Irrational Romantic

20 May 2018

Irrational Romantic

                       18 May 2018 30 X 25 cm

It was decidedly chillier this night but the sun warmed quickly up the morning and the birds were suddenly everywhere. They help my spirit resist these shorter days.  

A large cloud bank had rolled in from the south and sat on the horizon for this study from the other night, one of two. At the beach too, it’s chilly and the frigid sand reminds that I’ve forgotten to wear socks again.

Verisimilitude is on my mind these days. When I sneak away from it and leave its familiar shores, I’m always happier with the results. To achieve a level of verisimilitude is hard enough in its own right and one needs to be a pretty good painter with an able technique. I’m not that kind of painter because I never learned that sort of technique, but nor was I very interested because I’ve always known that I’m way too messy to be a member of that club. It’s also a difficult path to follow if one has already made a commitment to the ‘Romantic’ tradition like me. And anyway, it raises all sorts of complicated questions about the real nature of Art. An academic painter, I’ve never been, I’m too wild and wooly.

‘Life-like’ is how they describe the meaning of Verisimilitude. And this begs the question of what that means. For me, it follows the academic tradition like that of Ingres, and the Hyperrealism schools as they are still practiced today all the world over. But it gets complicated because Diego Velázquez could be seen as a representative of this ideal version of verisimilitude. Personally, I would still put all his godly talents into the ‘Romantic’ tradition, not into a ‘Realist’ camp because his pictures are always unified through abstract means and despite the number of relationships in his pictures, they each come together and are subservient to the image as a whole. To put it more succiently, unlike the Academic tradition of Neoclassiciscm whereby one of adds separate well-polished parts together to create a whole, a Romantic desires that the sum of a work be greater than its individual parts. 

I am without a doubt a Romantic in the hallowed tradition of Delacroix, who was a hero for me for years after reading his journal and seeing his watercolours and paintings. But he is by no means the only Romantic painter who taught me. Van Gogh was certainly his godson, and one whose attention was strictly focused on how the emotional expression of a painting is measured in a work. As a child of the 20th century but an older guy of the 21st, I can get a little confused about how Romanticism manifests in this contextual art world of today. But for me in painterly terms, it means an invitation to freely interpret Nature through a subservience to an organic whole, irregardless of style. It’s loyalty is to the picture plane as whole unit, not to stylistic parts of a picture, no matter how well painted. It’s not rocket science but one might need lots of lift to get there and get it right.

I suspect that somewhere along the line, perhaps due to Industrialisation, Nature became something, if not inferior, then perhaps something suspect, untrustworthy or just unworthy, through the superior 19th century lens of progress. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not a dreamer, I like scientific and rational behavior, and I also ask for logic and truth too,  especially in both politics and human relations. But everything else in my life, within all its artistic applications, I desire spontaneity, intuition and emotional clarity. In civilian life, I see life through a rational lens, as exemplified by the equation, 2 + 2 = 4. But in all things artistic, 2 + 2 will, for me, always = 5 because I’m an irrational Romantic.

So in this unrurly study one might imagine a Zen monk out at the beach after too much sake; naked, and screaming at the oncoming storm, flinging his long unkempt hair onto the palette and rubbing his head across the small and startled virgin canvas board. All this in quiet contrast to me, a teetotaler, calmly preparing a palette while searching for a way through the clouds like a lost pilot. After initially setting up, it immediately began drizzling, and the clouds were moving in quickly so I simply improvised as best as I could. In the end I managed to wrap it all up and call it a souvenir of my session out there. Looking at it now it feels like the half-sister to the painting of the 16th of April last month.