Hiatus, and the approaching storm.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This study is from almost two weeks ago when I finally got out to my small perch on a cliff overlooking the sea. I made two that night and I wasn't terribly impressed with either but this was the better one. It has held up for two weeks  so I am putting it for scrutiny.

We've had so much rain this winter that I've slipped into a state of somnolence vis-vis this 

motif. Even on clear days when it looked decent to get out there I've stayed home where the winter chill cannot penetrate me. So, actually, I've just been lazy and cold.

But it has raised the question of whether or not I even still wish to pursue this motif. ? At the moment I am still finishing up a writing project at home, one that is going almost three years now, so I'm busy. And what with so much work to do around the place here in the country, I really need to better organise my time, something I've never been good with. The good news is that it will soon be warmer and the days are already getting longer so everything's looking up.

I would hate to let go of this beach series  because even whether or not the work is any good, it provides me with a therapeutical shield against so much awfulness out in the world. Let's be honest, Gaza is a horrible tragedy, but Trump has a way of even eclipsing that bad situation. With each passing week many of us watch with horror as that Orange Turd wrecks even more of this already fragile system we call America. It's disheartening at every level and all my friends are depressed. I, too, can let it get to me if I didn't practice one form of creative Art or another. 

I awaken each morning and begin doom-scrolling immediately on my phone. Whoa! A bad habit for sure, but I know I'm not the only one. Into the kitchen to make a strong black coffee, then I proceed to the piano and to begin, I jump into the most difficult piece I'm currently working on. After ten minutes I have left the doubled world behind me. I'm back in a space where I cannot be touched by anyone. After about two hours I feel alive with optimism, so I am fortunate because I have a solution, an antidote to facing the world each day.  

I was listening to Brahms last week, his intermezzos and fantasies from the Opus 118, the sublime ones he composed towards the end of his life. I'm sure I've said this before, maybe even in a several pages over the last few years, but this idea that Art can change the world, as some very idealistic people believe, is just not true. It'a lie to make people feel better. OK, why not? But Art cannot change nor save the world. If it could have, then after Brahms, WW II, would never have happened. Art cannot change the world but what it can do is help each individually either as creators or as passionate lovers of Art. But even that is a slim sand bar to stand upon because look at what all those cultivated and artistic Germans did to the Jews even after J.S. Bach and Mahler. Forgive my dark take, but only as individuals can anything be changed.     

For fun, here is a small painting I made when I was home from France after my first year there when I was learning to paint outdoors. It was kicked about for many years before I realised that there was something in it that I think managed to catch an approaching storm. It's a rough cut, like an unpolished diamond, but it reveals a painter who had a feeling that just needed to refine it through learning this wonderful craft. So, evidently, my heart and soul have been fascinated by the the sea for a very long time. 

South Beach Fishers Island, New York, 1974, oil on canvas board, 36 X 28 cm

Prayer for Sarajevo, 1995, but Gaza too

Untitled, Châteaunoir, 1995, oil on canvas, 50 X 42 cm

They cut off noses in Bosnia, Châteaunoir, 1995, oil on canvas, 55 X 45 cm

Untitled, Châteanoir, 1996, oil on canvas, 50 X 42 cm

Prayer for Sarajevo, Châteaunoir, 1995 oil on canvas, 140 X 90 cm

Untitled, Châteaunoir, 1996, oil on canvas, 50 X 42 cm

      La Honte, Châteaunoir, 1998, oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

The Annunciation, Châteaunoir, 1998, oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

L'Enfance, Châteaunoir, 1997, oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

Untitled, Châteaunoir, 1996, oil on canvas, 120 X 100 cm

Auschwitz Again, Châteaunoir, 1996, oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm

 Untitled, 1996, oil on canvas, Châteaunoir, 50 X 50 cm

Here are some things I made a while ago back in France in my small studio at the Châteaunoir. It was back during the height of the war in Bosnian war. For some reason I was very affected by it. I had pasted on a wall a cut-out photo from a newspaper of a young boy touching the head stone of his father at a cemetery. it triggered something for me. So I made a few small studies which then became a small series. 

I didn't paint this series centred around the war in colour because I was basically afraid that I wouldn't keep the focus on the brutality of what I wished to express. I was also afraid I would obsess about colour and that I couldn't get it right and this prevented me from working quickly. Honestly, I was worried that my perfectionism would bring out my procrastination. This is something I struggled with most of my life. 

And as many of us know, war is a destructive activity. The shock of the Vietnam War, not only for both the Americans and Vietnamese peoples, but for the whole world. It was a setback of terrible proportions since the start of the United Nations began after the second World War. Was it too naive to believe that humankind might begin to resolve their conflicts through dialogue and negotiation? Up until then, all we seemed to do upon this earth was plunder and rob while destroying everything in our way. Civilians were casually exploited for labor or sex. So indeed, the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end go the 20th century came as a rude awakening to all who had committed themselves to practical negotiated settlements of disputes. 

Today, there are wars raging in Ukraine and in parts of Africa and Asia, but in the Middle East too. Israel, a country I've travelled around in for months, full of the most cultured people in the world is starving the population of Gaza as I write these words out of vengeance for what happened two and a half years ago when Hamas murdered one thousand citizens of Israel. Both sides in this conflict are male and full of hatred. Is it ethnic or religious loathing? One could have asked the same questions about the Bosnian war.  

There are idealists, of which I am not one, who believe that Art can change the world. If that were so how could Germany have slaughtered so many people after Johannes Brahms had written his suites Opus 118?

Will civilised societies ever learn? Judging by current wars, it's not likely, but that doesn't mean that poetry and music will not flourish in between foxholes and missiles. Ukraine proves that, and God help them.  

When I was packing up the Belvedere in the Drôme to sell it I put about a dozen of these images around the studio. A friend brought her new beau over for lunch, and afterwards we went up to the studio that was mostly boxed and cleaner that it had ever been. The new boyfriend, who was a therapist, began looking at the pictures. I watched him walk slowly around while looking carefully at each of them. When he turned around he had tears in his eyes which moved me terribly.

Sadly, most of those paintings were later ruined here in a flood in Australia and worse, I hadn't taken any photos of them. But here (above) are a few remnants. 

As I painted them in my small studio at the Châteaunoir, I was also painting out in the landscape and working in full living colour during this time. So I straddled two worlds of image-making; one from an invented memory in my studio making large paintings like the ones above, the other, from colourful motifs out in Nature. Below, are just a few things from outdoors during those years that reveal the stark contrast of sensibilities that lived within me at the time. 

la Chaise, Châteaunoir, circa 1990's, oil on canvas board, 50 X 50 cm

Irises, Châteaunoir, circa 1990's, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

L'assiette, Châteaunoir, circa 1990's, oil on canvas board, 5 figure

La tasse, Châteaunoir, circa 1990's, oil on canvas board, 5 figure

                  Untitled, Châteaunoir 1996, oil on canvas, 3 Figure

Who done it? Lois Gibson, the artistic sleuth

Lois Gibson has the world record for the most identifications by a forensic artist. Her work cracked 1313 cases over a long career in Texas.

She worked without videos or photographs and often from the memories of traumatised victims.

She not only appears to have a remarkable talent for understanding how visual memory works but she can do it through the memory of a third person. It's pretty extraordinary.

Tucker Nichols, the possibility of Art

 

                 Flowers for your friend with a truck

My dear friend Claire de Chivres (another artist) sent me some images and texts from a wonderful book she was reading by Tucker Nichols, an artist, and obviously a bon vivant living a cool life in Northern California. 

These are two landscapes I pulled from his website which sells for $500, which I think is a wonderful price. Not too much for a lover of Painting, but an amount fair enough for an artist who obviously throws these things off pretty quickly. A Win Win, I think. If I weren't watching my pennies, I would jump on these two landscapes myself.  

There is so much I like about the way this artist works that I would need a few weeks to properly absorb all the ideas that pop up out at me while looking at his work.    

I don't know anything about him but I would venture to say that he definitely comes from a graphic place back in his Art education if indeed he even had one. I just love artists who break down the visual world into somewhat of a flat structure. But it's rare that I see many graphic artists who possess such a great sense of light which arrives from the 'Fine Arts'. I say it's unusual, except for the really best ones who usually sell to high end magazines and newspapers like the New Yorker and the NYT because their quality is the best. 

I do have this notion that since Matisse brought Painting down to a flat surface it seems somehow, almost impossible, at least for me, to go back to a Renaissance configuration of depicting reality. This is just me though. I always still struggle with how to represent reality in a two dimensional form. Aren't we painters always looking out for a way to express a verisimilitude in a way that conforms to our own vision of the visual world?

When I go flat, I am secretly surprised and always happier. The golden-coloured clouds crossing the mountain (above) is both childishly absurd but also sophisticated smart. This is the kind of picture from an artist that reminds me of all the possibilities still left to be exploited in this unique human pastime that we call Painting. Tucker Nichols is on a ledge, one with a great view, certainly, but also one of certain uncertainty. A real artist!   

I love the playful quality in these things, because God isn't the only one who knows what a nightmare we are all living at this moment. God must be a trickster to have thought up such a perfidious fool like Trump just to see how we all would react. He is a fun fellow to anoint his work with such clever titles.  

I love his colours. I love the quick spontaneous feeling in all of these things and I'm envious of so much use of florescent colour. Not sure if he uses just gouache or acrylic, or perhaps both, but he appears unafraid of the challenges of using either of these mediums to carve out an original form of luminosity that mirrors the classical mode of Fine Art. But he has a remarkable sense of colour, one which matches his abbreviated sense of drawing. 

I like everything about his work but it's his sense of colour that turns me green with envy. I have been wanting to make a switch over to acrylic for many of my own larger pictures so thus, seeing these things has inspired me. 

His book is entitled "Flowers for things I don't know how to say". Gotta love that. 

Flowers for whoever is DJing the pool music