but in a halfhearted sort of way. He had lots of talent but he also had a life of work apart from it and this kept him from the discipline of being an artist which demands a lot of time. Maybe one can have a separate life from art but I think its hard, it’s sort of like trying to keep a mistress separate from one’s wife and family. It quickly gets sticky, and it never works well except in French films, naturally.

But my father did paint wonderful portraits which adorned all the walls of his large bathroom with oil paint. Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Masaccio were among his favorites. From the bathroom walls all these Italian noblemen of the Quatrocento observed the intimate goings-on in the 20th century bathroom. It was wild, and I was amazed that he was allowed to paint so freely over all the walls. But then, my parents each had separate bathrooms, and unbeknowst to me at the time, they would also soon have separate addresses.

So, in a picture like this and done so far away from Bologna, I can still see the serenity of Georgio Morandi. I admit it might not be appreciated due to its unfinished look, but personally, it’s a picture I like for my own reasons even though they may change in time. But unlike his pictures of bottles and jars and cups that all live in a macro-world as if seen through a telescope, my own are done out by the open sea and under an endlessly expansive sky. The connection for me today, is through the soft light and sensual lens of Morandi.

Diary, one cloud at a time

16 November 2019

Diary, one cloud at a time

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 November, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Sunny and windy here today, but down south, terrible fires are consuming whole towns along the coastline below Sydney. On the news are horrific images from Batemans Bay, where the roads out of town have been cut off and people are trapped on beaches awaiting rescue from boats by sea. I feel so badly for everyone, most of whom are tourists, but also for the livestock and wildlife all caught by the indiscriminate fury of fire. But also on the news are the man-made furies that kill Iraqis and Sudanese at the moment, and I feel so disheartened at times that I cannot seem to separate all of these tragedies. Sometimes, they all just bunch up in me like a traffic jam. But here, on the North Coast, there is open sunny space everywhere, and the peaceful beach keeps many of us sane and hopefully grateful.

This image was painted the other evening and strangely it even looks like a sky full of smoke from a fire nearby but it isn't. 

I see now just how comfortable I’ve become working on such a small scale, because at this hour everything changes quickly and I’m forced to keep up with it. But I’ve also discovered that it suits my anxious nature. When I have too much time to think while working, I can falter easily. So maybe this process is what brings out my best qualities. 

It's taken me years to get this about myself, and yet it's always been so obvious. I'm a jittery kind of guy, so naturally I just paint quickly. 'No drama Obama', as some of us still affectionally like to put it. But anyway, for any painter, it's an important insight because it's the difference between running at 33rpm and 45. Actually, don't we all need to find our own pace in this crazy world? 

As I was working it, I sensed its form was something that I knew and liked intimately. That sounds like a cliché I'm sure, but not all pictures make me feel the same way. Some are new and fresh images that take me by surprise, while others remind me of all the dreadful ones. Still others, remind me of my favourites.

But this one has a familiar look to it that feels like I’ve always known it. This doesn't happen too frequently so it’s a great pleasure and very special, it's as if I’ve bitten into my very own Madeleine biscuit from Paris. 

It's a compact picture and held together tightly as if constructed from an idea already built deep inside me and arose up from my memory banks. Like I imagine for everyone else, I seem to be just a giant hard drive made up of billions of images and texts. Some people during their lifetime try to make sense of it all. Others don't. We get one life and if we're lucky enough to live in a free country, what we do of it is our own business. The artist, I think, attempts to create some order out of that task and the result might be more or less what we call art. But we all do it in different ways and degrees. Creating anything in life requires choices and decisions, and whether we like it or not, these in turn always create the form of the art. And isn't that form not just how we communicate with ourselves but others too? 

I'm not a writer but I did begin trying make sense of my own life when I began a diary. It's not art but how I chose to understand myself. But like most amateurs in this, I had to learn how to express myself and that means actually learning to write because language is the form. 

It was daunting to begin writing about myself. I had tried a few times previously in my life but failed to ignite anything durable. For me it was like trying to build a fire in the wilderness with nothing just one stick and a few bits of straw. But one afternoon on the deck of a ship on its way from Ancona to Athens back in January 1986, I tried again more seriously and with more desperation this time around. On a deck chair with winter white clouds streaming overhead and a hangover, I found the courage to begin anew, one sentence and one cloud at a time. Surprisingly, I've managed to keep it going all these years.

But I'm loyal to my roots because my diary still begins with a weather report. Is it raining or is it clear? Is it hot or humid? What are the insects doing? And are the birds awake yet? Are they singing or complaining? But of my favourite creatures in the sky, I'll always ask the page if there are clouds above. Snd if so, what are they getting up to? So, no surprise that forty years later they've become stars of the show in this Painting series o the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. 

From the very beginning of this writing experiment, these observations helped to ground me instantly into the moment. I mean, what could be easier than just watching the sky? After I became used to this routine, it became a ritual something I looked forward to each day. This then allowed me to gently tiptoe into my feelings and thoughts about the days (and nights) with less overt self-consciousness. Eventually, just like a river at its source, it began flowing.  

Cut to the chase, all these observations helped teach me to write because I never learned to grasp the nuts and bolts necessary enough to build an idea. Was I too anxious or too lazy to say what I needed to express? As a creative act, it's vastly different than painting a picture but both crucially need an attention to the task at hand and the discipline to see it through to its finish. I obviously didn't possess any of this but I didn't also in almost all other areas of my life (but that's a long story).

First of all, I had to admit that I was a ‘crap’ writer, as they say in both Britain, and here in Australia. But thankfully, it was the diary that helped me over the years stumble into a sentence and help me make sense of my thinking. 

Being an anxious type of American, I had never possessed enough composure nor the discipline to put an idea together coherently. Then, after moving to France and living with the French, Mon Dieu! I was forced to think and speak with more precision and cohesion. I owe that great nation any communication skills I might possess today, but ditto for social skills too. 

Throughout my life, it had always seemed impossible to ever get anything right, so why bother even trying? At 14, I was still like a 4 year old fat with perfectionism. Was I more chronically lazy, or just afraid of hard work? 

I was impatient, but so fidgety that I was unable to sit still. My mind churned  around in circles like I was a goldfish in a bowl. In school, it dawned on me that I was different than others, and I surely I must have some kind of a socio-mental affliction. Were my teachers too afraid to break the news to me? Worst still, although I wanted to fit in like everyone else and be normal, I suspected I was not repairable. Couldn't I just find some kindly old Swiss watchmaker to fix my hands? But when you're a kid though, it's hard to organise this. 

True confessions, I'm also a college dropout. With few exceptions, I rarely made it past the first drafts of a mid-term paper, and the few I did manage to finish were pretty crumby. Despite all my ‘inspiration’, and ‘big ideas’, I just couldn’t get my pen to paper long enough to build a sentence.

Though I've always read a lot, I had not yet fallen in love with the simple sentence. That would be like a painter who enjoys painting but doesn't care about colour. Basically, I just couldn’t stomach the empty space necessary for me to sit still long enough to put small one humble word after the next. 

Later in life, I saw it from another angle, it was the mother of all problems; I lacked commitment to just about everything. I was like an astronaut, untethered from the mother ship and drifting uncontrollably into emptiness. But all this changed when I began to investigate myself through facing my diary each day. So thankfully, I’ve learned a little about writing since then, but a lot more about myself. And just by looking more carefully at pictures, after I began starting painting years earlier, I also began reading more books with more care after getting the writing bug. This is how I waded into the world of literature, but like many of these small painting that may never hang upon foreign walls, neither will my diary ever be read by a foreigner. It's a workbook not a final exam.  

But in the end I’m not really a writer, I’m a painter. If I were a writer I'd be writing all the time, writing short stories and novels and whatnot. But I’m an amateur so I don't. What I wanted to express is that just as painting has taught me to look and see, writing has taught me to listen, inside and out.

As a painter I understand that any picture has been constructed through an abstract arrangement between the eyes and the hands, similar, say to baseball pitchers, and ditto for tennis players. But there is so much more than that because somewhere in the body and mind, are creative juices that pulsate through the cognitive marshland of memory and turns them into an electrical current running throughout the system. This is the alchemical part of any creative process and many call this arrangement a spiritual one. I'm open to anything but I do know that it cane never be an academic process and cannot be spelled out on an intellectual blackboard. One has to just learn all this either from stumbling over one sentence or just one cloud at a time.

Happy Endings are messy

 

29 January 2020

Happy Endings are messy

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

After a week of rain the skies have given way to rich and colourful Blooms. Whew,,,  this is from the other night and it was a bit of a surprise. It’s a long distance from the way I’ve been working recently. Looking at it, I can see that I’ve become a Flat Earther. It’s intrigueing because its compressed design asks me whether or not this kind of abstraction can possess volume and light? Those would be my wishes if it did.

It was the last of four from the other night. But it’s this one that reminds me of a flag and it's decidedly different. In it one can see that the evening had grown dark and the orange bloom had begun to dissipate into the Prussian Blue that was rising to displace it. It's the last chapter of the day when everything will soon meld together into dusk.

I also marvel at how different it came out than the other two in just a matter minutes. Is it me who is so fickle, or the sky itself? They could have been done from three different evenings, maybe even by three different painters too. I like them equally, but it was this flat one that started a dialogue in my head, and it's also a larger format than I usually use. 

Unlike so many painters today, I’m not an adherent of American Expressionism, nor do I have much in common with their painting philosophy though I do love a great non-figurative or non-objective picture when they are imbued with enough form and light to keep them alive. But what I really like about them is their need for speed. Many, but not all of these painters worked quickly and without hesitation, as if in an attempt to escape monkey mind. They wished to create a movement, a revolutionary wave that would change not only how we looked at Art, but in the ways that people looked and thought about life in Post-War America. Despite the sleepy conservative 1950’s, there was a tiny pocket of eccentric poets, painters and writers who were all wide awake and looking hard at reality within all its infinite possibilities.

The Beat Era as it became known, produced lots of movements in the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophy. It was a noble era, but looking backwards at it now, I wonder if real movements only become movements after the fact because they're almost never pre-ordained beforehand. In politics, perhaps, but hardly rarely ever in the Arts. In Art History, we usually only find out about them years later when afterward the Zeitgeist had already cooled down. After struggling collectively, or alone, we discover that a bunch of cool artists and thinkers emerge from their chrysalises to bequeath to the world something new, relevant, and always surprising. 

But the regarding the Abstract Expressionists, this element of speed and spontaneity has always appealed to me because I’m naturally the nervous type. But they weren’t the only speed demons in the world of Painting. It’s been a long tradition throughout Art history though not with a vast majority of adherents. In the East of course, spontaneity has always had a corner on the market though less so in the West except for  after Post-Impressionist. The quick drawings of my teacher Leo Marchutz were naturally an inspiration for me, especially his late drawings of Venice. But Albert Marquet became a more practical influence on me maybe because I felt closer to his use of ink and brush. So much of what I learned from them both became the inspiration for me in my approach to these paintings by the beach at dusk. 

Consequentially, I usually attack this motif with the speed of a scorpion once I’ve seen something going on in the sky. From then on, any further impulses to thinking or rationality generally slip away from me as I focus on the canvas board like it’s a victim to be devoured.

In the end I’ll use any means necessary to make a picture work. Occasionally, though it’s rare, I’ve used my rags and my fingers tips. But something else I do share with the Abstract Expressionists is a feeling that all the messiness left at the end of a short session actually becomes the resulting picture. All is good, by whatever means necessary, a happy ending is usually a messy one. 

All that said, in this curious image, there is also a footstep into Minimalism, and this is a new experience for me. I never really got into it before, it was a 1960’s thing when I was still a teenager and spent my time looking at girls not paintings. By the time I got to France and began painting as a student (in earnest), I was already swept away into Impressionism. But in fact, Minimalism is still a speciality item for many art enthusiasts around the cool capitals of the world and it holds a place of veneration. 

So suddenly, I look at this study and although it’s super tiny compared to the large colour field pictures done already 80 years ago, I can see an interest growing in me for a certain kind of compression. Someone had recently remarked to me that some of my work resembled Marc Rothko. I could understand this as I had seen the same kind of simple compression in his pictures, but I had never really warmed up enough to them to investigate. I should have been flattered because he is a kind of God to most Art lovers, but instead found myself a little annoyed. Then I just became curious, so I looked him over, up and down online, and bought a book about him too. Eventually I accepted all this talk as a compliment. But for myself, I certainly don't compare my work to his, though in this painting I can see the similarities. 

Looking at it now, I think I'm most surprised by the faint hints of yellow just underneath the violet band at the very top of the picture that seems to help the sky open up like a stove pipe at the top of the roof. Visually speaking, I wonder if it doesn't help to keep claustrophobia away. 

Out of mind

22  February 2025

Out of mind

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

I didn’t think too much of this picture when I packed up the other evening but I like it today. I like the light which is fragile and nuanced especially the brightest set of small clouds over the horizon to the left. Higher above there are patches of pale blue which I suppose is the sky, and though I painted, it I’m not even sure. In visual terms, I just appreciate them as mere patches of colour to set off the golden clouds and which help to enrich them. These are the ‘accidents’ that happen when I seem to be ‘in the painting’. 

In this spontaneous work from nature I find myself most present when I’m not there. I think everyone loves this space when they're plugged into something they're fully engaged in doing. It's something that's so natural for children but easily gets lost with age. 

In my life it hasn't happened all too often, but now it seems more frequently. Sometimes like when I play tennis, yes, but not always, and rarely is it continuous but I’m working on it.

There is something particular about painting from nature that pushes me into this mind space. It’s different than working in the studio where the picture is more like an opponent on the tennis court and something to vanquish than a friendly communion. Because these spontaneous pictures rarely take me more than twenty minutes to paint, the effort to concentrate is pretty easy. It's not brain surgery, so thankfully for everyone, I'm not a surgeon.  

The effortless joy from connecting with a picture out in nature comes from the submission to the motif but also to that place inside me where I'm absent too. It's where I’m at ease in my head, and like an escalator I intuitively know where the next step will be taking me. 

Here at the beach, nature requires my complete submission to that space deep inside. Perhaps like most people, being headstrong, I’ve never been adept at giving into anyone or anything very easily so to get into this quiet place also requires a special kind of discipline all its own; The discipline of letting go.

This  suddenly reminds me of my visits to a friend who lived not far from me in NYC. He was living in a small loft building that had an elevator which stopped and opened into each loft space. 

One of those very curious and universal habits in life is that whenever any of us enters an elevator, we all immediately turn around to face the elevator door. Isn't it curious that we do this? But we do, and religiously, like we're in a church, so it makes sense somehow. So now facing the front we all remain reverently still as the doors quietly close and the elevator goes up or down. The custom also requires that we look below at our shoes or above to see its progress. Just above the floor indicator in this elevator was also another illuminated digital message that read OUT OF MIND in a stretched Ariel font in an eery pale Prussian Blue. It was a surprise, and my friend told me the developer had been a follower of Osho, of the Poona clan in India, and they were really big on clever affirmations. Indeed, each time I rode the elevator I was pleasantly  surprised. It was very sexy, like a great new logo design for a chain of  yoga studios across California. For some reason, it made me think of a thin cloud. 

In the West, Out of Mind can conjure up either a mellow ecstasy trip or a crazy person on crack cocaine running through the streets with a long knife in one hand. But in the East it generally portrays a mental state that most spiritual practitioners desire to attain. 

But Out of Mind can also just be in that empty space where we are at one in the world around us with or without drugs. It's a place of wonder and it's what I find at the beach when painting. Surprisingly, almost always, I get there and it's why I always go back. 

But aren't we all looking for that space in these anxious times? Clearly our social apps are a mere substitute yet like a companion, they appear to wrap us up in a cocoon of solitary comfort. Would there be as many dating apps if everyone were content with themselves all on their own? 

There are rooms everywhere full of yoga and meditation practitioners too, which is a good thing because we are know how crazy life can make us. Because I'm a latecomer to all this, I've only just come around to understanding the real value of creating art. Whether it's great or poor made or whether we like the result or not, it doesn't matter as long as we learn something creative for ourselves alone. Creating anything is already a good thing because it's always just the first step to something else.

Of course playing and performing music, is the most common way of accessing this place. Making music has universally been the go-to space where one can practice ‘out of mind’. It’s been known as the place of ecstasy for us humans since forever, but ironically many of us in the West think we need to be ‘high’ to get into this space. Go figure. But when the space is clear, it’s the real deal, and when we have experienced it even just once, like being in love, we’ll always try to get back into it.

In the Painting world there was movement at the turn of the 20th century when artists and some writers, tried to attain this creative space of rapture through spontaneous ‘mark-making’ which today has become a style all its own. The Belgian artist Henri Michaux (1899 - 1984), was one of its leading proponents and in many of his ink drawings he used mescaline to access his inner mind. Though not exactly the Whirling Dervishes, the idea was to let go completely and connect with a trance-like space of unity through any artistic process. Artists have always dabbled in drugs to achieve a state of unity, so it was nothing new, but the work that came out spawned a new school of what was called in France ‘Les Signes’, This is hard to translate due to it many nuanced meanings but the Larousse Dictionary seems to come the closest to what I’m trying to express. “An ensemble of conventional gestures constituting a symbolic basis of non-verbal communication." (my own translation) 

Michaux’s ink drawings are wild abstractions and very seductive. In artistic nomenclature, they are Non-Objective, maybe even some of the first Non-Objective paintings to be offered up to the Art World at the time\ though I‘m not sure Michaux considered them commercial. For him and his fellow painters I think they were considered personal images, like diaries. This was after all, the modern world of Freudian analysis when looking-inward was no longer a sin. 

So Michaux was part Tachiste, part Surrealist, part poet and painter. Being a creative soul, he was all these things but also he was cerebral, and somewhat intellectual when he needed to be I imagine. The early years 20th century were heady times, but rich and brave times too. One thing for sure, he invented a style of working long before Pollack began making his own pictures by splattering enamel onto a canvas from the paint store.

But why do I bring all this up now? Something in this picture above reminded me conversations I used to have with a painter I knew in Aix. He was quite mad about ‘les signes’, and indeed, they played a pivotal role in his own understanding of how paintings are put together because these gestures are really the basic elements of any painting. All painters from any any period, whether its Raphael, Giotto, Vincent Van Gogh or Miro, are have been constrained by these gestural rules of painting.

So curiously, when I looked at this painting from the other evening, not unlike hundreds of previous images in this series, I suddenly saw it in a new light, as a accumulation of abstract gestures. Of course, this is a figurative image, but it still shares all the elements of an abstract one like in Henri Michaux's ink paintings. The difference is that mine is organised in a different way. Instead of looking inward for inspiration, I look outward towards the evening sea and sky to find a way inside of me.   

I am reminded that in this history of painting it’s always been about taking, discarding, and stealing and destroying. Artists need to be ruthless if they’re going to find a way into their inner selves. And in this series as I’ve probably iterated ad nauseum, the drawing of a painting is made up of these ‘signes’ or 'gestures'. That they all come together to form a whole image is remarkable and it's always surprise whether it’s non-objective or figurative image. What come up should hopefully satiate the creator until the next collision with paper and pencil. Contrary to Michaux, I organise these gestures to create a figurative image, but I think that we're both after a luminosity by using the method of Chiaroscuro to achieve it. Unlike even Cezanne, a picture like mine above is more 'Renaissance' than 'Impressionist' because I’m still after the various kinds of natural surfaces appearing in this physical world of concrete elements (i.e. clouds, air and water).

The later Cezanne, and perhaps all the true Modernists onward from the Impressionists through Matisse and the Fauves, approached every painting surface like it was a mosaic full of brush strokes, often wildly uneven at times, but fluently distributed regardless of Natural’s tactile diversity. This technical side of Modernism is one of the less discussed aspects of it, maybe because it’s not part of the larger and more theoretically seductive side of its social contours. To be honest, I only just came up with it for myself while writing this. I think because it’s a painter’s issue, not one for a larger historical discussion which academics generally like to swim around in. I'm a painter so I’m on always on thin ice around academics.

But, this is a big conversation, more than I had wanted to chew off here. I would need a whole chapter of examples and documentation to further explore it. But because I am a painter, not an academic nor a critic (in the worldly and economically driven sense), it might be above my pay grade as they say these days. Basically, I’m really only interested in my own understanding of Painting and Art as holistic ideas and selfishly for me alone. How to create and make things that work successfully on a two-dimensional surface is always the goal for me. 

Although this painting certainly triggered off a lot of different ideas, of itself, it's really somewhat simple. There is almost nothing to it. And this pleases me because when I step backward and look at any picture, I want to see it all at once, then move in closer to see its inner intimate beauty. And this is not unlike the same way I discover people when I meet them. 

But in this picture I was curious about how these marks and brushstrokes have an antecedent in the works of the Surrealists and Henri Michaux at the start of the 20th century. Though  I don’t live in that world, I like to dip my toes in it from time to time.