Tourists and paramours

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 July 2023 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

As painters and writers, we're not tourists when we look at pictures nor when we read books, we investigate like private dicks all the squirrelly squiggles on paper and linen surfaces.

Of course, everyone has an opinion these days about everything including what artists and writers and other creative folks put out for the world to devour, but writers read books differently than tourists just as painters look differently at pictures. It's not a big deal, it's just the way it is. It's a bit like the way a certain mechanic will stop to look at a Porsche type "C", built in the 1950’s, that's  parked on a random street. Because he sees all of it at once as a whole unit through all its interconnected details, he sees beauty.

It's the same for lovers of books and paintings, sailboats and vintage motorcycles, watches and golf clubs. These are all objects of desire that attract everyone of us who have a vested interest in them because they invite our imagination helping us fly away into what we really cherish. They are also love stories, unusual ones for sure, but love affairs, the kinds of which that are so strong they can throw wedges into otherwise perfectly happy couples. Art is about both love and imagination. 

Think of the average gardener, who, unlike so many of us upon seeing an empty field, will behold a lush garden. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick heads, 11 July 2023 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

And so, Art is a formidable love affair. It is not, nor should it be, just a question of liking, preferring, or coveting an art work. It's about a whole world of mystery, craft and obsession, because it's about a powerful love. Proust wrote somewhere in Swann's Way, 

"We no longer love anyone else when we're in love". 

Maybe in the normal world of the human heart this makes sense, but in the world of art, I would say for myself, that a painter can forget everything else in the world when he is working, yet still, in the off hours of his imagination he'll be sleeping with Goya's Marquise de la Solana. In fact, everything he's ever seen is at his fingertips, and like on his smart phone everything can be called up instantaneously. His imagination will relentlessly tempt and taunt him as he looks out for his next conquest.