God’s skin, hope and desire

30 July 2021

God’s skin, hope and desire

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 July 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I was looking at this picture from the other night and suddenly realised that I had finally come close to something that fulfilled my deepest wish in this painting racket. At the same time, I also came to understand that it may only please a small portion of the world at large, but hey! Every artist secretly hopes their work will resonate with even just a few people. Is this not also a painter’s right? 

Chilly, chilly south winds arrived a few days ago. I had a few really delicious sessions this past week and increasingly I feel like I’m getting somewhere new. Many of these skies are so delicate that I often treat them with lightly scrubbed washes to ensure their luminosity. It’s something of a throwback to my early days when I was under the influence of Cezanne. But recently, I see that I am ‘lathering them up’ like a barber might do for his clients. I’m using more paint at the moment and it’s changing the way I deal with this essential understanding of light. 

Now, I admit, as a habit, I will sometimes leave just a fragment, a scintilla of virgin white on the canvas board to indicate the brightest part of the ‘picture light’ as a whole. This is a nod again to Cezanne. It completes one half of that notion that came out of the Renaiassance in Italy known as Chiaroscuro. Despite it’s rather ancient connotation, it still aptly defines what drawing is, but not necessarily how it works.

Isn’t it curious how Cezanne can be found in the same breath as this idea from the Renaissance? When one thinks of him one thinks of such brilliant light, one so unlike the light that came up as if out of the crypt of a black ground in the 15th century studio. My habit of leaving the palest of spaces to highlight the brightest spot in a picture isn’t just an empty nod to Cezanne but an ingrained habit that I would be hard pressed to give up, it’s an intuitive habit for me now after so many years. So lately, when I say that I’m using more paint it implies a subtly different way of designing the light in a painting because I’m actually now starting with the light of the picture ‘chiaro’, in great contrast to many years ago while in the landscape when I always began with the dark accents, the ‘scuro’. It’s the light of the sea, so radically different than a landscape in the interior, that has changed my approach to a picture. Today, I’m able to come in with thick creamy brushstrokes of pale light at the very start of the picture. 

I remember a story about, (who else today, but Cezanne). Apparently, when he was painting still lives, (apples, and pears?) but also portraits too, he would place a black top hat on one side of the sitter and a white glove on the other. He worked excruciatingly slow, so slowly, he claimed his eyes would ‘bleed between brushstrokes’. Whoa! But the purpose of the top hat and the white glove was to remind him of the extreme limits of black to white, night to light, hence, Chiaroscuro.  

This picture here, was the last of three studies from several days ago, and as I said previously, I feel it embodies an ephemeral quality that I’ve been after here in this series. That evening was much like many others except that at the end of the session these planes of colour had flattened out serenely in an orderly fashion just the way I like, though it’s rare that any sky conforms to my wishes. This peachy pink sky reminds me of a French market on Saturday mornings when apricots and peaches, pears, and plums, all exhibit a textural colour so close to what I was loading up on my paintbrush for this picture. 

Again, looking at this pale sky from a few nights ago, makes me think of a small anecdote from a book entitled,The Memory of Fire Trilogy, by the wonderful historian, poet, and writer, Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. He wrote that when the Conquistadors arrived in Central and South America, they had of course, brought the bible with them and tried to convert the local people living there. When they showed it some of the local Indigenous tribes there was general astonishment. When they caressed the thin pale paper while holding it up to the sun, they declared to their conquerors that it was the ‘skin of god’. 

Though it came to me many years before my obsession began with this sky here in Oceania, I’ve never forgotten this description. It must have been in the back of my mind all these years. But it’s even rarer for me to approach this ephemeral metaphor until a picture like this comes up in a session and depicts such fragile, delicate light as if I’m painting a butterfly’s wing.

Finding the Renaissance term of Chiaroscuro in this small modernist painting is likely to be a bit of work, but I assure you, don’t be fooled by the pale apricot hues, for the light in this sky is tethered firmly in place by the deep dark sea.