Waves and Waves of familiarity

19 September 2019

Waves and waves of familiarity

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 September 2019, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

As always, when I venture out to my motif most afternoons I’m never sure what I will paint. All I know is that by the time I’ve prepared my palette, it will always be the motif that itself that will guide me to a visual solution. Without it, I would be a lost tourist in Kyoto without a map. After 2 1/2 years of this very ‘site specific’ work, as my Contemporary Collegues might call it, not only I have I come to trust this motif, but the motif has come to trust me like a dog to its owner. 

I’ve started reading a small book on Rothko’s notes lately, and he said something which I underlined this week because I found something in it that startled me. Writing about Romantics, he wrote:

“They failed to realise that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything unfamiliar is transcendental.”

I’ve read this sentence over and over again, but honestly, it still rather confuses me. What does he mean by the ‘strange and unfamiliar’? What he says appears to contradict how I understand the paintings of some of my favorite heros like Monet and Turner who both repeatedly worked on motifs under all sorts of weather conditions. The routine of painting from the same motifs in Nature appeared to have allowed Monet access into new windows in himself. If I understand transcendance, I believe this is an example. To switch the metaphor slightly, Monet in his painting, walked through the Doors of Perception. 

Ditto for Turner whose watercolour sunrises in Venice are achingly sparse, and yet they’re small precient windows into what was to later arrive in 20th century Painting. An artist like Turner comes along rarely. His watercolours alone opened up a skylight into Modern Art that helped to transform the arc of Painting, even if few at the time understood them.

His spontaneous impressions done from his direct contact with Nature (including both sunrises and sunsets) among so many other motifs he relied upon, display an obvious counter argument to Rothko. But I wonder if this has to do with the fact that Rothko made many of his paintings in a New York studio without the benefit of experiencing Nature in the wild? 

So, for me, it’s in the repeated access to the familiar that Nature has always openned up her wings to me and allowed the ‘strange and unfamiliar’ to manifest. And so it is for me that a horizon line dividing the sea and sky has given birth to an endless flow of images, as many in fact, as there are waves rolling over the sea. This creative activity is certainly a trancendental experience for me at least. For others I cannot say, but I thing it has to do with how we approach the work. 

Like the story of the Zen master who chides his guest, a visiting learned academic who fills his tea cup too full, exhorting him. “Like your teacup, your mind is too full, you cannot learn anymore.” So too in creativity, as in spiritual matters, if I’m like an empty cup I’ll be like an open and empty mind able to receive the motif at the beach, but if, and when, I approach a motif with a concept in mind I might find myself closed off from the evening session. 

I generally never take academics or professors seriously. And I generally try to steer clear of too many heady ideas in this Painting Racket when they don’t have direct contact with the craft of Painting. But that said, it that doesn’t mean out of curiosity, I don’t investigate them. Because Rothko intrigues me, I read about him like I would any artist. In this creative gig, I think all artists are searching out meaningful regions where we alone can reign because in this creative world, all roads actually lead away from Rome.  

So this study from the other night is so simple it could be mistaken for a shower curtain. on its side. How’s that for art criticism? This amuses me because I’m not against shower curtains, nor do I take all these studies too seriously. They are just quick colourful ideas that at times work wonderfully while at others, just give me great pleasure to both to make and look at. Worse case scenario they’e just tiny pebbles marking a small trail leading me like a map to somewhere open and with a better view.

It was a brisk cool Spring afternoon (DownUnder). The beach was practically empty with only a few ardent runners and dreamy beachwalkers following the shoreline. It wasn’t a great bloom but I made two studies of which this was the first. I was happy to be out there because I had been so cold at home that I almost wimped out and stayed reading on my sofa. Sacre Bleu! But shower curtain aside, this image ressembles that flat simple archetype that has been marinating inside me for some time now. Comprised of but four thick stripes of colour it gives a pretty straight-forward idea of what the beach resembles at a certain hour in a certain season. Looking at it now the colours feel quite ‘dirty’ or broken more than usual, but they work. Come to think of it, it appears less like a used shower curtain, maybe more like a weather-beaten flag, one that’s been flying on this beach for a few year’s now and staking out my place on this beach.