Agnes Varda, of snails and clouds

8 January 2021

Agnes Varda, of snails and clouds

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 January 2021, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

This was the last of three done the other night. Like all these things, I think of them as souvenirs excised from a fragile moment like a small postcard missing a stamp but sent anyway from a beach somewhere. Because I painted them, they’re all souvenirs for me alone, first and foremost. At times, like long summer afternoons themselves, these may simply ressemble one another indistinguishably but nevertheless, they’re all are each built differently. The biggest thread running through them all is of course, me, and who I am at a specific time in space.

 

Everyday in a painter’s life, remarkable things happen to the senses when painting at this time of the evening. Shapes and colours of clouds are oscillating at the speed of snails. It is only me, who, while painting, moves quickly by grabbing clouds like a destructive child at play. 

Such clouds like these from the other night remind me of the opening sequence of a film by Agnes Varda, about the gleaners of France, aptly titled, The Gleaners and I (2000), which I just saw again last week. It’s a remarkable film which from a remarkable woman, an artist, film director, auteur, and humanist. There are clearly not enough adjectives to attach to this modest French artist of distinct eminence.

But the sequence I’m referring to is of her in the passenger seat of a car while she is filming with a small camera in her left hand. Her right hand, being filmed, is outside the window of the moving car and it gently surfs up and down in the wind. 

Every so often, she manages to catch her small hand opening up wide enough to briefly clasp a compact white cloud high in the sky as they drive along a small country road. While a dialogue goes on between her and the driver, she performed this repeatedly like when a infant discovers the power of its tiny fingers clasping cotton balls. It’s a remarkable sequence captured spontaneously with a small camcorder.

 

So natually, I must also point out that in my own dreamy world, the element of grasping and pinching these untouchable clouds with my hands and fingers goes on rampantly here on the small dune from which I paint in a somewhat more stantionary stance .

The other evening when I arrived, a gentle cloud bank was lying over the dark sea like an enormous seal. By the time I got to this last study everything had softened, and dusk had disolved the large cloud into a sea of smaller ones full of colour like tropical fish swimming through the thick twilight sky. Like Agnes Varda, I too found myself freely playing around with these pastel colours that were ascending into the evening sky.  

Because I had run out of larger canvas boards I had to use this small one I found in my backpack. I was super happy to capture this palest of Prussian Blues that form at the very end of the bloom cycle. It’s really difficult and I almost never get it right but the other evening the defused colour harmonies let me in.