Handshake with the past

 6 May 2019

Handshake with the past

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Now after over a year into this little series I can feel that I’m finally beginning to learn how ‘to see’ again. It’s reassuring to be able to respond naturally to the motif with less uncertainty and more trust. My eyes are once again the principle software of my senses as I go out to follow the colour wheel at this hour of heightened melodrama.

This a curious image that I slowly warmed up to as it sat on my kitchen counter top along with a dozen or so others where these studies currently dry out. At first I didn’t think too much of it, but yesterday, for the fun of it, I placed it into a small frame which can help isolate it away from any prejudice on my part. I had initially thought it too straight forward, too simplistic, a little boring even, yet with a bit of time it began to shine for me. Too often the reverse is true, where I think I really like something but it quickly goes off, turning sour like milk. But hey! Live and like is good, I think.

In any event, an image like this possesses a kind of ‘hybrid nature’ reminding me of the confusion that lurks in my mind about the nuanced fluctuations between past memories and these present sensations when painting. It’s the immediacy of the moment, yet at the same time, a handshake with the past. One in the present moment, the other, a compilation of all the images I’ve ever seen and loved, as if stored on a flash drive of visual memories. 

So a painting like this is a rapid and spontaneous combustion of pigments under the colourful constraints of a changing set of elements at the beach. But it’s also essentially a collision between my collective memories and the painting session at hand.  

All these paintings seem to express that I’m more interested in a clumsy and cohesive unit than one that’s pieced together with weak glue and portends to be something made up of miss-matched elements taken randomly from the motif with no rhyme or reason.

This picture came quickly, one of several of the night. Although a little unrefined, it feels fresh and painted as if its colours sprang off the palette like kids running out to recess. It got to its present state in a matter of minutes, so thankfully, I was clear-headed enough to stop immediately. Another brushstroke and I would have wrecked it.

At the same time, I also feel something in it that seems to harken back to Impressionism. This I can accept, because this small series is a workbook full of things that both surprise and displease me all at the same time. I hold the long view, not the short one, so I’m not going to get hung up about individual pictures. That said, there is something else in this image that I like. It’s something flat and rather post-Matisse, a quality that is different and Modernist. So it may be a bastard child of Impressionism and Modernism, I’ve been called worse.

But it’s this flat quality that I seem to cherish, it’s also something over which I have little control, like it’s a software inside me that’s pulling me slowly along on a factory line which cannot be stopped until perhaps the end of my life.