Builders and electricians

18 June 2020

Builders and electricians

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 June 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In France many years ago, I dropped in on a painter whom I used to know. Instead of an education at the Beaux-Arts, he had studied economics I think. He was smart and somewhat of an intellectual even. Despite a French education that shaped him with a rational thought process I appreciated that he became a painter way outside the system from which he came. 

I visited him one Spring afternoon, he was in his garden when I arrived putting some last touches on a picture. Our usual banter immediately turned to Painting, but on this day we spoke of a programme which we had both heard the previous evening on France Musique which had highlighted the relationship between Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. They are very popular and iconic composers who are played often throughout the week. At the start of our conversation, I said that although I like Debussy very much, I was really crazy about Ravel. We began talking about them both, what pieces we liked, etc, etc.

I said that Ravel feels to me to be more like a comfortable armchair straddling the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, a long Romantic stretch, and one in which no doubt, Brahms had certainly napped in before him. Debussy, his contemporary, on the other hand, seemed to be steering music into the 21th century on a skate board. For some reason, I wasn’t even surprised to hear him tell me that Debussy was the superior artist. It seemed in line with his cerebral taste and education. Though this discussion was at least thirty years ago I’ve never forgotten it. Like most things I found interesting during my daily life, I noted our conversation in my diary at the time. I would summarise his thinking thus: 

“Unlike Ravel, Debussy’s musical ideas were not weighed down by an excess of emotion.” He then asserted that because of this, Debussy was the greater artist.

Our discussion that day was, as always, very precise, almost mechanically logical, the way they can sometimes be in France, often even, to the point of didactic exhaustion. But on the other hand, this was one of the things that I truly loved about living in France, a country of thinkers and lovers of not only Art, but of eloquent debate. It’s a kind of a giant cafe, a home to a collective cultural brawl that’s filled with hyper-reasoned participants unafraid of verbal skirmishes. Don’t forget, France is the land where Cyrano de Bergerac slew his opponents by tongue, after all.

Our discussions about Art were also part of our own particular brawl yet also the glue that held our unlikely friendship in place over the years. We shared a certain legacy that was born in a 

fertile French soil, and this allowed our discourse to replenish year after year despite our differences. And yet in this instance, I found myself annoyed by his arrogance and it rubbed me the wrong way. 

Any avid listener to France Musique receives a large dose of both of these composers on its programming on a regular basis, so I had listened a lot to both Ravel and Debussy since arriving in France back in 1973. But for me, I had learned to love artists (of every field) for lots of different reasons. With aging humilty, when it comes to greatness, I don’t generally attach my feelings to a hierarchy of that greatness anymore. I had  learned over the years to critique a particular work of an artist, not the artist, nor their reputation themselves. It keeps me out of a lot of trouble, and it’s for sure, more diplomatic. But it’s also cleaner, a more precise way of exploring and evaluating the Arts over the long haul of history. I’ve found that in things artistic, all roads should never lead to Rome, but away from it, to a squirrelly destination full of diversity and surprise.   

Paul Cézanne is generally considered to be the father of Modern Art, and like Debussy, he ushered into the 20th century a new structural form which broke away from centuries of pictorial thinking as if a dam had burst and swept away most of what was already housed in the Louvre. To a great extent there is much truth to this metaphor. 

Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, isn’t considered in the same light, and yet he, like Ravel, was steeped in the structures of the 19th century, ones that arrived through both Rembrandt and Delacroix, among so many others including many artists from Japan. Yet Vincent Van Gogh almost single-handedly, opened up the palette to more light than the world had ever seen or experienced beforehand. He was a new lightbulb. If Cezanne was the builder, then Van Gogh was the electrician. But according to Emile Bernard who knew them both, Cézanne had heard of Van Gogh and even thought he was a mad man who made crazy paintings. “Il est fou!” He had declared. So, you see how opinions are never facts when it comes to Art. And anyway, I’m also someone who distrusts the word genius, and I try to avoid using it at all costs. But I do use the words: Greatness, Great, Good, OK, and Awful, among others, to describe Art in general, but people too sometimes.

It has been many years since that conversation with my old friend but I’ve never forgotten it. It was a learning curve for me, and I still remember being taken aback at the audacity of it. Today, even more humbled with age, it shocks me now even more. 

So, all these years later, have given me the clarity to see that greatness comes in various colours and different forms, even newer tastes with which I may not yet even be familiar. And although I can be ruthlessly critical of particular works, it’s rare that I slag off an artist’s whole oeuvre, or his or her person. I’ve also learned today, that even thinking like this is an odd form of narcissism. At such a distinguished level of artistry like Debussy and Ravel, where craft melds with vision, comparing two iconic composers is like trying to compare Cézanne to Van Gogh; an apple to a pear. 

Meanwhile, at the beach came this frosty coloured picture from the other night, the second of two studies. It’s getting chilly these days as we approach the winter solstice and the sea looked to be a cool silver blue. I’m still not sure what I think of it but there is something both Modern and flat in it that tells me I’m on my own right and authentic path. In time, it might look more interesting or less so, but it could also be a dud. 

In this moment how can I know? It’s long story, this painting racket. A painter just continues forward, one picture at a time, one day at a time. One thing is sure though, I accept that I’m not a great painter, so I don’t need to waste time worrying about that form of narcissism. To be a good painter is already great enough, because no one will ever paint like me.