Green Dolphin street

12 February 2019

Green Dolphin street

      Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 February 2019, oil on canvas board, 20 X 25 cm

This whole week I’ve been listening to Green Dolphin Street, the iconic piece written by Bronislaw Kaper, but made famous by Miles Davis. It’s a beautiful melody and I’ve been fooling around with it on the piano. Like an infectious pop song it’s kind of been living inside me for days. 

Last year when I got back into practicing regularly, I realised that I was falling in love with the piano again. For decades now I’ve had an on and off again relationship with it. Poor thing, she’s so loyal, and for some crazy reason after all this time, she still seems to love me  through thick and thin like a yellow Lab. But like a Don Juan, I’m always looking over my shoulder at the shinier objects out in life and I drop her for years at a time. Full of remorse, I always return to her every few years with an increased passion and my tail between my legs in shame. Like any love affair, it requires discipline but forgiveness too. I had somehow always imagined that I could pick up music like I saw everyone else doing with such ease and without putting in all the work that’s required. But fortunately, as with all my relationships, I did eventually grow up and I learned to listen more carefully. Gradually, I’ve found more harmony in all my affairs, inanimate and otherwise. Therapists would have a field day with a guy like me. 

But contrary to the Painting world where I must usually draw something over and over again until drudgery reaches dedication, the piano nudges me quickly into immediate delight with its sonorous repetitions and its tentacles of a loving God, not the whip of a ruthless Pharoah. To compare the two art forms isn’t difficult despite their distinct differences. 

They both share a giant universe in which harmonies explore distant galaxies of emotion. If a drawing is a musical idea, then harmony would be the home within which it lives. And if harmony is about how colour relationships interact with one another, then melody would certainly be the drawing which gives it structure. How important it is to have a great melodic line? Most musicians will tell you that it’s everything, for without it, one might swim in a sea of feeling, seemingly forever in bliss. And yet, there are loads of sensuous paintings out there which are full of wonderful colour harmonies but lacking in drawings firm enough to hold them upright. So, although they may deliver great feeling, one could also drown in them before getting back onto solid ground.  

Without a drawing, a painting can go anywhere, or nowhere, all at the same time too. It’s the painter’s choice. If nowhere is interesting, then sure, why not? Personally, I think it would be hard over the long haul to ignore the need of drawing (which is really a pedestrian word for Form). Form is a thing, Formless is no thing, and it’s virtually impossible to render. I, myself, despite my pendantic goings ons about it, love the whole idea of nothing, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to give it a form. There are however, many successful artists who have, and they flit about the edges of both these ideas with great success and long happy careers. But for myself, I think that over the long haul, like for a 747, cracks would eventually appear in the body of work. 

This very small study came from an overcast afternoon a few days ago. Critically speaking, I’m not sure what to think of it, but I like its overall feeling. It speaks to a particular kind of cloudiness that ressembles the worn stone floor of a church, cold and clammy and nothing like the hot muggy Australian afternoon when it was conceived. It had been cloudy all day but as can often happen towards dusk, clouds lift up just enough  to reveal the Prussian Blue backdrop before nightfall. 

An image like this also reminds me why I never use black paint while out here at the sea (which surprisingly, btw, lots of people do). I don’t use it because even just the tiniest bit it on a palette can infect the luminous nature of an overcast sky behind which the sun hides, but still also pulsates. 

Winter Solstice, under a watchful eye

 

22 June 2021

Winter Solstice, under a watchful eye

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 June 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I had not been out much this week. The sky last night was clear when I arrived except for a thin hazy bank of clouds hugging the horizon and the colour of a corpse. I set up quickly, mixed a palette and put a white canvas board on the easel.

 

Everyone around here practices meditation. Many years ago, I overheard a guy talking about his own meditation ritual and I had found him quite pretentious. Around that time though I had thought lots of people pretentious. But hey! No matter, I imagine that lots of people found me pretentious too. I’m sure it’s a global disease (both being pretentious, and thinking others are). Anyway, this fellow was saying that after years of meditation his mantra became so ingrained in his body that he could no longer tell which was doing what, or what was doing which; was he reciting the mantra or was the mantra reciting him? This fascinated me.

In any event, here is where my own meditation  kicks in because though I haven’t a clue of idea how I proceed in a picture, I do understand that something guides me, and I like to think that, like a mantra, it must be the Motif that’s steering the tiller. But the engine behind that must certainly be Nature which is directing the motif and informs painters like me how to proceed, not the other way around. Contrary to many others, I try to watch and listen, I don’t dictate to Nature, or impose what I think I want to do, because my choices are almost entirely contingent upon what Nature wants of me. It shows me not what I think I want to see but what needs to be seen. The motif doesn’t give a hoot about my volition even if I may think I’m making the big and little choices. 

So, this was the first of three paintings. I’m not sure I’m that wild about it but the sky had mellowed out and maybe I had caught some of the electricity I perceived over the horizon. For some reason, both Solstices of the year seem to provide really wild light for days before and after each one. I preferred this first study  more than the other two that followed. It has a sparkling feeling in it like a Perrier on a hot day. But as usual, there are things in each that I appreciate. Sometimes I appreciate things in pictures, both my own, and of others, that manifest something uniquely authentic even if they're not really great over all. 

At one point in the painting session an older gentleman joined me, remaining cautiously at a safe distance while we chatted. I found myself working more nervously in his presence. He was a retired meat inspector. He was fascinated by the speed at which I was able to work. I explained that I was an anxious child but he didn’t blink an eye. 

Of course, on this night there was a pretty crazy crowd on the beach, much like usual for such a pagan-like event and it’s often that people come by to take a peek at what I am up to here on the dune. I know that I am a strange sight for sure with my paint-covered smock wrapped over an old white hoodie. I not only look weird but I’m engaged in this weird-looking activity. Several hippies came by to see what I was up to, only to scamper hurredly back down to the beach. By the end someone was doing a dance with torches that lit up the twilight sky as I packed up to leave.

So, at least my last three pictures done on the Winter Solstice were painted under the watchful eye of a kindly gentleman named Warwick, a retiree, and originally from a small town in Victoria.