Corot, Corot, I know, I know,,,, gentle gloom

5 November 2021

Corot, Corot, I know, I know,,,, gentle gloom

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 4 November 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Dark rainy Springtime clouds have been visiting us for weeks now. Only a smattering of sunny days has allowed me to get to the beach to make anything. Happily though, it’s forced me into the studio to face my scary demons in the form of large paintings.

But the weather brightened two days ago and I zipped out there to see what I could do. This is one of two studies which are not great but I was relieved to just get out to work a bit. This was the third and it looks and feels to me vaguely “too 19th century”, as we say, but it is what it is, and I accept it gratefully. 

Generally, the evenings arrive with their own particular light which then maps out possible routes for me to follow. How I proceed, though I hate to admit it, simply depends upon my mood in doing what I am open or closed to do. Every sky may look the same but it’s never completely so. While setting up I glean what I can from them and armed with these initial perceptions, already, I’m able to plunge into an unknown destination. How could I not be grateful for this easy set-up?

The other night was mostly clear with the usual bit of fuzz hanging about over the horizon line. I spent too much time on the first study but afterwards, when the sun had set and the sky in front of me had softened, when the strength of the day had seeped out, I was left with these sensuous gray forms still clasping onto a fragile breath. Out of the blue I thought to myself; “This a Corot moment!” 

Sometimes clouds can appear so fragile it’s like I’m picking up an errant flower blossom that has glued itself to the wooden deck after a light rain. The funny thing is that I’ve never been a fan of Corot. Yes, he’s great, too great perhaps. But like Degas, he’s also almost too perfect and I’m left cool to his craft, but then it all comes down to a question of taste not talent, right? So on this night, like in a Corot, the lingering light diffused these gentle forms evenly as the dusk infected the evening air with its own gentle gloom. Suddenly, the painter in me awakened to the task of finding a solution for these dying traces in the twilight sky. 

The problem on evenings like this was purely a technical one; How do I see my palette in this fading light? Without a sliver of a new moon overhead to guide me I’m quickly lost. And twilight, as anyone knows, doesn’t wait for stragglers on the beach. That is a great shame because in this tenebrous gulf that left me colorblind, the sky high overhead, still radiated with a delicate luster beckonning me for another go at it.

So I dashed off this last study like an after taste. Looking at it now, a day later I find myself doing a post-op on it. What I really like in it is the way the sea was carved up not only with colour but form too, because it’s divided quite primitively into three zones. The whole ‘block’ of the sea was painted with a dry brush giving the surface an unfinished feeling that mimics the luminosity of the fragmented cloud overhead.

In the very foreground, a cold discreet band of broken Prussian Blue was laid over it with another dry brush. The last thin stripe, as it were, separating the horizon from the sky is a very broken, slightly warm Ultramarine Blue that softens the transition into all the warmth of sky overhead. All of this happened within minutes, and that speed prevented me from even being conscious of any of it. I haven’t a clue how it was done, and this is why I work quickly and without much hesitation. When I’m present, I’m not there.

I like it, yet the more time I spend with it, it already seems to fade away, becoming a distant memory. Tomorrow is another day, another study. Nice, this painter’s life, I think to myself.