Swiss Time

8 March 2021

Swiss Time

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I think it took about 15 minutes, and though it’s not terribly exciting, it works in a certain way. It was a great exercise, but then, aren’t they all? Like a battery, there’s enough truth in it to power it forward, maybe even forever, but we’ll see. It is of a specific place and time, one that gives it a particular feeling about that exact moment in the afternoon, and this for a painter, is reassuring. The painter will be long gone and forgotten, but no worries, like we say here DownUnder, for what remains of him will be perhaps a melancholic relic of his own ecstasy.

I’m a fool, but not a big one, I fully understand that these small studies are of little value to anyone beyond the walls of my own home because let’s face it, there are already way too many small pictures on millions of walls around the world. Think of all of them in just one country alone, a place like Switzerland. How many cute chalet walls, celler taverns, and gasthofes must share their wall space with cuckoo clocks and small seascapes from Sorrento or snowy depictions of the Materhorn seen from sunny pastures full of cows? Goodness! And inversely, what about all those views of the Materhorn that adorn the hotels of Sorrento and Anacapri? 

But yes, little pictures of all subjects are cranked out for hotel and motel walls the world over. I wonder, does anyone ever look at them? Older couples may get into lumpy beds underneath them and quickly fall asleep but young couples will make crazy wild love underneath them in large king-sized beds, and sometimes even, one of them will find themselves looking straight at the Matterhorn against cheap wallpaper in absolute ecstasy.

But for me, the point isn’t to cover walls, but to find joy in these painiting sessions. Because that’s why we should do any work or sports we’ve chosen. I heard a guy at the tennis courts the other day say that he never played any sport except to win. I thought to myself, how strangely different we all are, because I only ever played any sport for fun and the enjoyment of it. 

So what happens to these studies is always secondary to the challenge of making them. This is a very un-American notion, I know, but hey, I moved to France early on and adopted their highest esteem for arts (and artists). This may come as a surprise to many in the public, who like Swiss bankers might only think of the financial upside (and downside risk) of each activity we perform in life. But even some artist like me who take this long view, may also be foolish enough to believe that making Art (writ large) is right up there with one of the greatest things to do during our short and insignificant lives here on earth.

I used to imagine that all my self-worth was contingent on commercial success or whether or not people liked my work. I soon realised that people can like and admire the work but still not buy it. It’s better to learn that early on in life, I soon came to understand, though not early enough. My pictures may never find walls upon which they’ll find a home, so what? They’ll be homeless. So again, my validation always come from how this artistic life allows me to live better in an oftimes difficult world.    

And because the Painting experience is the joy, not the result. If one makes a living, so much the better. A friend once told me that an artist must embrace poverty but that only sounds heroic when one is young and life appears long, deep and wide. Being poor and older is another story, doable, but still abnother story.

I think it was Bernard Berenson who once said that Painting is an impossible vocation if one desires fame and fortune. He said that the only way to make it work was to either come from wealth or marry ino it.  He cited Tiepolo (the elder) and Guardi, as two Venitean painters who embraced this idea and made it work for them. Of course they were also brilliant too.

I had a headstart when my parents died early and left me with a small inheritance. Because I decided upon an artistic life and I had fled to France early, money was a means to an end not the other way around. Free time was both the ends and the means to being able to paint. Shortly afterwards, I luckily bought a large empty space downtown in New York in the 1970’s, and I was able to stretch it out slowly into a life in France until like bubble gum it eventually popped. Money afterall, provides one with time. What we do with it? Waste it? Kill it? Squandor it with inattention? I’ve done a little bit of all these things actually. 

With attention, or with inattention, bank accounts rise and fall, they can fill up but empty out just as easily. Isn’t it how we spend our time that’s more important than how we spend our money? Most of us choose to have more time, or more things in our life, but the lucky few usually have both. The majority of people around the world live hard lives in poverty and with almost no choices. But for those lucky people who do have choices, isn't time the most expensive gift in the world? So a fine Swiss watch piece is a grand metaphor for both money and time.