2 June 2019
Drunken Noah
These are glorious skies that grace us each afternoon, and chilly nights that follow. Two studies from the other day, this was the second. I'm not sure how good it is but the session was full of colour and it was really pleasurable despite the chill in the air.
I had a sudden insight the other night but it seems so obvious that I feel almost too foolish to admit it. On the drive home from the beach the other evening I was ruminating about all the chaos and disorder going on in the world at the moment when I suddenly wondered if maybe the whole point of ART is to counterbalance it all with order. But of course, the world has always been spinning out of control and it's mostly due to human misbehaviour.
I mused ruefully that perhaps in a world where darkness represented all of humankind's cruelties and greed, then wouldn't light surely be its opposite? Could it also be possible that artistic endeavours everywhere, might function also as healing properties, like angels circling playfully around this volatile world of humankind?
I'm not trying to be fanciful, nor am I naive or idealist, it's just a proposition that aired itself while driving home in my old car the other night at the start of winter.
I was actually thinking about Painting but then it occurred to me it’s really about creativity isn’t it, Literature, Architecture, and all sorts of music and dance, etc, etc? Everything, the whole kit and caboodle. If we believed that Art (unlike Nationalism), is a kind of bridge to something reasonable and beneficial to all society as a whole, then couldn't it be seen as a kind of bonding glue to connect us all?
Yes, this sounds so obvious, it's almost so silly that I hesitated to follow it further. And yet, on a personal level, when I accept that Art has fused me back together and made me whole again again, it made me wonder whether or not it's been doing that ever since humankind first began being creative instead of adversarial.
But even further down into this rabbit hole, I also wondered just how order and disorder, are expressed through any artist? Around me (and in the world) I notice many artists who want to break the world apart in their art work through disconnected imagery and disrupted subject matter. That's cool, if it works. We all have to do what we all need to do after all, otherwise, why bother with any of it?
We may as lie on a beach in Jamaica drinking rum all afternoon.
Why then is it that my own desire yearns for the complete opposite? Are their lives so composed and whole, that it permits them the luxury and freedom to express such formal collapse in their art?
Me, on the other hand, I'm always trying to put things back together, to bond elements whether they be in a picture or in my life. I seem to be trying to tie everything down like I’m on a small boat in stormy seas.
In my own case I'm pretty sure I know where it all came from, this old sense of dread and fear of being out of control. I came out of a dysfunctional house, full of disorder and violence, so I understand why I'm always searching for some kind of ordered calm, both in my personal life and in my creative one too. Are these pictures a kind of psychological response to my place here in the world? I've always been searching for a comfortable foxhole, actually. I was a Drunken Noah, in love with sleep because I couldn’t handle the world war.
I’m also the guy that's looking out at the sea and sky at sunset when colours want to peel off in any number of directions and I’m the one trying to catch them all like they’re butterflies in a field. But I am trying to make sense of a motif so that its pictorial incoherence can be legible for others to read. If a painter’s job is to convey an idea, or a feeling, then mustn’t it be legible for others to also feel and experience? We're no longer infants anymore, I mean, what would be the point conveying gibberish to each other?
I feel like I’m walking out on a tightrope with all this but hey? I like heights.
Yes, I know, I know, stop making sense, it's a clever catch phrase for a POP generation, but eventually we get to an age when we really must begin making sense of things or we start to go crazy, possibly conspiratorial and nutty because we're no longer grounded. But then, I’m not God, who knows the answers to any of all this? I’m just a painter, a drunken Noah of sorts, trying to save myself through small pictures. What could go wrong?
But another thing I realised the other night in the middle of all these thoughts is that I am finally practicing what I should have learned so many years earlier, that it’s the daily work, that's the ticket out of out of confusion for anyone who trying practice a craft. Had I known that earlier I would have saved a lot of energy.
This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever stayed so long on a motif week after week, month after month through all these seasons here, because it continually offers up something for me each new day. If it didn't I wouldn't be coming back for more. But to be fair, there isn’t a great variance to these seasons especially on a simple motif like this. But the steady attention to it over time is what I had missed most of my life. And yet, it’s everything for a painter, how could I have missed this?
Being an artist isn’t about all my fantasies, the endless rumination and dreamy ideas that make up a painting trajectory, it's about the concrete work produced on a steady basis, and yes, a routine grounded in devotion. Everything else is just fluff, maybe interesting fluff, but fluff all the same.
When I think about how much time I’ve wasted in trying to find order in my life by thinking, I'm appalled. I’ve lived the life of the drunken Noah depicted so beautifully in stone on so many Romanesque Churches throughout Europe. But remarkably enough, something shifted for me years back in my own Dark Ages and I’m grateful for it. I feel like I awakened from a long dream and in many ways, it's this series that has jolted me upright.
This study came after a struggle as the whole colour harmony appeared to collapse towards the end of the session and left me at a loss. But being a good fantasist, I faked it accordingly.
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