Painters and paramours

14 July 2023

Painters and paramours

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Painters and writers, are not tourists. When we look at pictures or when we read books, we’re investigators. With the obsessive fervor of private dicks we scour every squirrelly squiggle on a canvas like we parse each sentence on a paragraph.

Writers read books differently than other people in the same way that painters ‘read’ pictures differently. It’s not a big deal, it’s just the way it is. It’s not unlike a certain sort of mechanic who will stop to admire a Porsche type “C”, one built in the 1950’s, and maybe parked on a random street somewhere. Just like a painter, he sees all of it at once, and he understands why all its round forms organically fuse together through each of its perfect and separate details because he sees beauty and he responds to it. But there are gardeners too, who, where many of us see empty fields, will behold lush gardens. 

It’s the same for lovers of books and paintings, watches and golf clubs. Objects of desire attract everyone of us who have a vested emotional interest in them. These are true love stories, unusual ones, but love affairs all the same. These love affairs are so powerful they can break up otherwise perfectly happy couples. 

And so, art is a formidable love affair, as it should be. It is not just a question of liking, preferring, or coveting an art work. It’s about a whole world of mystery, craft and obsession, but behind everything it’s because it’s about a love. Proust wrote somewhere in Swann’s Way; “We no longer love anyone else when we’re in love” and that can also be true about art. Like in the civilian worlds of the human heart, creativity makes us forget everything else in the world while working.

Even reminiscing all his beloved images can plague him at a moment’s notice, and for any reason all. While in the wee hours of the night and next to his beautiful wife, an imaginitive painter might still be dreaming of Goya’s Marquise de la Solana. In fact, everything he’s ever seen and loved, is at his fingertips, and like on his smart phone, everything can be called up instantaneously. His imagination relentlessly tempts him, taunting him with memories of all his favorite things. 

This bright yellow painting was the first of three from the other night. It was a wonderful sky, so simply deliniated into three wide stripes of colour that I had no trouble grabbing them quickly. The clear winter light felt like an invitation allowing me an easy access into both sea and sky. This one turned out to be a super fast study, only because I wanted to preservere it in my memory bank for future work. I stopped after one minute, sometimes it’s like that. Once a palette has been prepared I have all I need for a picture lasting up to an hour, or a minute. Though it may look rough and unfinished, for me, there was no need to go further. Of course it might have become another picture but lots could have been done to also ruin it. What do they say: “Brevity is the soul of wit” ditto sometimes, in all forms of art. 

 

Marthe’s perfume #2

28 July 2022

Marthe’s perfume #2

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

This was the third study from the same night and unlike the previous two that seem more conventional, this appeared to be a new and unusual destination. It’s barely discernable as a seascape, rather more non-objective, a place I love to visit as often as I can in front of these twilight skies. It’s a simple picture, so austere really that it’s just three planes of colour that appear to melt into the twilight haze. Whereas the previous one appears to also fade into the twilight air, this one appears to be baked into it like a sponge cake and I would love to see it as a larger picture. It’s an idea that naturally appears more adaptable to a larger format I think. It also seems to open a glass doorway into a place where I'd wish to find myself quite soon. I live for these moments of pictorial clairvoyance, it’s like I’m receiving postcards from my own future.

I work so quickly in front of these shifting colours at this hour that I have no time to think. That’s a relief, but redundant too because I find myself writing this fact ad nauseam in almost every diary entry. This is in such contrast to a studio space where I would have leisurely moments to think and postulate, fantasise and reflect, all the while smoking lots of cigarettes in order to disguise this procrastination. It’s definately not out there on the dunes where I am harried like a New Yorker during rush hour. But anyway, I’ve come to understand that art hates procrastinators. 

This image in particular, made me think of Thomas Aquinas today because he speaks of art’s imitation of Nature as being contingent upon how I see and interpret what Nature is giving me at every nano second while working. If at the motif, I’ve been faithful to the information I’ve received, then there is a good chance it will reveal some truths about the motif. 

And so thus in this picture, if I’ve been true to both the drawing and the colour in the motif then it has a good chance of working as a painting. If a painting doesn’t ‘work’ then it would either it be deficient, or that maybe the viewer cannot buy into the illusion I'm presenting. Tricky business. In Painting, unlike life, one might say that what is true doesn’t always appear real because what appears real isn’t always true. 

For me, unlike in Maths where two + two equals four, it's in art that two + two will always equal five, because a successful solution in a picture will always be greater than the sum of its parts. 

I had always imagined Art in this way, so it was a surprise to learn that George Orwell had already created this metaphor in 1939 to illustrate how an authoritarian leader dupes his citizens to believe that two + two = five when the leader says so. So yes, for me, this surreal equation means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts only when referring explicitly to a work of any kind of art. 

It’s actually closer to Aristotle’s meaning that the whole is something else, more ‘mysterious’ than just the sum of its parts. This adds an additional element that binds art to the mysterious, something which I like.

But in the end, all these words and ideas of Thomas Aquinas, George Orwell, and Aristotle, don’t mean a hill of beans if an image doesn’t live. If this painting above cannot stand on its own, then no rhetorical gymnastics can keep it upright. For me, the structure of a painting can even be as fragile as perfume if all its elements are cohesively united. 

 

Marthe’s perfume

28 July 2022

Marthe’s perfume 

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

I’ve had some wonderful evenings lately as I rediscover the delicacy of these winter skies when the sea can be turquoise and the sky champagne, the colour of perfume. I made six or seven studies over the past few sessions and I’ve felt drunk with joy. 

This is the first of three studies from the other evening. The drawing in this first one is more conventional than the one on the following page. It began with a very pale sea as the cloud bank turned pink. It’s the kind of picture I’ve dreamed of blowing up in size. In the studio I’ve tried to scale up similar ideas but have yet to succeed. My problem is always my own impatience but maybe I also lack the necessary skills to proceed thoughtfully into larger versions (150 X 150 cm) because it’s such a different process. Everything I’ve done in the studio so far, feels like I’m cut off from the wind and the changing colours but the light too, from all those spontaneous elements that feel so necessary and natural outdoors.

One of my heros, Pierre Bonnard reworked his paintings over months and years in the small studio of his home in Le Cannet above Cannes. I imagined him painting with speed of a snail. Ensconced in his private quiet life life, he painted everything around him: his wife Marthe in the bathtub, a whole host of still lives from the dining table, the dresser tops, and the open door which always led out somewhere towards more light outside on the terraces and the gardens. He painted vast views looking West down to the coast when needless to say, the view was unobstructed in that period before the Second World War. Strangely enough, when I was thirteen, I spent a summer there not a stone’s throw from his house and must have ridden by it a million times on my mobylette, but I was oblivious to Bonnard then. He is a giant for me now, but also for so many others of the art public who yearn for his slow-motion notion of beauty.

He tacked up loose canvases around the studio walls when working, and one only has to look at a photo of him to glean his gentle, stoic patience. He worked like this for years on various paintings and yet his output was remarkable. These photos of him in his studio puttering around his simple home and gardens can be a shock to see when juxtaposed with our contemporary world view of artists in their respective studios that fill fashion magazines. 

I love his entire oeuvre because it’s both deeply personal but sensual too. It’s rare that his pictures don’t open up like windows through which we can collectively voyage outward with him into a mysteriously playful but complex vision of Nature. 

He was a colourist, and his oeuvre is so full of lessons that one could learn everything about both colour and light from his very personal and exotic understanding of it. But in his drawings too, there is a universe of small pencil drawings that fill hundreds of sketch books which are intimate and completely realised with so little material. Unlike his pictures, one can experience his quick and spontaneous nature.

 

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Orphic Olympics 2026

So the Winter Olympics are here again in Italy. Nice! 

The World news is so grim, we all really need something to celebrate. And what we really celebrate is youth. 

Being an aesthete, I'm naturally a severe judge when it comes to each countrie's team uniform. I'll keep it simple and just nominate a few countries that stand out in this sartorial category. 

I cannot speak for all their uniforms but Kazakhstan definitely takes out first prize for the the look of their Mogul skiers (above). Who doesn't love lemon yellow over off-white? And with the deep blue bib,,,, really!

But I was also very impressed with the Canadian hockey teams. That intense red is wonderful. But especially, kudos to the graphic artist who created the colour of the maple leaf. It's not pure black like some lazy, colourblind designer might have done. It's a dark broken black colour with subtle relief in its drawing, very subtle and sexy. In fact, although it's hardly discernible, this bright orange/red jersey is also slightly broken in colour, and it's why the whole thing works so well together with the black paints.  

The women's team in white is cool too, not subtle, but simple. 

Although I thought some teams looked awful, I've decided not to point them out, I'll stick with the winners. 

I also like the refined look of the French hockey teams. Typically both discreet and subtle even in a brawl.

I've picked up a book from my table, one that I read a few years ago, Orphic Paris, by the American poet Henry Cole. It's lovely read and takes me right back to France where I sometimes need to be in my spirit. If you want to know what orphic means, look it up,,, because I had to. 

But here, near the beach, and in another world completely, I still get out to paint when the weather permits. I'll do anything some days to get away from editing my own book which feels always endless and too full of mistakes.

Below are a few things from the past few weeks. This first one is from last night. I had been  lazy all day due to the extreme heat but managed to get out for just one picture as I was late. It's OK, but a bit too much verisimilitude, even though I did have fun with the deep dark violet sea. No worries, "just keep at it", I say to myself because I feel awfully lucky to have something to do when I go to the beach. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads,28 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 January 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 February 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm.

Continuity

16 February 2022

 Continuity

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A study from last week, the first one of the night and this morning it made me think of Pierre Bonnard. It’s probably due to the colours he loved so much. He seemed to love those warm delicate violets and sharp flaxen threads that break the bright airy Veronese Green. 

It’s a very nervous-looking picture but I like it. It reminds me of my Sodastream thingie that transforms tap water into Perrier in seconds. Indeed, the painting has a fizzy side of it that surprises me because I certainly wasn’t feeling all that effervescent whilst painting it. It had been a hot humid afternoon and I would have loved to have a waiter arrive at the dunes with a cold Perrier on a silver platter. But hey!

Regardless, it has a curious colour harmony from the very start of the session when the sky was just starting to turn. I’m always partial to that lime-green hue that seems to kick off the colour wheel into all that hot melodrama of yellow and pink. It vaguely feels to me as if it were born in the future somehow, an image only half-understood in my hand but already forming in my thoughts for some time now. The direction will easily clarify itself if I remember to remain true to my real loves; light and space.

But at the same time I’ve been struggling with finding a way into ‘something new’ in this series like I have a kind of writer’s block, but one particular to painters. The only answer is to persevere and remember that one cannot give up before the miracle, as my friends say. While it is wise to keep at it in a disciplined fashion, there are also ways to shake things up at the same time. But how?

I made a design to clean out lots of older pictures that don’t excite me much. It’s usually because they are boring for one reason or another or they just don’t work. So, on many of the better ones that could be touched-up I’ve started adding some fresh bits of colour. Some nights at the beach I patiently look for a way back into them hoping to find an answer from the distance of both time and space. In each of these pictures I’m looking for a resolution to finish them like a writer in search of an end to their novel. 

The idea in this series was always to get it right in one session as if it were a small watercolour. Work quickly, and do or die. My biggest weakness is I’ve always had the greatest difficulty going back into working on an unfinished landscape. Most painters don’t appear to have this problem but for me at a certain stage of the process, a painting already has a personality of its own and though unfinished, it’s already got a history behind it that’s hard to change. The problem is that its history also possesses its own movement jumping on a train as it’s leaving the station. I need to be in sync but I never am. Is it my anxious spirit or just a fear of failure? For me, it means changing everything to go back into a painting. But to be fair, I’m usually also bored and no longer  interested. But anyway, there is also the complex issue of syncing up the overall light. This is the continuity problem, like in films.

It’s one of those things that drives  directors and editors crazy I imagine, and it can wreck a film sequence. Although not at all as dramatic a problem, painting a landscape on different days used to make me so crazy that I forsook working on large pictures that required me to return again and again to the same place on different days. Why bother? It’s too much trouble doing that out in the landscape.

Imagine having to shoot film sequences out on the water over the course of a few days during a film shoot. The weather tells the sea and the wind how to behave each day, and because it’s rarely ever the same, the problem of continuity figures into it. It’s near impossible on a tight filming schedule to find consecutive days to find the same wind and sky even if the sea remained the same colour. Everything is different, mostly the wind which dictates what the water looks like. The most clever directors can coerce their actors into brilliant performances but they cannot bribe the weather God. 

I am particularly obsessive about these continuity  issues when seeing a film. At a certain point, I think the line producers just say: “Screw it” the audience will never notice, and most might not. Alas, some of us obsessive film nuts actually do. But I think we’re also rather forgiving too because we know that no one can boss around Poseidon.

So, for me to avoid this whole drama of weather I just work quickly and small outdoors, hoping to get it right in one go.

And all this makes me think of Pierre Bonnard, the Patient King. Apparently, (and unlike film crews) he had no schedule and so he worked on canvas’s tacked up on his studio walls for months and years on end. He worked indoors to evade the disturbance of the weather. He painted (I speculate) with a painfully slow deliberation as if all the clocks in his home ran slow. Really great things in Art possess that awful cliché of ‘timelessness’, but there is truth in it nonetheless. Once a successful artwork lives, it lives forever; music, books, poems, paintings, they’re created in their own time, and they’re loyal only to their own destiny, be it fire or flood. So I’m not sur why but this leads me to some of Bonnard’s famously discreet but brilliant things he wrote in letters to various friends. Here are a few which I read continuously in times of difficulty in my own work. These are my own translations which may not please some academics.

“L’oeuvre d’art; un arrêt du temps”  

(A work of art is a pause in time)

“Ce qui est beau dans la nature ne l’est pas toujours dans la peinture. Examples : effets de soir, de nuit” 

(What is beautiful in Nature isn’t always in Painting, ex. effects of the evening light)

J’espère que ma peinture tiendra, sans craquelures. Je voudrais arriver devant les jeunes peintres de l’an 2000 avec des ailes de papillon. 

(I hope my pictures will outlast their cracks. I would like to meet the young painters in the year 2000 on the wings of a butterfly)

Élément étranger: souvent le blanc pur ou le noir.

(the foreign element; usually pure white or black)

Il y a une formule qui convient parfaitement à la peinture: beaucoup de petits mensonges pour une grande vérité.

(There is a formula that works well for painting; lots of small lies to create a great truth)

Tout le monde parle d’une soumission à la Nature mais il y a aussi une soumission au tableau.

(Everyone talks about a submission to Nature but there is also the submission to the canvas)

The simpleton and the scorpion

 12 July 2022 

  

 The simpleton and the scorpion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From last week came some curious studies as the Winter Bloom has kicked in with a small moon. The light in the Western sky has turned electric, and sometimes I have to pinch myself and wonder if I’m not hallucinating.

At the moment there are so many colourful ribbons cruising overhead that I sometimes dream of hopping aboard any one of them like I’m a cummuter in London catching a double-deck bus on the fly.

So, I work swiftly and the speed of execution might seem frantic to an observer but to me the sky is like a colourful pin wheel spinning in the breeze and it’s just beyond my reach. At the same time for the painter, it’s also a double-edged sword, one that slices through the whole world of both the catastrophic and the serendipitous in one quick blow. 

This was one of several, from four nights ago, and it’s my favourite. I like it because its idea is complete, yet at the same time so simple. It’s something whole from which nothing can be added or removed. It says exactly what I saw with little adulteration as if me, as the artist, was invisibly present.

I also like it particularly because it still surprises me even after just a few days of looking at it. I think the point of painting is actually to surprise us, not just once, but continually, forever and ever in fact. A really successful picture is an anomoly, for it breaks Nature’s tenet which says that all things that grow old will also die; fauna, flora, and even us. But a work of Art of any kind, when it really works, it lives on beyond us and it’s something we cherish all the more so because of this fact. Our Art is passed down and protected by subsequent generations. I believe we value it because it teaches us something new about ourselves, and it does so because its creator also learned something new from its act of its creation. Yes, I know, climate change will eventually either drown it, or burn, but hey,,,, I’m not putting a timer on it.

I also like it because it dares to ask a question, another vital sign that a picture is alive and lives out in the the world of humankind. This is picture that does not have an answer for anything. But like A.I, it might possibly have a consciouness all its own and could ponder its own surprising existence. My own search for self-expression, that Holy Graal of creativity for so many artists I think, might just be as simple as painting what’s in front of me because implicit in this action is already a kind of self-expression purely manifested. 

I don’t often look at many of these pictures after they’re finished, I put them away in book shelves in my home where they suffocate all together in tight communion. But within this community they’re at least protected from the mildew of this seaside weather here. 

In any event, like for any creative act, the goal is to enjoy it always but also improve. Because I love tennis and I play regularly, I learn continually from both on the court and at the dunes where I paint. In both activities I’ve learned to act and react quickly by seizing my subject at once and striking like a scorpion with full trust in my intuition. Though I may still be a crap tennis player and a decent painter, I’ve improved considerably in both domains, and happily so, because if having painted or played tennis this long without making progress I would certainly be a simpleton.