Past and future

9 February 2022

Past and future

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 February 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This will sound banal but, as a painter, I’ve come to understand that each instant has its own a picture in it. My experience has been that painting the sea in the late afternoon has made it easy to witness the natural changes that go on imperceptively during the daylight. I imagine that working in the desert would be quite different and it would certainly change my visual response to how an empty dry landscape would hold and difuse the light during the day. But here at the beach, the light is very much conditioned by the sea.

This study was one of two the other evening. It had been a hot humid summer day and puffy low cumulus clouds were drifting in with a lazy onshore breeze. It can sometimes happen when the conditions are just right that these small balls of cloud catch the last rays of the setting sun and turn bright orange. Above them, at the same time, a hazy dim cloudbase of broken violets remains in retreat like a theatre decor on stage. Luckily, this happened the other night, and I was there to catch it. 

I love this effect and I also understand that it might even reveal to me something from my future. It can happen in a session, or on a particular picture, that I’ll suddenly find myself in the right elevator that goes straight up to a future version of myself. Somedays, it only goes to the second floor, but on others, it may take me all the way up to the top penthouse with a great open view of myself.

How does a painter’s path work in life anyway? Nobody can know but the Muses themselves. Usually, one’s very earliest work will already manifest in the soul of a painter in tandem with their mastery of the craft. But at times, it’s the opposite, like when the young painter appears early on in a messy tangle of inchoate form. Everyone comes to their calling differently.

There is a slab of marble not forty centimeters high that Michelangelo carved an Annunciation into when he was just 17 years old at the Casa Buanaroti in Florence, The Mary mother is in profile, and over her shoulder is a figure of her son carrying the cross in bas relief. Not only does it reveal the greatness of the sculptor Michelangelo to come, but the future of his vision as well. I saw it many years ago at the Casa Buanaroti and it made a huge impression upon me. The bas relif is no more than a centimeter in depth.

Curiously, on a program on France Musique the other day, there was a sublime piece by Shubert being played, and just afterward, the conducter, who was being interviewed, simply said about it, “it was religious without god”. When an artwork hits the mark, don’t we all seem to know what it is, whatever it is?

So, though I don’t think I spent more than twenty minutes on this small picture here, I like the feeling in it. Without it being too obvious, I think I caught it as it was in just an instant, not too early nor too late. I can also already see in it, a picture from my future, one that’s reshaping my intuition. I guess this why we improve with time if we stick with it.