Curve

 

14 July 2019

Curve

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 10 July 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

This was the third study from the other night and it portrays a fairly typical winter sky at dusk when the afternoon has polished it clean. I like it. Like lots of places near the sea, winter skies here can be pretty wild and this captured the intense luminosity from the other evening. It's such a surreal interpretation that only a painter like myself could do it so spontaneously. No hubris, just a fact. It took me maybe ten minutes.

It may seem to silly to admit, but I realised that if I hadn't been there to paint it, no one else would have ever known about it. Oh sure, a few beach walkers and a couple of surfers might have seen something like it but not this particular image because it has more truth in it than anyone's memory, or photograph for that matter. There would be no record of it. Although we can all be witnesses to it, it needed a painter to capture it, for otherwise, it may have been lost forever and still bounding out into the immense memory of the universe. 

I think this is the extraordinary thing about all art, whether it's a poem to mark the occasion of a first kiss, or a short story about the first kiss, or indeed a picture of two lovers ready to kiss. It's through art that we can awaken to reality at every instant.

So, the other evening, it had been quite chilly and for some reason or other, I felt rushed. This was a tiny canvas board because I had run out of the larger ones. But I like it for both its small size and its simplicity. There is no grand idea within this image, nothing earth-shattering, just a simple thing which was truthful and executed at great speed. It could be faulted for its wonky-looking horizon line which has a slight curve to it. But hey! Who doesn’t love a curve? Isn’t it Nature’s way of making us all smile? 

And curves are everywhere, in every form and function, from Oscar Niemeyer's Brasília to Zaha Hadid’s magnificent Aquatic Center in London, designed for the 2012 Olympics. To be perfectly honest, I was actually never really a curvy kind of guy when it came to Art, I’ve always revered the crisp honesty of both the square and rectangle, man-made inventions, and ripe for a clean and uniquely adulterated expression. But to be really, really frank, I’ll also admit that I'm actually a square. For most of my life I’ve been a really uptight guy who needed control, something to hang onto even when there was nothing to hang onto. I needed anything to kill the insecurity living deep down within me like a jelly fish. But if there is one thing that cannot be controlled, it’s the cool curve. In Nature, it rules. It follows no one’s advice, it's original, and let's face it, it's a chip off the old block, our planet Earth. 

But there’s another reason I’ve always been suspicious of Nature’s curve in all creative things. It’s because I’ve always been uncomfortable with the copy-cat mentality of trying to imitate Nature’s squirrelly designs out in the architectural and commercial worlds. I never liked those tree-trunk bedside table lamps or the Steiner-inspired homes with wonky-shaped windows and curved roof lines that have inspired hippies the world over to recreate mushroom-shaped abodes. Honestly, if I wanted to live like a hobbit I’d just go to New Zealand. But hey! That’s just me.

But there’s no reason to hold all this against the curve just because of my own prejudice and dislike of an overzealous global craft business. 

The curve is quite cool and I've warmed up to it over time. Somewhere in France, I recently saw a city library where millions of books were displayed in large free-standing curved walls that weaved around the room.

And I was at a dinner a few months ago where the wavy outdoor table curved around dinner conversations providing intimacy for a dozen people. In fact to my happy disbelief, the world is full of cool curves, and it’s reassuring for me to release my old, stubborn bias.

Even in this small abbreviated study, its form only hints at the suggestion of a curve, like it's really a mistake of Nature's and not mine own. 

The thing is, everyone must paint the way their emotional needs require them to in the moment even if they are bound by prejudices that also bind them. I’m reminded of this bit of criticism that Picasso once voiced about Pierre Bonnard. In it, I recognise my biases.

“He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it’s a little pink too, so there’s no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision. If he looks long enough, he winds up adding a little yellow, instead of making up his mind about what colour the sky really ought to be. Painting can’t be done that way. Painting isn’t a question of sensibility: it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice”

There is a lot in here to unpack as they say these days, though I agree with him that in (Painting) “..it’s a matter of seizing power, taking over from nature...” But for me, “seizing power”, or “being supplied with information and good visual advice from nature...” are not mutually exclusive. Both are viable componants of the Painting process. But of course, I would disagree with everything else he says about Bonnard’s own very personal process of painting. In fact, Picasso's rather bitter critique actually describes exactly why many of us love Pierre Bonnard’s whole oeuvre in the very first place. 

Picasso, like his reputation that proceeded him, was a very assertive painter, a bully with a brush at times, with a big appetite and macho approach to everything according to his biographers, friends and lovers. Why not? After all, life was (and still is), a big crazy brutal and difficult place that too often demands a muscular approach to survive and thrive. But Art isn't really all about that. It's about listening, then hearing. And most importantly for us, painting is about looking, then seeing.

And anyway, every painter will always work at their own rhythm and in their own fashioned way regardless of what others think or feel about it. For me anyway, it's only the end result which counts because, contrary to popular sentiment, a painter's worth isn't based upon an artist's reputation or they sartorial flair. Nor is it based upon their media persona online, it's their work alone that determines their worth. 

So I find Picasso's criticism unsound and silly. I even wonder if he was’t a little jealous of Bonnard’s oeuvre in the same way that he was of Giacometti's? Their temperaments were as different as night and day, one worked patiently the other, impatiently. One luxuriated in the quiet and reflective space while the other seemed to push his way right through it. What’s the big deal? Both are valid if the work comes out well and works. 

Picasso appeared voraciously restless, like a fish that had to keep moving continually ahead, any which way. The upside is that he was curious and constantly trying out new styles and new media. Though really brilliant at times, sadly, he churned out a lot of awful pictures. I think he wasted his great artistic genius on too much mediocrity. On the other hand, Bonnard seemed to just plod gently along his own quiet path to great glory.

Disclaimer: my own way of working is certainly closer to that of Picasso, swift like a snake bite. It's my nature, but oh my,,,, I’ll get in trouble for saying all this. But what the hell, it’s Bastille day in France, vive la Revolution, the personal and the collective.