16 December 2021
Under the watchful eyes of la Nina
Here on the East Coast of Australia we are in the capricious hands of ‘La Nina’ who these days is throwing us into a humid cycle of steady rain and wild thunderstorms. I do find all this more agreeable than hot dry summers with the risk of fire everywhere but it has rained so much lately that I’ve only been able to get out to the beach until just the other night.
Being away this work gives me that old feeling like I’m a beginner again, but can have an upside to it so I accept it because I think it grounds me a little more than usual. One nice trick that many artists do when they feel too comfortable, even complacent at times is to switch hands when drawing or painting. I don’t do it enough as I’m not currently drawing much at the moment. But when I do use my left hand I’m always surprised with the results because I even seem to look and see differently. As a wise guy from France once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”
The wise guy was Marcel Proust who said this somewhere in his fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time (which I haven’t yet read). But as a painter, I really love this. Somewhere along the line many of us stopped being curious I think because we stopped looking. And when we stop looking, we naturally stopped seeing anything. As infants, before we could form sentences, seeing was our prime vocation. It’s how we communicated with the outside world via our small one way perspective. But yes, we felt everything too, with our tiny fingers and toes like climbers on a trellis. But my world was mostly a visual one I think. Regretably, too many of us manage to lose this as we grow up, surely seduced by our other senses hard at work and striving for attention within us. Like a musician who first listens, then hears, a painter looks, then hopefully will see. Every sense has its fans, just ask any pastry chef. But I’m a painter for better or worse, and I’ve always been loyal to looking and seeing.
As Proust points out, we do need new eyes; new eyesight, always. This implies a whole new change of one’s mental outlook too. An old friend Charles used to tell me that he needed a new set of eyes to see his wife each morning as they sat down for breakfast. And naturally, it actually was a new experience for both he and his wife each new day. As I understand this, Proust also implies that seeing is vastly superieur to just looking. But looking is just the first step, and sadly, some people don’t even give themseves the time nor credit to even look. This is for me, is at least putting the horse before the cart.
But as usual, I’ve gone off subject. What I really wanted to express is that being away from painting sessions can be good and can shake me up for the better once I get over initial fear of being like an actor who has forgotten his lines. So a bit of fear is also great for keeping me on my toes.
The other evening I arrived to a mixed-up sky of mostly cloud cover but also with small patches of sun, pretty classic. I quickly made a palette and jumped into it. It’s not much, but the sky in this small study, has a nice colour harmony in it that reminds me of an old British textile design they might have used for curtains. I wasn’t happy with the sea, but in the end I left it because, like an actor in a supporting role it compliantly cedes all the glory to the sky.
It’s not ‘fabulous’ or even ‘outstanding’, but just another experiance of looking and seeing which it’s all about each day. I always need to remind myself this when I feel that what I’ve done is ‘great’. It was one of four from that night. But like just one page in a book, one of many that may add up to a larger and perhaps even grander story, I can even find an old fashioned satisfaction in it after every session each day. I’ve heard lots of writers say that by writing a page a day one can create a novel in a year. Working like the writer, isn’t that what any painter does as well?
Anyway, I was grateful to be out painting again under the perilous protection of La Nina. Days are hot as we approach the Summer Solstice.
As The Bears said it ....fear is never boring
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