Red, White and Blue

30 May 2020

Red, White and Blue

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 May 2020, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Chilly nights are here but happily, the days have been warm and full of colour. There is a small moon which doesn’t appear to impede the ‘Bloom’.

Australia is opening up and the beach is full of people, and like everywhere it seems they’re out and about, socialising as if the pandemic never existed. But the virus is still around, and I suppose the tourists will apparently make sure it stays around for a while longer. Honestly, it’s become such a political and social divide that I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. But happily, I’ve still been able to avoid it so far. 

From two nights ago came this study which brought me much joy. It was the second of two and yes, in a way, there is a strong verisimilitude to it, but if so, it’s purely by chance because as is always the case, it only came together in the last few moments. Nothing is ever planned out in advance in these quick studies, the final act always comes to me as a surprise. 

This quick way of working creates the right space for spontaneity and it also allows me to find an unambiguous response to a specific instance during this hour when the sky seems so full of charged energy.

At this beach a painter can (and should) ask what it is they are after in these skies. In fact a painter should even ask why indeed they are painting the sky at all? Let’s be honest, it’s a dangerous subject for anyone. One can fall down too easily in front of so much potential kitsch. But hey! It’s fun. Isn’t that enough?

Anyway, because I can be such homebody, I’m always after anything that pushes me outside of my boundaries and painting is a great vehicle and built for speed. There are periods when the sky can often ressemble photo copies of itself even at the twilight hour. On certain evenings the sky can follow its usual colour format giving off the impression that all twilight skies are pretty similar, but of course they’re not. One thing for sure is that similar or not, I will always paint them differently. This is because I’m both anxious and spontaneous, and I see new possibilities everywhere. At the same time, I’m always after a very particular instant. The trick for me is to capture a spontaneous sky and turn it into something both fixed but eternal too. I am not very good at making duplicates of any experience. So, I like this study of a fairly standard-looking twilight sky around here just because I enjoyed painting it so much. 

This week I watched Three Colours Trilogy, (Blue, White and Red) by Krzysztof Kieslowski which I’ve seen several times over the years. I first saw them out of order, but then in order, and now back to the order in which I first saw them; Red, Blue White. In all aspects of life I seem to have penchant for being loyal to my mistakes, the big, the small, and the stupid. But no matter, what a cinematic adventure are these three stories! Tonight, I am still a little hungover from all the nostalgia it evoked in me for Europe. 

 

Haiku for Halloween 31/10/25

Unfortunately,

I looked into the mirror 

This evening.

Agnes Varda, of snails and clouds

8 January 2021

Agnes Varda, of snails and clouds

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 January 2021, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

This was the last of three done the other night. Like all these things, I think of them as souvenirs excised from a fragile moment like a small postcard missing a stamp but sent anyway from a beach somewhere. Because I painted them, they’re all souvenirs for me alone, first and foremost. At times, like long summer afternoons themselves, these may simply ressemble one another indistinguishably but nevertheless, they’re all are each built differently. The biggest thread running through them all is of course, me, and who I am at a specific time in space.

 

Everyday in a painter’s life, remarkable things happen to the senses when painting at this time of the evening. Shapes and colours of clouds are oscillating at the speed of snails. It is only me, who, while painting, moves quickly by grabbing clouds like a destructive child at play. 

Such clouds like these from the other night remind me of the opening sequence of a film by Agnes Varda, about the gleaners of France, aptly titled, The Gleaners and I (2000), which I just saw again last week. It’s a remarkable film which from a remarkable woman, an artist, film director, auteur, and humanist. There are clearly not enough adjectives to attach to this modest French artist of distinct eminence.

But the sequence I’m referring to is of her in the passenger seat of a car while she is filming with a small camera in her left hand. Her right hand, being filmed, is outside the window of the moving car and it gently surfs up and down in the wind. 

Every so often, she manages to catch her small hand opening up wide enough to briefly clasp a compact white cloud high in the sky as they drive along a small country road. While a dialogue goes on between her and the driver, she performed this repeatedly like when a infant discovers the power of its tiny fingers clasping cotton balls. It’s a remarkable sequence captured spontaneously with a small camcorder.

 

So natually, I must also point out that in my own dreamy world, the element of grasping and pinching these untouchable clouds with my hands and fingers goes on rampantly here on the small dune from which I paint in a somewhat more stantionary stance .

The other evening when I arrived, a gentle cloud bank was lying over the dark sea like an enormous seal. By the time I got to this last study everything had softened, and dusk had disolved the large cloud into a sea of smaller ones full of colour like tropical fish swimming through the thick twilight sky. Like Agnes Varda, I too found myself freely playing around with these pastel colours that were ascending into the evening sky.  

Because I had run out of larger canvas boards I had to use this small one I found in my backpack. I was super happy to capture this palest of Prussian Blues that form at the very end of the bloom cycle. It’s really difficult and I almost never get it right but the other evening the defused colour harmonies let me in. 

Vincent haunts the Courtauld Institute

9 April 2021

Vincent haunts the Courtauld Institute

              Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, January 1889

When in London, I often visited the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House. If I were eighteen all over again and if I had even a fraction of the Art-bug I do today, I’d re-do my life and  enrol at this institute and learn everything about art history, art restoration and how to be a curator. It’s collection of paintings is well-rounded and top-notch. But my real interest is the self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh which is hung on a wall by itself in a large room overlooking an immense courtyard.

On my last visit there it was somewhat empty and I had the place to myself, so I was able to completely plug into it. This amazing portrait must have been painted just days after Vincent cut off his ear. I know there is another version with a red background and also another one with a bandage, but it’s this one I find the most mesmerizing in every painterly way.

Here in this room are long and large windows with luminous thin shades pulled down to keep out the midday light. This seems only to accentuate the intensity of the cool harmonies in the picture. It’s a beautifully painted portrait of cool and disjunctive color harmonies emanating froma dominant lime yellow scheme. Van Gogh famously adored everything yellow to every extreme on the palette; from buttery rich cadmiums to these limey green hues. In this portrait particularly, he uses anusual combination of both warm and cool yellow tones to highlight the delicate shadowy relief in his face. It’s wild but harnessed. No one had ever done anything like it. And it’s flat! And yet it falls into line with everything traditional that had come before it. There is Holbein in it, and Rembrandt too. There is even Matisse in it, waiting to arrive.

It’s a complex painting too, despite its apparent simplicity. It’s so flat, and yet there is every indication of relief throughout its surface. I think he picked this up from the Japanese. The Prussian Blue hat which also figures in the other portrait with its black fringe, acts like a kind of black hole around which everything seems to gravitate. 

Well,.. for me it is extraordinary, beautiful, and yes; perfect. But I hate that I write that because I don’t generally 

believe in in any kind of perfection in Art and I gulp at the use of this adjective. Maybe I should qualify it by saying that it’s simply a truthful portrait, one that rivals his great hero, Rembrandt, but one illuminated by the new electric lighting in France. 

One can only imagine what the uncultured and equally uninspired folk of the 19th century might have seen: Ugliness! Brutality! Hideous insanity! But we know Baudelaire’ wisdom when he wrote that often new and original works of Art can look ugly on first viewing. A picture like this forces us (me) to be on our contemporary toes. Where are the Van Goghs of today? Would I be able to discern them with a fresh but cultured set of eyes? It is also a great reminder that none of us, both painters and the viewers, can afford to worry about outside opinions regarding out own work. 

As I left the institute and found myself on the busy streets of London, I realised that what had trapped me in front of his self-portrait for an hour was its humanity. As I wandered the city streets I found myself looking for humanity and finding it everywhere.It seemed to me that only a painter of such heroic humility could paint such a portrait. And yet remarkably, in it, isn’t a hint of sentimentality anywhere, just a plea perhaps to God, that he might be understood. 

The artist has fallen in love

4 January 2022

the artist has fallen in love

Alfred Sisly, The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes, 1879. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 

This painting by Alfred Sisley at the Met has always haunted me. It’s entitled The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes, 1879. When I lived in NY I used to up to the Met on Friday evenings when it was open late. On my peregrinations there, I often stopped to look at this picture that drove me crazy. Looking at it today, again, it still does. It takes me right back to the French countryside on an Autumn afternoon.

Google tells me that Sisley made 471 paintings in his lifetime. Not a great deal compared to what so many contemporary artists crank out these days, but it’s a different world now, faster and less discerning perhaps. Sisley spent long hours on each picture outdoors, preferring to finish his work on the motif unlike other Impressionists who would return back to the studio. 

He was an exceptionally modern painter who survived the dusty, dogmatic schooling of the Beaux Arts in Paris. He said something that moves me still regarding painters and their work; ...“every picture reveals a specific place in it which the artist has fallen in love”. What a lovely way of expressing something so personal that only another painter would understand it. I agree wholeheartedly but would add that a painter can love specific places in a picture for any number of reasons too. Places that caused grief because it has been worked over and over, or place where an angel has passed overhead and serendipitously left brushstrokes that trace the divine. There will even be mistakes that reveal sparks of the painter’s authenticity. He also said; “I like all those painters who have a strong feeling for Nature”. Ditto for me, that’s for sure. After all these years, my love for the sea and sky has only grown precisely because I’ve been painting it. 

This painting of his has a tactile and spontaneous application of the paint which means that hidden under his British reserve, there was also a passionate Frenchman. He was in fact, a dual national. 

For me personally, what I hadn’t learned already from Vincent Van Gogh’s visceral sensuality, I learned from this modest picture because before he came on the scene, Alfred Sisley’s picture seemed to manifest for me all the elements in it as real living entities. It had nothing to do withe Cezanne or the Impressionists. 

Nor did it have anything to do with the world of permanence so often evoked in Cézanne’s austere but sketchy pictures. This is a sky of stormy emotions, one that erupts, then dissipates within hours like young children at play.

It feels to me like a late autumnal landscape painted just before the November chill, but it’s just a feeling I've always had. The large tree on the left, (in the relative foreground) wiggles and writhes like an old oak resisting the change of seasons; holding on, and holding off with persistence to its very last leaves. The tree to the right across the road in the wintry rose-colored field might be an elm, or maybe a mulberry, who knows? But unlike the great oak to the left, this tree has accepted its fate and surrendered its colour. I love that it has been rendered with an airiness of touch, painted perhaps with a rough hog’s hair brush then scratched out with the hard wooden end of it even. Its faded leaves are a lovely grey and already, winter lives in its branches. Threadbare, one can almost see through it.

If one covers the entire foreground below the horizon line, one would be left with a picture of a sky and trees for the most part, and it might even suddenly appear to have been painted by Pierre Bonnard, a Bonnard in a big hurry though. But writing this, and looking at it continually, I might amend that, and say that maybe the entire painting could have been done by Bonnard, even if the foreground feels more like Sisley. The tree (aforementioned on the left) feels so Bonnard! It’s hard to describe just why, but it has something to do with the utter lack of pretension in it. It's painted with wild, childlike freedom, so charismatically Pierre Bonnard. Sisley, it seems to me, was more of a technician than Bonnard but that it not a slight to either of them. In fact, this picture is rather atypical for Sisley, who was usually a smooth operator with a flawless sense of 'classical' drawing. Sisley's Impressionism is bright and clean, not absent of poetry, but just more structured. He was usually more loyal perhaps to the earlier tenets of Degas’s visual clarity, barely 30 years ahead of the younger, more pictorially modern and adventurous Pierre Bonnard. 

In any event, every painter has at least a few treasured favourites living in their own deep colourful vaults of memory, and this is one of my own. 

Just the facts Ma’am

5 August 2024

Just the facts Ma’am

 Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 1 August 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I’ve just finished Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich  which I had last read some fifty years ago in high school. Even if I appreciated it then, today, it has had a more profound effect upon me than it did when I was so young.  

Already, I have so many reflections about it this time around. I was seventeen when I first read it and now I find myself older than was even the poor dying Ivan Ilyich whose last few months Tolstoy chronicled with the attention of an ER nurse. In those days people seemed to age quicker than we do now because evidently the bourgeoisie ate, drank and smoked way too much so naturally, it wasn’t a great life style choice. Unlike the late 19th century, today’s wealthy elite is inversely slimmer than the bankers of that era. Like in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, it also paints a picture of too much food and drink and enough yoga and aerobics to keep the burgermeister crowd from their early demise.

Re-reading it today has naturally filled me with newer reflections about life and art. How have I lived these past fifty years, given to me so freely, I suddenly ask myself.  

How one lives one’s life and the consequences of a having purpose or not, are great themes in Art. Like Ivan Ilyich, many of us spend our lives pursuing empty dreams, while others, who may have dreams, seem to be too sleepy to pursue them. But there are still others, whose dreams are as strong as their resolve. 

Many of us in fortunate nations are lucky today to live in an era like our own because it is a great moment for both doers and dreamers. People, in most countries, both rich and poor, are going after their dreams and adventures around the world with more ease than ever before. The globe has never been more porous for such things. I think it’s great time to be alive for those who pursue their dreams and have the discipline to make them real in spite of economic disadvantage. 

“Youth is wasted on the young” goes the cliché, but I’ve changed my opinion on that one. Today, with more information at our fingertips than ever before, I’ve read about so many gifted young people around the globe; musicians, writers, environmentalists, etc, etc,,, who are grabbing this life firmly with both hands and jumping off the starting line with vigour and determination. So just because many of the rest of us didn’t, it doesn’t mean that many others didn't, and still don’t. Maybe some were lucky enough to have had super-cool parents who  loved them and inspired them to flourish very early on. Maybe some intrepid youngsters were just born for a surprising life and even knew it from an early age. Either way, when an old geezer spouts that old cliché about youth being wasted on the young, run away from them as fast as your legs can carry you because it just means that they wasted their own youth. I know this from experience. 

I came to Painting early but that doesn’t mean that I preservered at it from the get-go. I lived in a dream world that prevented me from taking anything too seriously, even my own talents. Of course, I couldn’t know this at the time because like they say, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It took me decades to settle down, but you know what? It wasn’t that I suddenly got enlightened and instantly got to work, I had to first get sober, then gradually allow this creative juice to slowly bring me up to the surface again. But this was just my story, one of billions on this earth, one of little real meaning to anyone else but myself. Tolstoy's great truth is that lots of us are still Ivan Ilyich for a whole variety of reasons no matter what our age.

All this has a personal resonance for me because deep down inside me, making art has somehow in this impoverished world of suffering and cruelty, it has always seemed like a selfish indulgent activity. My real problem was that I projected my disdain upon Art, something I really did love and had a feeling for and sadly, I secretly went through most of my life feeling this way. It was carried inside me like an early ailment, like polio or the plague.

That I was suddenly healed of this craziness still amazes me today because I see that I might never have changed had I not got sober. My life was like an airplane that takes off in a rainstorm but climbs into a clear blue sky. 

And like millions of other readers, I too, am a huge fan of everything Tolstoy ever wrote. Like a magician he transports me with ease from one drama to the next within just a few paragraphs. And like a screenwriter, he moves me steadily from one place to the next, sentence by sentence. His style is clear cut, almost impersonal but then I guess it depends upon the translator. He seemed to frame his wisdom in dead-pan, like a cop, “just the facts ma’am”, when a witness jabbered on too long. And this style I've always associated with Cezanne’s late pictures because if there was one painter who approached Tolstoy with that same cold, dispassionate truth, it was Paul Cezanne. 

Cezanne, like any competent painter, told us a stories. No matter what the abstracted means or language he uses to construct it, it's still a visual story that must convey something to the viewer. Is it a feeling or a just an idea? Or is it both? We judge it by its craft but also by its inherent vision. A great story, poorly told either in words or through paint, will still be unsuccessful no matter the spin put upon it by galleries or curators. 

Cezanne's late paintings around Aix tell us stories with the same regular efficiency of Tolstoy’s Swiss watch, only bigger, with more levers, buttons, and brushstrokes. Yet all the tiny components move at a steady Swiss pace towards a synchronised surface plane composed of small colourful splotches of paint placed exactly where they ought to be. Suddenly I’m reminded of summer evenings in Provence when insects keep the air circulating in a constant buzzy motion. 

Why all this comes up for me today? Perhaps it's the reminder that all great work, either on a page or a canvas; indeed any creative act, is always about relationships. I guess it's one of the most important lessons I learned from Cezanne and Tolstoy, but also my teacher Leo Marchutz.

Come to think of it, this picture (above) from four nights ago, would never have been painted had I not spent a lot of time looking and thinking about Cezanne. Funny enough today, I rarely ever look at his work anymore. Sure, once in a while, there are a few pictures that can still hold me spellbound, but none of his books are hanging around on my coffee table anymore. And yet, I’m still aware that his legacy, among other things, is about light, and this fashioned me into the painter I have become for better or worse. And it’s true that I can still go on about him the way many young people go on about Taylor Swift. I think also, that for me in this series at Brunswick Heads, he is still as foundational as Latin is to French, Italian, and Spanish.

So, lucky for me, it was a magnificent bloom the other night, but callously cold as well. I was underdressed and I appropriately froze out on the empty dune. And yet, I was happy and cold all together. 

This evening sky gave me a gentle and soothing light that eased its way into the sea, expanding everywhere all at once. The entire surface sparkled with tiny fragments of light before vanishing. These are after all, wondrous winter skies that can make a painter crazy with delight.   

Now, looking at it a few days later,  I see a happiness in it that surprises me. It may sound corny, but honestly, it seems like the earth is always looking out for any reason to express joy. Is it because it knows how hard it is for many of its inhabitants to live upon it?

 

Foolhardy with form

 

24 August 2020

Foolhardy with form

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

Despite my messy painting habits, this study from the other night reminds me that somewhere deep inside me is a hunt for form and it reveals my continued desire to make order out of this unruly motif. If not symmetrical, then at least I seem to want something more balanced. In my old Greek spirit there could also be lurking an obsequious desire to please Phidias, whose keen sense of divine harmony has lain dormant inside me until now.

It’s as if I yearn to somehow reduce all of Nature right down to the snug size of a small canvas board. I wonder if this desire haunts other painters as much as me, because no matter what the abstract proportions are, this reduction is truly where the magic ferments. Despite the sheer dimensions of something unknowable, like the sky in this instance, form is within reach if one's vision is as good as one's craft. 

But what really permits me to attempt this feat of scaling down the sky must be wholly due to the fact that it’s been done before by so many other painters. I cite J.M. Turner (yet again) because he managed to plausibly compress his own colossal skies and squeeze them into pages the size of sacred prayer books. 

In order for a painter to re-create the unruly nature out there (yet born within his own imagination) an artist must find the practical means to naturally reduce the infinity of this unruly world such that it fits neatly into his own prayer book. It takes a certain geometric magic no doubt, but it basically comes down to the craft of painting. One has it or one hasn't yet learned it. It's not for the faint-hearted, for like any craft, it requires lots and lots of failure which can leave a bloodied field of dead and wounded pictures.

"Be persistent!", was the best advice I ever received from artists, both alive and dead. All it took, they said, was just "lots of failure and buckets and buckets of humility".  

I think it also requires a foolhardy belief in oneself to become a painter because Art is a cruel game, and any budding artist must possess enough fortitude to breach the gates of this realm which can slay wimps faster than a sharp sword. 

This study from the other night is an example of my own desire for order and form. And, I admit this, in contrast to all the obvious signs of disorder in the rest of my own parallel life as a bachelor. 

Only lately have I come to see that it may be precisely for this reason that such an ardent thirst for order shows up right now in my painting life. Despite all this grand talk of an ordered form, I’m still as messy a painter as I am in every other area of my life. My home and garden are in such disarray that I haven’t invited anyone over for tea in years out of embarrassment.

But funny enough, there are many days when I arrive to find the sky looking so polished and clean that it looks like a butler had been out there all day. Those afternoons when messy clouds are absent I say to myself with hubris: “This is going to be a piece of cake!”

But, the downside to clean and well-formed skies like these is that left to my own devise, and in front of such visual clarity, it’s too easy to resort to painting what I've already done many times beforehand, for this is the curse of a clear and happy sky.

The truth is that without a challenge I'll never change. Every artist, indeed, everyone, needs hardship or they'll never grow into a craft. Isn't there an ancient myth somewhere that warns about the terrible ennui of getting everything too easily? 

Immodestly, I admit that I like this picture, it's not great, but I feel grateful that it isn’t just like every other one that was started from a clean and polished sky. Its tactile construction and its colours are appealing. What I really appreciate are the transitions on the painted surface. In this one I love the way the layers of colour in the upper half of the sky seem to glide over one another other, barely touching. In fact, this is why I still work with oil paints. 

 

The French have two wonderful words for this effect; frôler and effleurer. Of course, because they’re French, they are often used to great advantage when speaking about gentle kisses, and caressing a loved ones hair like it's the wind. But that's exactly what I mean here in this sky. So despite its small size, this bleached area of light, high overhead, that fences in the top of the picture, also beckons the illusion I'm always after, one of an empyreal region that's just beyond my reach.