Mantegna’s cap

30 March 2021

Mantegna’s cap

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the first of three pictures from the other night. This unusually austere, but sensual study, reminds me today of Montegna’s magnificent portrait of a young man in Napoli at the Capodimonti museum. Personally, I think he was the greatest painter of the Rennnaisance. This is a very small portrait, maybe only 25 X 15 cms tall and seen in profile. He wears a rose-coloured cap virtually identical to this pink sky, hence my association. I can often fall in love with certain paintings but this intimate portrait by Andrea Montegna, I place in a special in my memory. How does one fall in love with a work of art? It’s easy for some of us, it’s certainly as easy as falling in love with another person and less problematic too. But the feeling is the same if you are a painter, because you are pierced right through the corps of who you are. A work of art is a top-of-the tree sort of love, and it will always grow taller for you, and will never deceive you or let you down, or talk back. Whether it be an opera aria, a film, a book, a picture, or a small Mayan figurine, the love of an artwork can a perfect and everlasting union. But obviously it’s not for everyone. Some people love their cars to death, polishing them each weekend, while others worship their dogs and cats more than their spouses. It’s a deeply personal thing and that is the way it should be. Isn’t that what is so wonderful about Art? Like a girlfriend or boyfriend, our love interests come in all shapes and sizes, with or without tattoos. It’s our own imagination that creates such attraction, our lust and affection. It’s a true democracy of feeling and we’re free to love what we love, but even better, we can make of it all what we wish. It’s like a giant food hub like one sees in Singapore where our choices are almost limitless and where the varieties on offer makes one hungry or horny by just having a peek at it all.

So, that said, I house an enormous affection for this small study of mine own from the other evening. I think it’s actually my very, very favorite one out of several thousand done so far from the beach here at the evening hour. In fact, if it had been painted by someone else it would still not dim my infatuation for it, not a bit. That it was painted by anyone and that it exists somewhere out in the world is already an extraordinary thing. Why? Who knows? Let’s just say that it rings my doorbell.

I sometimes imagine that I can traverse culural time zones in a flash with the ease of a child’s flexible imagination. It’s one that allows me to 

It’s a cockeyed world where I can flit about easily between pictorial things and intemporal places. 

exists in my head of course, because all these artifacts from so many periods of history long gone.: pre-Columbian, Cycladic, the Middle Ages, the Rennaissance, and Africana and Asian art to our own ‘Contemporay’ world of Post-Modernism. Everything in my time-bending cultural mind is completely fluid as the painter I seem to be in this 21st century. It’s confusing because it asks me what it means to be authentic. That’s always a great question to ask one’s self in every circumstance in life. How often do any of us contemplate our histories both personal an collective? We sit upon a treasure trove of riches going back 10,000 years, or longer,  and yet we don’t seem to use it as either artists or philosophy students. Why not?

Lucky for me, this humble motif seems to be my own private philosophy teacher. By day it’s just another humdrum-looking tropical beach but by early evening it’s transformed, like watching a woman dress for a night out, it’s magnificent thing to behold. And just like a person whose life is enhanced by a partner, I too, can be transformed by this motif at dusk, and it completes my own sense of well-being, 

It’s such a small picture to get all worked up about. I freely admit, but then I think it must be not unlike how any engineer might feel when the project he’s worked on has left the hanger and now flies overhead transporting millions of passengers to far off places around the globe. Is it pride one feels, or love? Or both? Does it matter what it’s called? Isn’t it that sensation that arises in a person who has discovered both of these feelings all wrapped up in a bundle like they’re a proud parent? Painters too, can feel like parents sometimes. 

So yes, I really do have an emotional connection with this picture for some odd reason. It may seem strange to hold such feelings for a picture but I would add that it’s not just a picture or the motif, but more specifically it’s a space in which an artist has fallen in love. It has meaning. I’m reminded of one of my very favorite films from the 1990’s called The Object of Beauty wherein a poor deaf maid working in luxurious London hotel steals a small Henry Moore statuette from a room. When asked at the end of the film why she had taken it, she replied to the police, that it had spoken to her. And that, is what Art is all about for many of us.

So, I spoken of my emotional attachment to this small picture, but now critically speaking, I’ll address why I think it works. As a painting it’s as inventive and concise as any painting I’ve ever admired anywhere. Though I may come off as pretentious, this small thing is itself quite unpretentious. I daresay that a young child with talent could very easily have come up with such an image because it’s a simple idea is reduced down to just a few stripes of colour. They are however ones that correlate to Nature via the motif at the beach. My only regret with it is that I cannot seem to ‘scale it up’ to a larger format successfully in the studio. I cannot seem to get close to the same spontaneity of it. I hope in the near future that will change for me.

Doubt is our passion

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 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 am again allowed to get to the beach. As we approach the Winter Solstice here, the afternoons begin to clam up like heavy iron doors each day before 17h. But hey! Soon, I tell myself, that by the end of next week the days will lengthen and again grow optimistically.

When I returned to the motif the other night for a string of good days to paint, I felt like a novice, a beginner like I knew nothing at all. This feels strange but it can equally feel invigorating. I guess it depends upon how much or how little sleep I’ve gotten the night beforehand.

So I approached the motif with a little trepidation but full of excitement too. These two studies both came quickly and just a day apart. 

What they share is that pale lime turquoise sea right before the onset of dusk when the sea is flat. Many other pictures can dig deep into the violet sea which come later as twilight melts the night. But these in particular have something in them which I really like; They possess that incredible ‘lightness of being’, to borrow from the title of Milan Kundera’s brilliant book of yesteryear. I am always amazed and grateful that this motif is a gift that keeps giving ever more generously over time. 

Of course it’s the same motif I first approached five years ago and its mercurial behaviour hasn’t altered an iota. What has changed has been m. I’m a better painter today only because I’ve learned to see better, and that is what a good and hardy motif can teach even a mediocre painter. 

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion (cont)

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

Like all work, the quality of one’s paintings goes up and down in accordance with the mood of the muses.  I think it’s the same for every painter that once in a while, having just one great painting session can awaken one and silence our doubts. After all, isn’t this why all artists, writers, musicia  keeps showing up day after day, trudging through all the seasons? 

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?

What I like especially in this study here, the first from the following night, is its immediate feeling of joy, for it sings. I can say this because it’s 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 jovial. I’ve always drawn to darkness, and sadly, pathos for me, has been a stronger bridge to others than joy. But hey, maybe I’m changing?

But here, even inspite of myself, the joy is apparent and I’m so glad for it. I painted it quickly, it was one of three two nights ago. 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 misteps 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 June appears to calm the ocean down by turning it a sublime lime. But how to capture it?

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?

14 June 2022

Doubt is our passion (cont)

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 an address by the art critic Robert Hughes at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Academy of Arts, in London years ago. I came across it somewhere online. In a nutshell, aside from the fact that any real craft comes from centuries of long tradition, one born of experimentation and failure, I think he means that art needs to be separated from the clever world of Advertising. I think it began back in the 1960’s with appearance of POP Art when these two worlds became entwined. 

I love the idea of ‘slow art’, even though I work quickly at the speed of light. But of course, he’s not really referring to the speed of the execution of art but of the mind-set behind an artist’s entire oeuvre which is in direct contravention to the entire idea of advertising and selling. But anyway, it’s a pretty self-explanatory. 

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 has come up often in these pages. And a possession of craft is the vehicle from which all creativity is born. It’s the one that shows up everywhere from lute makers to a potter’s wheel. Generically speaking, it’s the undercurrent of how we all share our skills and intelligence, is it not? Isn’t it also true that for any creative act, the quality (with few exceptions), always proceeds from one’s command of their craft?

This picture was the third one from the other night. Does it manifest craft? Many might not think so, but of course for the painter, he must absolutely believe that it does, because for him it is matter of life or death, at least in his fragile heart. 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 in a gentle slow motion expanding warm yellows and pink into an arc. The waxing moon eventually brought it to a sudden halt. Tonight might be still be possible but the full moon arrives in a few days and may kill it.....I am nonetheless into some wilder colour harmonies; more pure colour pigments, and when I can; flatter drawings.”

So this harmony in various violets from cool to warm, came after the ‘arc of colours’ had passed in ‘slow motion’ leaving a kind of afterburn which lasted only a brief moment but was prolonged by the generosity of artist-licence.

No brandy? There’s always Morandi!

14 July 2021

No brandy? There’s always Morandi!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 July 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I’ve been thinking about something recently that figures into this study from two nights ago. Because these are such small pictures, there is consequently less horizontal room to create a wider seascape. Of course, I could create more of a wide-angle effect if I used tiny brushes and painted in the style of the small 18th century Dutch paintings where the sea was small beneath the giant skies overhead, but I’m not that kind of painter. In the photographic lexicon, it would be like using a 28mm lens in order to fit everything into the confines of a small rectangular canvas board the size of 30 X 25 cms.

So I reasoned that in my small pictures, to further push the photographic analogy, I actually seem to be painting with a 50mm lens, which makes the images look more cropped because I’ll be taking in less of the horizon. My pictures almost always appear to be zoomed up to a specific portion of the sea as if I’m a captain on the bridge of a surfaced submarine peering through binoculars at a giant cloud over the horizon.

This study, from the two nights ago for example, is a case in point. It’s sort of right in one’s face isn’t it? I like it but I do admit that it lacks all the earmarks of a traditional landscape. No aparent hints of a foreground or distance that normally help navigate the viewer into the picture. In fact, it could almost be a pressed flower between two layers of glass seen under a microscope. Yet I like it, and there is a freedom in it that reminds me of my old flame Giorgio Morandi who also presents his intimate paintings without much fanfare. Their presentations are often absent the classic parameters that have defined the Still Life genre. 

This study was the last of four from a fairly mundane sky that I found myself trudging through without much inspiration when suddenly, out of the blue, and to my total surprise, the sky blossomed open spraying millions of tiny clouds the colour of fuchsia every which way like confetti at a wedding. I love when this happens, I had a field day.

Though I would not compare my small studies with those of Giorgio Morandi, I have always had a big love affair with much of  his entire oeuvre since I was a young impressionable child. My father had a book filled with images of his small bottles and cups. Looking back, I can see now that at my attraction was a reaction to all that delicious sensuality of his brushwork and oil paint. One can never know to what extent children are influenced by these attractions at such an early age but they are the mysteries that help form a person. I also remember Philip Guston’s paintings as a child, and it too, made a deep impression upon me. Much later, when I began painting in France his brushwork also hung over me like a shadow.

So over the years, I’ve seen many, many exhibits of Giorgio Morandi, some small, but others, like the retrospective in Paris at the Musee d’Art Moderne in 2008 which was huge and fairly inclusive. I loved it but at the same time, it felt overloaded with so many small pictures all pressed tightly together like a bulging wallet. Too many riches in such a tight space! I had thought at the time. I also noticed that his work can sometimes blur together in monotony when I see too many of them. In such quantity they can lose their individuality, the precious quality that make each of them so extraordinary for us all. I take note of this for my own small pictures which can also visually stray little from one to the next. This should be a cautionary red flag for me if ever I were to show lots of them in a group. I’ve also recently noticed that large exhibitions need a great variety of an artist’s oeuvre so that individual paintings can take a viewer’s breath away, while at the same time, allowing viewers to move breathlessly from one room to the next. This is in itself, an art form for successful curators I think.

“...to see too many at once reveal his limitations”...., said a painter friend to me about Morandi years ago. I understood what he meant, but I didn’t agree in the way he meant it. He inferred that the quality was diminished which I found harsh. My objections were about the monotony of a show, not of the works themselves. For me, small is beautiful, even in large doses, but they shouldn’t be bunched up too closely on a wall which I tried unsuccessfully to explain to him.

Morandi’s gentle obsession of small bowls, cups, and bottles, lasted decades into his life and these intimate mise-en-scenes were painted over and over again in various colour schemes. These arrangements were recycled and shuffled obsessively about over the years ressembling intimate family photographs spanning several generations. I think it’s evident that all artists are rather obsessional, and this is a natural aspect of a rich and creative imagination. But Morandi’s interest in these familial arrangements bordered on an almost erotic obsession as if he were also a curator of his own harem wherein an unlimited variety of small curves and rounded forms could be possessed by him alone at moment’s notice. 

When he wasn’t teaching he painted landscapes, or was home in his native Bologna where his life revolved around his work. He had a studio in a comfortably bourgeois family home which he shared with his sisters. His studio was a room at one end of the large home on an upper floor. To access it, he had to pass through each of his sister’s room’s, one right after the next, like what used to be called in New York, ‘a railroad apartment’. This is the one story about him I love the most, for there is a special kind of family home that is inhabited by the adult children whose parents have passed on. The intimacy of Morandi, this soft-spoken gentleman as he was known to be, gently knocking at each sister’s successive door before finally arriving at his small studio each day could be from an Eric Rohmer film. This arrangement of such domestic familiarity no doubt found its way into his pictures. 

Like in some bohemian homes, I have a very large coffee table cluttered with piles of books, and parked in a nearby corner of it, is a large book about Morandi. Whenever I feel a certain restlessness come over me like my life is going pear-shaped, I’ll often reach out to it, being so close at anxious hand. So, when there is no brandy, there’s always Morandi.

Confession from the Old Man and the Sea

28 January 2022

Confession from the Old Man and the Sea

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

I’m not sure what I think of the picture but I really liked the session and that’s because I had to struggle so much after losing this study several times like a fisherman with a swordfish on the line.

I had gone out to work even as rain was pelting the windshield on the way there because I had been inside all day and I was going stir crazy. During the short drive there I began to feel foolish thinking it would clear up. I found myself looking for splatches of blue and white everywhere in the sky but to no avail.

 

When I did arrive at the beach the sky suddenly looked angry with dark clouds rolling in from the Southeast anda light rain. But I went out and set up anyway because I believed. Sometimes that can be enough.

So I began to mix colours and was ready to do something, anything, despite the light rain. My heart was begging the clouds to back off for an hour and I cursed my foolish self silently.

Just as I was starting a canvas board a large dog began scampering out of the footpath and bounded around on the dunes in a state of joy. At this beach, dogs are always the first to announce the arrival of people. Then, moments later, small kids would sprout out laughing and shouting, then a few older ones would appear. After a short time, the parents arrive at the end of the small sandy path as it opens generously at the wide beach. They might be accompanying the grandparents who follow up like the caboose. But one thing is for sure, when they look up to see me, this funny-looking guy in front of an easil under the rain in the middle of nowhere, they almost always smile with surprise and perhaps laughter.  “Finally!” I sometimes think to myself,  “All my life, I’ve waited for people to be overjoyed at the sight of me.” 

But on this particular afternoon it was a family of five gals appearing from the pathway. They immediatly pulled out an enormous umbrella from Bunnings and began to huddle beneath all it except the dog, which had come up to say hello to me quickly before racing down to the water’s edge. Three generations, a grandma, her two daughters each with young girls of their own, all huddled together like in an advertisement for Woolies or Coles. They were staring out at the dark sea under a Bunnings umbrella when barely a minute later they apparently decided to leave and called to their dog who obligingly came back sort of straight away. I was getting a little wet mixing colours but still full of hope for a picture. 

When the family passed by me they smiled, and I said to them:

“You know,,,,if you leave it will stop raining don’t you?

But if you stay, the rain will continue.”

They laughed as I did, getting soaked.

Then I added

“Thank you for leaving!”

They laughed again, and were gone like in a puff of smoke.

But to my own surprise, I was right, and I managed to finish the session as the clouds gradually parted. I made two things, the first was rain streaked but this was the second. Yes, it’s strange and different, but there is someting about it that speaks of the session. Despite my doubts, my angel Grace, had made an appearance and allowed me a session full of surprises.

To mask, or not to mask

 13 March 2021

To mask, or not to mask

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In spite of the rain pouring off and on for weeks now, there have barely been a few windows of light. It sometimes pours downso hard on my steel roof that it makes me feel like I’m wearing an infantry helmet. But when softens down a little, it’s becomes a piece by Steve Reich. The grassy lawn around the house is spongy and it soaks my ankles, so there’s been little painting at the beach these days.

And COVID has hit the area hard and everyone is either anxious or angry, they either wear a mask or they wear defiance. And so the vaccine fight goes on, but one thing is sure, everyone is depressed either way, and lonely from everything I hear through the grapevine. I’m a kind of a solitary guy so I’m somewhat adrift to the rhythms of  life in this community and hardly an authentic gauge of truth or sanity around here. I got vaccinated and that’s that. In these matters, I’m quite conventional so I don’t have an opinion about others.

Surprisingly though, despite all this turbulance in the air, in just these past few days, the skies have cleared and it has allowed me to get to the beach to mix a palette ‘for work or recreation’ purposes’, so the regulations dictate for us all around here. That said, in theory, we are all in lockdown though it hasn’t really affected me coming out to paint at the beach. This is rural Australia after all, and anyway, I still need my regular dose of heavenly breezes upon me. 

This was the only one from the other night because I scrubbed out the first. This is only the second or third time in the past few years that I have abandoned a picture. I just lost it ,and like the drowned swimmer I recently witnessed here on the beach, I just couldn’t ressurect the light in it. Death, alas, is the same for everyone but still, it put me in a bad mood briefly. 

So, I then started this hoping to reset my mood. It has a feeling in it which I like. I had fun with these gentle clouds that channel my love for strawberry ice cream. At the same time there is also an uncertainty with the way in which they were painted, I think because I was unsure how to treat them. The colours were changing so rapidly and they had to be synced up with the changing sky that was shifting into gold. It was tricky, but this spontaniety forces whatever skills I can muster to follow the colour wheel into dusk. After all, Nature provides the map to all the answers if I’m clever enough to follow it without prejudice.

Addendum; We all wear masks now when we’re out and about. It’s a curious atmosphere, but of course, many don’t, which is also another curious thing. But I caught myself in a mirror the other day at a store with my mask covering most of my face and I suddenly thought to myself;  ‘Wow, I’ve never looked so handsome!”.