Edward Hopper and Louis Kahn by the sea!

 

Rooms by the Sea, Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1951 

Although I have a great affection for Edward Hopper, he is far from being an artist who has ever cast a spell over me. 

I think any painter, writer, musician, architect, what-have-you, should be able to articulate the early influences whom previous artists have had over them. Who has lit the rapture in inside them and helped shape their formation into the solid craft of their choosing? 

Although I saw his pictures when I was a child they didn't speak to me the way that many others did. To be fair, I was pretty fascinated with most paintings when I was as a young kid, as I didn't have any way to discern them as either 'liable or not'.

My father had covered his bathroom walls with copies of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and I forget whom else. They were lifted from the many books on Italian Art which he collected. For sure, he had a thing about Italian Painting, but he really had a thing about Italy, in all its forms. He devoured everything Italian. 

My father, being a Catholic child, and brought up in a somewhat strict tradition in Providence, Rhode Island of the 1920's wanted nothing more than to escape it all, which he did when he joined naval officer training for World War Two. 

But from what I understood, he excelled in Latin, so that certain languages came easy for him. He learned enough Italian to get around, some French too and he taught me an invaluable lesson when we were in Florence in 1956 when I was four. While walking around town, he would randomly stop people in the streets and in shops to ask directions that invariably led to innocuous questions that initiated conversation. This was an Italy, not far from the war, where people were just so happy to be out in the prospect of a sunnier future themselves and their families. America had helped to save them from a Fascistic chaos after all, and so the attention of a charismatic American with floppy colourful clothes who posed an incessant stream of questions about their lives, about the war, about art, was extremely seductive. He had a kind, friendly manner that drew people into him easily so consequently everything about him was an invitation to be equally open and friendly. He stopped the Carabinieri often for directions and once got us both a ride on a giant Moto Guzzi, me scrunched in between him and my father in the middle of Florence. The priests in their long black robes were always good for a 'stop and chat' as Larry David, of Seinfeld fame calls it. Taking me by the hand after each of these encounters he would quietly explaim that he had just had an Italian Lesson. Later on, when I went to live France years later, I employed the same tactics and it worked just as well. 

Could he have been an artist? Should have been a painter? Who knows? But he loved it and he painted periodically. It's hard to become a painter unless it's almost full time I think from experience.

He painted the picture below back in the 1960's, in Providence, Rhode Island, where he regularly returned to visit his sister, my aunt Maddie. His father had emigrated in the late 19th century from Ireland as a boy of fifteen. He was the eldest of eight or nine children who arrived by boat. It was a tough time.

I think he must have been influenced by Edward Hopper to make such an picture like this. It has a decidedly 'cool' Northern Light to it, very New England, I think. It's an efficient picture, which is to say that it visually works well, where everything is in the right place. I have never really warmed up to it despite the fact that it was painted by my father. This is strange because I have so little left of his and I've always felt a little guilty about this. And yet, it has beautiful parts in it, nice abstract resolutions, especially in the foreground, both on the right and left sides. 

Thomas A Coffey, Smith Street, Providence Rhode Island, circa 1960, oil on canvas, 60 X 50 cm

The Edward Hopper painting (top), is a curious image unlike anything I've ever seen of his. At times his pictures possessed a solid kind chunk of Americana; lighthouses, New England farmlands, roof tops, American streets of large empty-looking homes. These are not pictures by Monet or Pissarro, and peopled with figures hurrying along streets or holding their hats and bracing the wind. No, Hopper's paintings are devoid of humanity in a weird way, almost as if after a plague had removed everyone.

But his famous urban pictures are those inversely peopled with solitary lives. The 'Night Hawk' the corner cafe at night with a few lone figures in it. There are lots of women too, alone, looking out windows from their beds or cafes sitting in silence like mannequins. He tapped into the quiet, dark, and restless soul of America at about the same time as did also many American writers like Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright.    

His dystopian imagination led him to paint these bleak American pictures but not without a sense of humour. This painting (top) is unusually Surrealist in spirit, and I like it for that. A door opens up on the sea outside with no explanation. 

I also love the colours and the way it's been constructed, its strong natural light pours into an interior like it's a still-life. It's a hard Northern white light that gives it the feel of a film set. It's a strange and beguiling picture, one I would easily live with here in my small home. It makes me think of what the architect Louis Kahn once said about Light. "A room doesn't know itself until light enters it." 

Here, below, is another kind of light, one from the Southern Hemisphere. There is little reference except a sea and a sky at dusk.

Evening Prayer, Brunswick Heads, 21 January 2025, oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

EO, and the state of humanity

A few weeks back I watched an extraordinary film entitled simply EO, (2022) by Polish Director Jerzy Skolimowski. Disclaimer, it's a very difficult film, one which may not reach many people because it lacks all the shiny action-packed violence and gentrified beauty that attracts most people, but hey! 

This is a film unlike any I've ever seen seen. Its star is a donkey and the film follows it through its odyssey to re-unite with a young woman in a circus. We know nothing of their lives before they were separated but we follow the donkey's search for her. This takes it through several chapters (and countries) throughout the film. 

It is a remarkable film but not an easy one. It will speak to animal lovers and maybe leave them indelibly scarred, I will say no more.  

Vanessa Bell and Gabriel Yared

The Pond at Charleston, 1916

This quiet and unexciting landscape was painted by the Bloomsbury icon Vanessa Bell, and after some twenty years of looking at it, it still drives a painter like me, crazy. It's an image one could aimlessly walk right by in a museum because its discreet sophistication is hidden behind such subtle simplicity. It's from photo of an old postcard that I've had tacked up behind my stove for years, a little beat-up, but it's something one can ponder when boiling water.

Looking at it now I suddenly realise just how Cubist it appears to me. I had never actually put that together in my mind. I also hadn't recognised that it was painted in 1916 at the very height of Cubism in Paris. Vanessa Bell and her painter-husband, Duncan Grant, being the jet setting  bohemians they were for the day, would have been very aware of the going-ons just across the Channel in Paris. It was after all, a close, cultured world of literati and erudite amateur artists. From their cozy farmhouse, Charleston in West Sussex, they might have even been able to watch bathers on the beaches of Dieppe had they had a high-powered pair of binoculars. But what I like about the idea behind the image, is that this was a Cubist picture painted from a motif outdoors where Vanessa Bell both lived and worked.

She and Duncan had several children yet they both led a very creative and fruitful life while at the same time churning out work incessantly. I've always remembered something she had once remarked to a journalist about her painting life. She said that with so much to do around their farm, she generally managed to get three hours of painting done each day, then adding that one could still get a lot of work done as artist with a family life too, one day at a time.

Here, below is an 'abstract' picture which she painted just two years earlier in 1914. This leads me to believe that she worked in several different 'styles' concurrently. She and her husband Duncan Grant made lots of designs for their own home; tables, chairs, lamps, screens, rugs, etc, etc... because they were a very creative couple. Almost every surface of Charleston vertically, horizontally, and otherwise, was decorated with lots of paint and love, it seems. 

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1914

I've come appreciate that artists work in vastly different mediums and 'styles', as if to say to the world: "I will not be pigeon-holed into just one idea or another. I can actually walk and chew gum at the same time. That said, I can also love entirely different artists like Giorgio Morandi, who strayed very little from his small orphaned family of bottles. He did make many very beautiful landscapes around his family home in Bologna, Italy, too. 

But these days, the creative crowd work in many different fields simultaneously because this is the turbo-charged age of both multitasking and money-making, one where only the 9-5 workers seem to need a rest. 

All this reminds me of an interview with a French Soprano whom I heard about ten years ago on France Musique. I cannot recall her name but I remember that she was originally from Marseille. (I've looked in vain on the net but no luck finding her name, so far). She had worked with with Gabriel Yared, a celebrated composer of films (The talented Mister Ripley, The English Patient, etc, etc,) among so many others. His 'style' is particular, and at once recognisable through his abundant use of minor keys. I 'knew' his music through my memory senses from all his film inimitable scores, but I knew nothing about him before this interview. Now, I listen often to all his scores through Apple Music. When I'm writing comfortably at home, he is my go-to mood swinger, and I can listen to the same film scores over and over again. It's as if they've fused with the DNA of each sentence I write.

But what I wanted to really express, was someone that this soprano, this lovely young woman had evoked about her life. It had been one of the those relaxed interviews that they are so clever of doing on France Musique. She had spoken about her work with Gabriel Yared on a project but then she began talking about what Singing, as a metier, was like for her and her contemporaries in today's ever changing digital world of music.

Being a soprano had brought her in touch with many different kinds of music, but as well, a great variety of musicians and lots of different kinds of music from Renaissance, Baroque, Mozart, Puccini, Webern, Jazz, etc etc,, She also sings 'scat' (an Improvised version of mimicking Jazz riffs at high speed with wordless syllables). 'Scatting' is a club of great musicians; Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O'Day, and Louis Armstrong, who is acknowledged as being the guy who began doing it on stage and consequently popularised it so many years ago. 

I understood that in the old days, opera singers were always just opera singers. They may have indeed sang dirty ditties in the bathtub for their lovers, but essentially Opera was Opera; and Jazz was Jazz. Men were of just men, even if they were closet gays; and women were women, (ditto for being secret lesbians) A mere eighty years ago it would have been unheard of for an opera singer to sing Jazz or anything of a popular nature. The Western world of yesterday appeared to be an uptight world where segregation and control acted as unwritten rules that coded everyone's colour, sex and work.   

Fortunately, our contemporary life today has freed most of us all up in a messy but creative way (and also freaked out all those leftovers of yesteryear who cannot handle it). We have been released from the rigid labels and categories that had frozen us into statues of both high and low culture. 

So, not only did I hear about Gabriel Yared for the first time, but I also heard something important about myself, a truth heretofore hidden to me and walled off by my fear of the unknown. It was a truth hiding in plain sight, for my own painting (and my own thinking), had already bifurcated into different ways of working almost unconsciously.  

It had never really occurred to me that I could work with such 'seemingly' different notions about making pictures. In essence, I didn't believe that I could actually walk and chew gum at the same time in this Painting life that I was leading. And yet, I there it was, I was doing it nonetheless. It felt to me as if I had been happily married for most of my life despite secretly carrying on an affair for years.

So, this interview had apparently really gotten inside me and I began to finally accept that such different parts of my own 'painting mind' could all live comfortably together inside me simultaneously. It was a revelation to see that I wasn't mad, I was just being creative.

Then I saw that what links both these worlds together both one of Non-Figuration and one taken from a motif out in Nature, was light light itself. If a light was unified in either case, a picture could always work aesthetically. Naturally some would work better than others depending on other factors.  
      

So for example, like Vanessa Bell, I can paint the following picture as easily as I can paint the one below it. They reside in my painter's mind yet they both express different parts of it.

Elephant, February 2018, Myocum, oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 23 December 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

 

Colourman, the tinny tubes and walls of colour, and grandma Moses too

Here is but another universe of creativity of which I've been oblivious all these years. While researching Colourman recently into  the origins of the first 'tinny' oil tubes for my book project, I erroneously came across this small paint company in London until only just a few weeks because after forty years of producing colours, it closed shop. They fabricated ready-made cans of colour for decorators of all kinds. Just from looking at the instagram account which is still up, these colours look sumptuously scrumptious for any hungry painter. What a shame it no longer exists. 

But as I said, I was led down a path into a world of which I had never ventured; wall murals and hand-painted wall paper. And I know why I didn't know of it. It's because I've seen so much mural-painting both inside and outdoors, that didn't appeal to me over the years, that it kind of turned me off the whole thing. I really hate bad painting no matter where, or by whom. 

But what I didn't know was that there was a whole world of wonderful artists (mostly women, it seems) who painted really fabulously original work and much of it fanciful in that truly British tradition of eccentric beauty that many of us artists (world-wide) adore. 

For instance, except for pockets of the very absurd within France, the French generally just don't possess an eccentric gene. Neither do the Americans, and ditto for the Germans, nor the Scandinavians (I think). But yes, I think the Japanese definitely do in a wildly clever infantile way. 

 

FYI, the tin tube of oil paints that set off my side trip into this world, was invented by an American portrait painter, John Goffe Rand back in 1841 in London where he had installed himself looking for work. He came up with the idea, copyrighted it, then made a small fortune which he then lost investing in a novel new idea for an 'Aeolian' piano (don't ask me what it was supposed to be). But having lost everything, he returned to America and continued his portrait-painting business with no regrets. Personally, I love that about Americans, those adventurous ones of yesteryear who dared to take risks and when it didn't work out they just keep plugging away at life with little resentment so unlike the current guy in the White House, hmmm...

But anyway, Winsor Newton bought the copyright and the rest, as they say, was history. FYI, before 1841, painters who went out into Nature to work (like Turner), used pig bladders which were stitched together. Yuck.

But my real point was to showcase this wonderful world of wall painting hitherto unbeknownst to me. I love these things, really great stuff, and typical British. I confess that I plucked many of these images from the internet and they don't have the proper acknowledgement. But, anyway, here are some of my favourite things. 

lamp shades too

                           Melissa White

I've been to Charleston (West Sussex) several times over the years. It's the cottage where the Bloomsbury crowd crowed together to make hay and a bit of scandal back in the day. Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, et all, etc.. etc... Every surface of the house was painted, happily but happily they had pretty good taste. 

And finally, If you have ever wondered if Grandma Moses was ever a real person or not, she was! Read about it below.