The funeral home

11 August 2021

The funeral home

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 August 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here is something from a few days ago. A strange dark thing. It was the third and last one of the day and so different from the other two which were bright and airy. A storm had gradually arrived after approaching from the North East and it was already getting a bit dark for this picture. I like the sudden feeling in it; lonesome and forlorn after a day of sunshine.

I put it up on Instagram and was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception. It’s a funny thing about Instagram, everybody criticises it and dumps on the the stupidity of so much narcissism present, but after living in a void for most of my life, I like it. I use it only for work, nothing more personal that because basically I don’t have much of a life with much pizzaz that would interest others. Like so many painters and creators of a certain generation, I’ve lived and worked in isolation because that was what life was like before the smart phone. After all, I did come from an era when a telegram arrived to inform me to come home quickly if I wanted to see my father before he died, which I did.

I spent twenty years in the Aix countryside with no means of getting my work out nor to communicate so freely about it. I was part of a whole generation of creative solitaires. Although cities were hubs where one mingled within the exchange of cosmopolitan ideas and friendship, many artists still lived in isolation from a viewing public even in cities. So now that we can publish an image instantly around the globe it's really magical. I still scracth my head over this fact. Imagine Paul Gauguin file sharing paintings of Brittany with Vincent in Arles?

But today, back here on the Pacific Coast of Australia, these small pictures are diffused around the globe with ease and much gratitude for I am no luddite. This study from two evenings ago is somewhat different vis-a-vis so many others in the series. It’s simple in the extreme, and is it because I seem to have several different painters inside me? 

Actually, I think I should just be grateful for the large closet of sartorial style within me. These painterly peregrinations lead me all over the shop and they remind me of that good advice from writers who ask themselves in mid-paragraph; Is this what I really want to say? Like them, I’m just painting what is present right in the moment and what appears real, but looking at this image now it makes me think of a funeral home. 

I believe this is as important for a painter as it is for a writer, though to be honest (and I’ve shared this a lot) I rarely think much when I am in the middle of a small study. Writers have all the time in the world to think and to fantasise while leisurely smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. The way I work makes any of this impossible, but anyway, what would children think if they saw a painter at the beach next to a bottle of wine planted in the sand?

But as long as I keep working, keep seeing, keep feeling, I cannot complain. It would be horrible to be stuck. Believe me, I know, because I have often been stuck for long periods at a time throughout my life. I think the one good thing about aging is that one seems to care less about all that stuff that previously consumed all my attention. I think artists and writers love what is real at the moment no matter what they are doing or wherever they’re doing it. We’re all like golfers who need to concentrate in the moment while trying to avoid the yips. 

As this stormy sky the other night was about to bring sheets of rain I wanted to finish up quickly and beat it out of there in a hurry. Yes,,,, I almost hate to admit it but sometimes a picture looks a certain way just because the painter was in a hurry.

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint, #2

30 July 2021

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint, #2

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

So I had a dream the other night wherein I was walking through the forest behind the Chateaunoir but as an adult, and remembering my way around like it was fifty years earlier. I think it came because for the past few days I’ve been looking through a small book I’ve had of the last flower portraits by Edouard Manet. Like I’ve intimated, though I admired him I was never a huge fan of his despite his giant and well-earned reputation, but that said, I really love these small intimate pictures I discovered so much later. Of course, I had seen his large things as a child and was amazed by the verisimilitude of his craft of which he was certainly a master. When I became a painter myself though he kind of slipped away from my circle of heroes. 

In my early years I was beginning to learn about how a picture is organically formed from its very inception instead of just being pieced together one element after the next, then added to create a kind of collage of form. The French say ‘Bricolage’ for such things that are randomly assembled (any which way) when put together one piece at a time. Some of it can be wonderful and there is a grand history of this kind of Painting to be sure. But at this time, Léo was already teaching me about something else, about how a picture could also spring to life from a vision as a unified whole. Consequently, this changed forever the way I would not only look at Painting, but all art. I decidely had an unusual art education unlike anything in America or even Europe as far as I knew. This was the reason I stayed in France throughout the 1970’s, and then later too.

So if I wasn’t crazy about Manet, why do I love these late flowers done right before his death? Though he is known for his early and famously large  pictures made for the Salon like Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, it was the intimacy of these small flower portraits which snared me. He had been chasing fame most of his career with large pictures, and though well painted, his work was shocking to a conventional public with no appetite for irony. Though much celebrated at the very end of his life, an illness slowed him down to working alone in his studio in front of small vases of flowers. It was a simple motif and lacking any presumption. They certainly fall into a genre of work that goes back centuries in Europe, but the manner in which he created them was Modernist I think. He asked us to look at Springtime through its children, its lilacs and roses, poppies and peonies, irises and wisteria. They appear so modest and lacking any pretention that one could almost walk right by them. There is none of the artifice I’ve seen in his large celebrated things. They possess for me that straight-forward ‘no-nonsense’ style that one can sometimes feel in the presence of such subdued elegance.

They are smallish works, certainly no bigger than perhaps 40 X 30 cm. They were executed without a lot of correction or fiddling about, and apparently executed in few brief sessions at most. It was under the guidance of his two young admirers, Monet and Renoir, who both pushed Manet to work directly in front of Nature, ignoring his predilection for a clean finish and to abandon himself to the pleasures of spontaneity and an undisciplined approach to a painting session. At the end of his life, these last pictures seem to say: Forget about the public, just enjoy the pleasures of a few small flowers in a vase and just the paint itself. Unfortunately, his health was declining and he was sequestered at home with a nurse. These small studies are fitting farewells to a creative life during a most remarkable era in French Painting. 

I first saw them in Paris where many of them all lived together in the comfort of the cluttered Jeu de Palme Museum. Now I think they live in the Musee d’Orsay, but wherever, they feel just right, expressing enough, but no more. These are creatures that hide their creator and they seem to live on beyond his death in their own oxygen tent.

I think they are beautifully painted though today, many young people may find them ‘too 19th century’, but I still like them very much. They appear modern to me, timeless even. I use the word ‘beautifully’ in defiance of the large dark shadow of Post-Modernist orthodoxy, a shade under which we are all now subjected to live, but hey! 

When one looks at the lives of great giants in every creative domain, the instinct for the student/admirer is to follow their paths. One does it for a while yet at a certain point sometimes it’s best to jump ship and go find your own even if you fall down for a while. We’ve all been there, failing is the greatest part of a painter’s training. 

Finding one’s own vocation in the arts is but the first step. Failure is the second, and it can hit one like sledge hammer, but it can also teach a young student more than when they do eventually succeed. If one is committed, their success will usually arrive in drips and drabs but may not be recognised by the lucky recipient until much later in their lives. I’m not referring to a bright worldly commercial success but an artistic one, more like Manet at the end of his brilliant and successful career, when he settled into a simple routine in front of a vase of lilies.   

This second painting from the same night really reveals what the winter sky down here is capable of doing. The sky went crimson red then dropped into the sea which it will often do with skies like this. It always translates into various shapes of deep warm violets that take over the water. It doesn’t last long but I’ve learned to wait for it then pounce at the right instant. 

Like a true narcissist, it exhibits just the right amount of emotional melodrama to seduce a needy painter. 

    

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint

30 July 2021

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint

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

This was the first of two from the other night, an evening of wild colours, a veritable pot-pouri of happy hues. This is the winter after all, when these skies DownUnder show off all their splendour and these psychedelic evenings strut like catwalk models at an Hermes show in Springtime Paris. In contrast though, the second study from the same evening that’s on the following page looks like the front door of hell.

Both pictures reminds me that though colour behaves the same way everywhere in the world, they can appear uneven due to the atmospheric conditions at various lattitudes around the globe. Towards the equator, so they say, colours will appear brighter and more embelished than towards the poles due to more light. This is what the scientsts say, but I’m just a painter and this bears out for me empirically well in the spots I’ve travelled around the world. 

For instance, coming from New England I had never experienced colour like I did when I arrived in Provence for my third year of Univerity. It takes most people about an hour to fall in love with the South of France, but me, it took two years because believe it or not, I was so uncomfortable under such a bright happy blue sky. The sheer cheerfulness of it all made search out dark bars in the narrow streets of Aix. This intense light of Provence gave me the jitters actually. I was so much more at home under the grey gravy overcast skies of the dismal North. This was a psychological thing, though I didn’t know it at the time. But when I decided to stay on for another year and I when moved out to the countryside and began painting the landscape, I became smitten with this talented light that changed costumes so rapidly in the day.

I suddenly fell in love with the rugged dry landscape that first Spring after I moved into the Chateaunoir only a few kilometers outside of town. I found myself overloaded with all sorts of new sensations, all the flowers and the bark and the olfactorius bed of pine needles in the dank soil that stewed in the mornings. By noon, a rush of rosemary, sage and thyme rode the wild Mistral like a bronco up and down the unruly hills. I had never experienced Nature so vividly, and it was all inextricably linked arm in arm with the act of painting. That first year at the Chateaunoir I read John Rewald’s two volumes about Impressionism, and in it, I discovered paintings made by men (and a few women) who went out into the landscape and committed their lives to Nature in every season and under every bit of weather. 

I took to walking through the forest in the early evenings, often with cats in tow. It was May and I first heard the song of the nightingale. The forest was full of them. I was an American from the city and the suburbs, and I had never lived so closely to Nature, literally outside my kitchen door. It was a revelation. And because I had never really studied anything after the Italian Renaissance in High School, I barely knew anything about French Painting except what I had seen in the Met in New York. I soon delved into the earliest chapters of French Painting which led me through the Barbizon period where I met the humility of Daubigny, Dupré, Millet, and others, all of whom I liked for different reasons. I saw through their eyes what it was like to go out and paint the countryside just for the fun of it. I understood that for the first time in its life, French Painting had moved out of the studio and into the wild wooly outdoors, and I discovered it all like a curious toddler learning to walk.

After the Barbizon, when I came across Manet, it was like a brick wall and he seemed to possess such a loud voice in this chapter of French Painting that it was impossible get around him. But by that time, I was already studying with my teacher Léo Marchutz whom I had met at university in Aix. He led me to other heroes of French Painting; Delacroix, Corot, Degas, and Daumier. Only later did I discover Cézanne and Van Gogh and the Impressionists. 

Funny, as I write this today, I realise that my contemporaries were all setting up studios in large lofts from New York to L.A. and Paris to Berlin, and many of whom were searching out a second act for Expressionism. This was the real beginning of the Art Market, the one that had begun with the bang of POP Art. Since, Contemporary Art as we know it today, has exploded into the international circus tent that cruises non-stop around the globe. 

And then, there was me, an expatriate, wandering around dreamlike in the past and searching to cleave out of this dry landscape, a rich and authentic voice, but also my own salvation too.

Doubt is our passion, #2

14 June 2022

 Doubt is our passion, #2

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

“What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.”

I believe this was lifted from a talk which the art critic Robert Hughes gave at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Academy of Arts in London years ago. I came across it somewhere online and I liked it. I love the idea of ‘slow art’, even though I work quickly at the speed of light. Of course, he’s not referring to the speed of the execution but of an art work, once completed, might already be a thousand years old.

It especially fascinated me because he made reference to the ‘skill and doggedness’ that makes one ‘think and feel’. Without saying it, he is really speaking of craft, something that comes up often in these page because a possession of craft is the vehicle from which I believe, all creativity is born. It’s the vessel that holds ideas and feelings, and it shows up everywhere from the lute maker's workshop onto the potter’s wheel. Generically speaking, it’s the undercurrent of how we all share our skills and intelligence. Is it not also true that for any creative act, the quality and vision, always proceed from one’s command of their craft?

From my diary the other night: 

“Cold evening! Ouch, I made a fire with what little wood I had cut in the afternoon. Three studies last night, a lovely bloom swayed in slow motion that expanded ribbons of warm yellow and pink into an arc before turning into a mass of violets. The waxing moon eventually brought it all to a sudden halt..... I am nonetheless into some wilder colour harmonies; more pure colour pigments and when I can; flatter drawings.”

So this painting from the other night was the last, and though it’s interesting it’s so abstract that I cannot seem to get a handle on whether or not it holds up for me. Does it manifest craft as I preach? Maybe, or maybe not, of course the painter always hopes so, but only time will tell. Sometimes, one’s fresh picture, like a loaf of bread and right out of the oven, isn’t so easily digested. I’ll let it sit for a time. Although the session was short and sweet, I like the colours of this after-burn that was prolonged only by the generosity of an artist’s licence. 

Doubt is our passion

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 June 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The weather has changed again, after intermitant weeks of rain the skies are mostly now clear so I’m again allowed to get to the beach. As we approach the Winter Solstice, the afternoons begin to clam up like heavy iron doors each day before 17h. But hey! Soon, enough, I tell myself that by the end of next week the days will lengthen and so will my optimism grow again too.

When I returned to the beach the other night I had a string of good days of work though I did feel like a novice. No problem, it happens a lot when I’ve been away for even a week. But also it feels invigorating. I guess it depends upon how much, or how little sleep I’ve gotten the night beforehand.

So I approached the afternoon with cautiously but with excitement too. The afternoon had been super clear and the air was cold and windless. This was the first of three studies from the other evening which all came quickly. This season at the start of winter often brings bright turquoise and lemon yellow seas at the dusk hour. Sublime lime! But how to capture it? 

This one in particular embodies something that surprises me. It may be that I find pure joy that in it, and I wonder where it came from? Surely not me? It seems to sing, and I say this because it’s been so rare that I’ve been able to access this quality. Too much of my work has rarely exhibited love for joyous things. I’m melancholic fella even if people find me somehat affable. I’ve always been drawn to darkness. Sadly, pathos for me, has been a stronger bridge to others than joy. But hey!  Maybe I’m changing? 

If I were to make titles for any of these paintings I would certainly call this one ‘The Incredible Lightness of Being’, to steal from Milan Kundera’s brilliant book of yesteryear. All I can say is that I am continually amazed and grateful that this motif, like a village fountain, is a gift that keeps giving and giving so generously since forever. Of course, it’s just the same motif I first approached five years ago, and its mercurial behaviour remains the same night after night. What has changed has been me, because it has made me a better painter today, and that’s only because I’ve learned to see better. Over time, this is what a good and hardy motif can teach even a mediocre painter.

Like all work, the quality of one’s paintings goes up and down in the short term, maybe it has to do with the mood of the Muses. I think it’s the same for every painter, whose one great painting session can awaken them and silence our doubts. But for those awful pictures, one needs both resolve and faith that have been stored within throughout all the seasons. After all, isn’t this why all seasoned artists, writers, and musicians keep showing up day after day, to trudge over their own landscape filled with both failure and success?  For Henry James once wrote, “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion, and passion is our task -- the rest is the madness of art.”  Henry James (1843 - 1916) What artist could argue with this?

But here, even inspite of myself, the joy is apparent, and I’m so glad for it. I painted it quickly and I even like the wonky horizon line that droops slightly on the right. But even this, is just a part of an organic whole, a creative mishap, not really a mistake, more like a misstep, and these missteps reveal the process of painting and give it its originality, like it or not, and for better or worse.  

It’s a flattened picture, compressed like a candy wrapper one might find on a city street. This flat quality is everything I’ve been secretly coveting ever since ‘seeing’ Matisse decades ago. I just didn’t know how to get there authentically on my own. Such a conception of painting one cannot fake. It has to be ironed out slowly from lots of failure. What I also really like is that this picture is not locked to the horizon line but exists beyond it, in a world of make-believe and into the realm art. These are now winter skies and winter seas that sparkle and glow as gentle June calms the ocean down. 

In the end, I’m so grateful that I’m the author of all these things for better or worse, even for my most worst things because they’re still like offspring to me, and I accept them all. If I saw this one study somewhere for instance, on any wall, celebrated or otherwise, I would rush over to it embracing it like a young mum to her infant son after school. Is this vanity? pride? or perhaps just foolishness?

Painters and paramours

14 July 2023

Painters and paramours

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 July 2023, 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 fervour of private dicks we scour every squirrelly squiggle on a canvas as we parse each sentence on a paragraph.

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

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 about love of craft. Proust wrote somewhere in Swann’s Way; “We no longer love anyone else when we’re in love”, and that sentiment can also be true about art. Like in the civilian worlds of the human heart, creativity makes us forget about everything else going on in the world while we're 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 delineated into three wide stripes of colour that I had no trouble grabbing them quickly within minutes. 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 a minute or two. 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 even 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. Was it Oscar Wilde who said: “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.