30 March 2021
Mantegna’s cap
This was the first of three pictures from the other night. This unusually austere, but sensual study, reminds me today of Montegna’s magnificent portrait of a young man in Napoli at the Capodimonti museum. Personally, I think he was the greatest painter of the Rennnaisance. This is a very small portrait, maybe only 25 X 15 cms tall and seen in profile. He wears a rose-coloured cap virtually identical to this pink sky, hence my association. I can often fall in love with certain paintings but this intimate portrait by Andrea Montegna, I place in a special in my memory. How does one fall in love with a work of art? It’s easy for some of us, it’s certainly as easy as falling in love with another person and less problematic too. But the feeling is the same if you are a painter, because you are pierced right through the corps of who you are. A work of art is a top-of-the tree sort of love, and it will always grow taller for you, and will never deceive you or let you down, or talk back. Whether it be an opera aria, a film, a book, a picture, or a small Mayan figurine, the love of an artwork can a perfect and everlasting union. But obviously it’s not for everyone. Some people love their cars to death, polishing them each weekend, while others worship their dogs and cats more than their spouses. It’s a deeply personal thing and that is the way it should be. Isn’t that what is so wonderful about Art? Like a girlfriend or boyfriend, our love interests come in all shapes and sizes, with or without tattoos. It’s our own imagination that creates such attraction, our lust and affection. It’s a true democracy of feeling and we’re free to love what we love, but even better, we can make of it all what we wish. It’s like a giant food hub like one sees in Singapore where our choices are almost limitless and where the varieties on offer makes one hungry or horny by just having a peek at it all.
So, that said, I house an enormous affection for this small study of mine own from the other evening. I think it’s actually my very, very favorite one out of several thousand done so far from the beach here at the evening hour. In fact, if it had been painted by someone else it would still not dim my infatuation for it, not a bit. That it was painted by anyone and that it exists somewhere out in the world is already an extraordinary thing. Why? Who knows? Let’s just say that it rings my doorbell.
I sometimes imagine that I can traverse culural time zones in a flash with the ease of a child’s flexible imagination. It’s one that allows me to
It’s a cockeyed world where I can flit about easily between pictorial things and intemporal places.
exists in my head of course, because all these artifacts from so many periods of history long gone.: pre-Columbian, Cycladic, the Middle Ages, the Rennaissance, and Africana and Asian art to our own ‘Contemporay’ world of Post-Modernism. Everything in my time-bending cultural mind is completely fluid as the painter I seem to be in this 21st century. It’s confusing because it asks me what it means to be authentic. That’s always a great question to ask one’s self in every circumstance in life. How often do any of us contemplate our histories both personal an collective? We sit upon a treasure trove of riches going back 10,000 years, or longer, and yet we don’t seem to use it as either artists or philosophy students. Why not?
Lucky for me, this humble motif seems to be my own private philosophy teacher. By day it’s just another humdrum-looking tropical beach but by early evening it’s transformed, like watching a woman dress for a night out, it’s magnificent thing to behold. And just like a person whose life is enhanced by a partner, I too, can be transformed by this motif at dusk, and it completes my own sense of well-being,
It’s such a small picture to get all worked up about. I freely admit, but then I think it must be not unlike how any engineer might feel when the project he’s worked on has left the hanger and now flies overhead transporting millions of passengers to far off places around the globe. Is it pride one feels, or love? Or both? Does it matter what it’s called? Isn’t it that sensation that arises in a person who has discovered both of these feelings all wrapped up in a bundle like they’re a proud parent? Painters too, can feel like parents sometimes.
So yes, I really do have an emotional connection with this picture for some odd reason. It may seem strange to hold such feelings for a picture but I would add that it’s not just a picture or the motif, but more specifically it’s a space in which an artist has fallen in love. It has meaning. I’m reminded of one of my very favorite films from the 1990’s called The Object of Beauty wherein a poor deaf maid working in luxurious London hotel steals a small Henry Moore statuette from a room. When asked at the end of the film why she had taken it, she replied to the police, that it had spoken to her. And that, is what Art is all about for many of us.
So, I spoken of my emotional attachment to this small picture, but now critically speaking, I’ll address why I think it works. As a painting it’s as inventive and concise as any painting I’ve ever admired anywhere. Though I may come off as pretentious, this small thing is itself quite unpretentious. I daresay that a young child with talent could very easily have come up with such an image because it’s a simple idea is reduced down to just a few stripes of colour. They are however ones that correlate to Nature via the motif at the beach. My only regret with it is that I cannot seem to ‘scale it up’ to a larger format successfully in the studio. I cannot seem to get close to the same spontaneity of it. I hope in the near future that will change for me.
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