14 July 2021
No brandy? There’s always Morandi!
I’ve been thinking about something recently that figures into this study from two nights ago. Because these are such small pictures, there is consequently less horizontal room to create a wider seascape. Of course, I could create more of a wide-angle effect if I used tiny brushes and painted in the style of the small 18th century Dutch paintings where the sea was small beneath the giant skies overhead, but I’m not that kind of painter. In the photographic lexicon, it would be like using a 28mm lens in order to fit everything into the confines of a small rectangular canvas board the size of 30 X 25 cms.
So I reasoned that in my small pictures, to further push the photographic analogy, I actually seem to be painting with a 50mm lens, which makes the images look more cropped because I’ll be taking in less of the horizon. My pictures almost always appear to be zoomed up to a specific portion of the sea as if I’m a captain on the bridge of a surfaced submarine peering through binoculars at a giant cloud over the horizon.
This study, from the two nights ago for example, is a case in point. It’s sort of right in one’s face isn’t it? I like it but I do admit that it lacks all the earmarks of a traditional landscape. No aparent hints of a foreground or distance that normally help navigate the viewer into the picture. In fact, it could almost be a pressed flower between two layers of glass seen under a microscope. Yet I like it, and there is a freedom in it that reminds me of my old flame Giorgio Morandi who also presents his intimate paintings without much fanfare. Their presentations are often absent the classic parameters that have defined the Still Life genre.
This study was the last of four from a fairly mundane sky that I found myself trudging through without much inspiration when suddenly, out of the blue, and to my total surprise, the sky blossomed open spraying millions of tiny clouds the colour of fuchsia every which way like confetti at a wedding. I love when this happens, I had a field day.
Though I would not compare my small studies with those of Giorgio Morandi, I have always had a big love affair with much of his entire oeuvre since I was a young impressionable child. My father had a book filled with images of his small bottles and cups. Looking back, I can see now that at my attraction was a reaction to all that delicious sensuality of his brushwork and oil paint. One can never know to what extent children are influenced by these attractions at such an early age but they are the mysteries that help form a person. I also remember Philip Guston’s paintings as a child, and it too, made a deep impression upon me. Much later, when I began painting in France his brushwork also hung over me like a shadow.
So over the years, I’ve seen many, many exhibits of Giorgio Morandi, some small, but others, like the retrospective in Paris at the Musee d’Art Moderne in 2008 which was huge and fairly inclusive. I loved it but at the same time, it felt overloaded with so many small pictures all pressed tightly together like a bulging wallet. Too many riches in such a tight space! I had thought at the time. I also noticed that his work can sometimes blur together in monotony when I see too many of them. In such quantity they can lose their individuality, the precious quality that make each of them so extraordinary for us all. I take note of this for my own small pictures which can also visually stray little from one to the next. This should be a cautionary red flag for me if ever I were to show lots of them in a group. I’ve also recently noticed that large exhibitions need a great variety of an artist’s oeuvre so that individual paintings can take a viewer’s breath away, while at the same time, allowing viewers to move breathlessly from one room to the next. This is in itself, an art form for successful curators I think.
“...to see too many at once reveal his limitations”...., said a painter friend to me about Morandi years ago. I understood what he meant, but I didn’t agree in the way he meant it. He inferred that the quality was diminished which I found harsh. My objections were about the monotony of a show, not of the works themselves. For me, small is beautiful, even in large doses, but they shouldn’t be bunched up too closely on a wall which I tried unsuccessfully to explain to him.
Morandi’s gentle obsession of small bowls, cups, and bottles, lasted decades into his life and these intimate mise-en-scenes were painted over and over again in various colour schemes. These arrangements were recycled and shuffled obsessively about over the years ressembling intimate family photographs spanning several generations. I think it’s evident that all artists are rather obsessional, and this is a natural aspect of a rich and creative imagination. But Morandi’s interest in these familial arrangements bordered on an almost erotic obsession as if he were also a curator of his own harem wherein an unlimited variety of small curves and rounded forms could be possessed by him alone at moment’s notice.
When he wasn’t teaching he painted landscapes, or was home in his native Bologna where his life revolved around his work. He had a studio in a comfortably bourgeois family home which he shared with his sisters. His studio was a room at one end of the large home on an upper floor. To access it, he had to pass through each of his sister’s room’s, one right after the next, like what used to be called in New York, ‘a railroad apartment’. This is the one story about him I love the most, for there is a special kind of family home that is inhabited by the adult children whose parents have passed on. The intimacy of Morandi, this soft-spoken gentleman as he was known to be, gently knocking at each sister’s successive door before finally arriving at his small studio each day could be from an Eric Rohmer film. This arrangement of such domestic familiarity no doubt found its way into his pictures.
Like in some bohemian homes, I have a very large coffee table cluttered with piles of books, and parked in a nearby corner of it, is a large book about Morandi. Whenever I feel a certain restlessness come over me like my life is going pear-shaped, I’ll often reach out to it, being so close at anxious hand. So, when there is no brandy, there’s always Morandi.
One of my favorites too. Pass the Morandi, svp.
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