Marooned on the moon

14 April 2019

Marooned on the moon

      Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 9 April 2019, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

This study looks and feels pretty wonky, but what appeals to me is its flat and naive simplicity. It’s like a mistake that somehow turns out okay. 

I had arrived at the beach early in  order to jump into the sea before the session. Except for a faint veil of cirrus clouds high overhead, it had been an otherwise empty sky that boded well for a big bloom. I quickly prepared a palette, then took my time in the the sea and even laid down on the warm sand for moment, something I almost never do.

It indeed, was a great ‘bloom’ that unfurled slowly as it settled down into dusk.

 

"Nice! Once in a while", I thought to myself, "It’s really, really on,,, and tonight, it really was". 

This was the second of three studies which I had the smarts to leave in an half-finished state because I wanted to keep the idea alive for something in the future. In truth, I just liked the way it looked even though I also thought it lacked something, a finish, maybe? In other words, I could have continued but it would have  turning it into something different which I resisted, so in the end I left it as is, and moved on to another one.

All this melodrama going on at the end of the afternoon is fun to work from but it also provides a cinematic relief from the craziness of the world. It’s easy to forget that what I really love doing is cooking these pictures but careful not to burn their colours. At the same time, I just want to offer these small pictures an eternal life, as unreasonable and egotistic as it may it sound. 

Eternal life, eternal art, these ideas always turn me back towards my hero J.M.W. Turner. What I so love in Turner’s quick watercolours he made at the sea, is how he captured an instant of life which he then managed to lock away for eternity as if channeling Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations, 'Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity'

For many artists, isn’t this a Holy Graal of sorts? It’s the region of human endeavour that rises up to the Gods because it contravenes the rules of mortality set down so inflexibly here on earth. Our lives may be finite but our artistic culture lives on, and beyond. 

OK, so this study may appear scratchy and a bit rough-around-the-edges, especially because it defies many of the prerogatives expected of a seascape. But for all its faults, there is something about its empty warmth, a kind of martian or lunar solitude that feels like it might just live on, and on, forever. 

This suddenly reminds me of a funny story I clipped from the Herald Tribune back in the 1980’s. It was by William Safire who wrote a weekly column called On Language. He was the go-to guy for all things grammatical. But among his many careers, he also was famous for working as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. 

 

As he recounts it, one day he was summoned into the Oval Office where Nixon told to come up with a small text to commemorate the upcoming historic lunar landing. It was to be engraved on an aluminium plaque and left on the moon to commemorate the event. He had already written a brief for the president entitled, “In the event of a Moon Disaster”, about what the President would have to say to the American people in case the astronauts blew up, or were stranded on the moon during the attempt on 29th of July 1969. So After consulting with NASA about the size requirements he went off to write the immortal text.

“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind”

All went well. The landing was a success and the astronauts returned to earth as heroes. Satisfied with himself and proud like every American citizen he continued on with his life uneventfully to eventually became a successful writer with a celebrated career. 

Several years later though, he received a letter by an astute reader who exclaimed surprise at the grammatical error in Safire’s famous lunar text. This reader went on to gently chastise him for making such an egregious error in his monumental text. Did he, William Saffire, not know that a date is never written 21 July 1969, A.D. but A.D. 29 July 1969?

The stunned William Safire confessed that he was overcome with shame to learn that his minute participation in the Apollo 11 mission would leave an everlasting grammatical error planted forever on the lunar surface. Everyone, from the astronauts to the computer geeks associated with the lunar landing felt enormous pride, all except himself, which he acknowledged in a later column. He, the Grammar Guy, had blown his one and only chance of achieving immortality with this one small but historic text. Fortunately for him, his hubris pierced, he had enough humour to let it go and see the un-godly irony in it.