Needs another title

14 June 2019

needs another title

        Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

“Truth is in Nature, and I shall prove it.”

Paul Cézanne

And so declared the man who re-invented Painting after so many sluggish centuries in Europe. Nowadays, I know that art students today wouldn’t go near him because he is a relic from the Paleozoic age. Even me, as a young painting student 50 years ago thought he was slightly Palaeolithic yet when I found myself living in the luminous hills of Provence I was suddenly awakened to his age-old truth.

Art trends today move easily through our elite culture at the speed of the light, so even now, I’m not sure what is the latest fashion but I will declare for myself that painting as a craft will never die out. It may evolve into a myriad of forms; ‘non-objective’, ‘abstract’, what-have-you, but it will survive forever as long as people still need to express themselves in paint. One only has to walk into a children’s art class to see it’s force.

 

But what I really wanted to say is that Nature is almost always misunderstood in this context of Painting. It is most especially so in our time. What does Cezanne mean when he says that ‘truth is in Nature’? What can we learn from it, and does it have any value for us as painters today?  

For me, Like all Art, Painting is always about relationships. Put simply, how do all the parts connect with each other in a picture? Is there a light that holds everything in place? Do colour harmonies clash with errant mayhem? Or with serendipitous intent?? What creates form in a picture? Is there a kind centrifical force tht holds everything in place? With this affirmation, Cezanne asks me these questions in order for me to sort out on my own work, not to copy Cezanne because all really great paintings also evoke these questions for us all. But I had help with this by looking at lots of different painters. From Paolo Uccello to Giorgio Morandi, to even Jackson Pollack. In my early years I learned that Painting is always about how different parts relate to the whole of a picture. And if so, light, or luminosity, must be an important glue. Then I learned by trial and error that Form was held in place by light as if by a central magnet.

It is often said that we like children’s painting efforts because they have a natural and unadulterated sense of colour and design. In a square or rectangle shape, a child intuits its spatial limitations and will include everything that is needed, arbitrarily or not. If they go overboard and fill up a picture with too many items and forgetting the sun, no problem! They’ll place it in wherever it fits. No drama.There is an order in the disorder, but naturally so. A young child generally makes a harmonious and natural unity with elements he/she has collected from seeing and watching the visible world. The child re-creates reality from memories that have been processed and stored like it’s their favourite foods. Of course, I have know scientific research to back any of this up, but it seems true from my own experience of watching kids paint. 

Also, and without any evidence to prove my point, I think most kids at a certain age seem to get this idea of how the parts make a whole picture. I think they also naturally possess natural and uncontrived sense of colour harmony. Sadly though many eventually lose it over time when they begin to conform to a conventional reality imposed by others, sometimes even by the teachers. The relationships aren’t just rocket science but rocket fuel, because when a painter understands this as an adult, they are as free as a young child again, and ready to set off to explore Nature and Art like a tourist.This time around they might even have an old map from childhood to help them navigate their intuition. 

I suddenly bring up all this because of this picture from a few nights ago. It is maybe the most childish picture I’ve done since elementary school, and I love it for that. Maybe the other night I was just lucky to feel free and foolish enough to forget all these pesky things I’ve learned about Painting over my lifetime. One not only needs to paint foolishly at times but be fool enough to think they can paint at all. I can still be so uptight! Honestly, I have often felt like a prison guard watching over myself, and it’s something I’ve really hated about myself for years. When I see painters who let go wildly, and though I may not like their work, I can feel envious.

But in this study, the sky had slipped into a mass of bright red-violet like I had cut open a beetroot and shredded it for my evening salad. The sea mirrored it even if I gave it a more earthy-looking tone. It’s quite wonky, but the effect of the whole thing as a complete unit must have been really strong for me to have come up with this. As child-like as it is, it is truthful to the motid the other night because I was lucky enough to find a way into the picture and make it all work as if in parallel logic. This is what the child in me painted, left to my own devices. 

So when Cezanne speaks about truth being in Nature, I also understand him to mean that as I work from a motif out in Nature, I allow myself to be guided by my eyes, garnering all the necessary information I need to create an image that suits my own imagination. In my own case, the colour harmonies here at the beach are also spelled out clearly in the motif at a specific time of day, so I only need follow them as the sun I drops at dusk. However all these elements may work out in the motif, it’s in the picture, where everything must also work, through the sacrifice of unnecessay elements that impede the pictorial image as a whole unit. Nature feels less like a dictionary and more like a thesaurus, one full of choices to suit the painter’s moment and temperment in front of a motif. When it works, it’s quite fabulous. I’m able to reconnect with a faithful reliance upon my own style which was developed originally when I was still a child.