9 December 2019
Colour enshaded in the Divine
So, over the recent years, my interest with the painting surface has only grown while at the same time my priorities have narrowed. I’m more fascinated with the interaction of colours and how they bump up against each other, rubbing and caressing, kissing and clashing over a surface. These days, the sensuous contact of colour planes seems far more essential than even before.
In this painting from the other evening, one of three, I am almost shocked at how it had all come together. It had been a clear sky and the bloom was as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. And yes, I really like the result here which is both personal and formal at the same time. It's decidedly more about how colours planes co-exist on a unified surface than a picture of the sea and sky. Isn’t this one aspect that helps to give a picture its subtle but rich dynamic vitality? A poor connection between colours will also mean less affinity between the physical picture planes, and this results in a weaker painting. But when there is relevance between colour planes, the whole drawing is glued together. And like at the end of any artistic process, despite everything, it should appear completely effortless even though a life may have been shed for it.
As I dives deeper into musical harmony on the piano it’s easier to see more clearly the relationships between Painting and Music. And as one begins to familiarise themselves with flatted and sharped 9ths and 11ths, etc, etc,, and those delicious suspended 4ths, it’s astonishing to hear the melding of chords as they progress through various keys and eventuate into a musical idea. In the Painting world colours behave in much the same way when they fuse onto a surface to create a pictorial idea. If in each case the drawing and the melody are strong, both organic structures will always push towards an eventual resolution. The more developed the relationships, the greater is the work.
I've listened to so many different kinds of music in my life, and it has continuously formed my sensibility over time. I fell in love with opera when I arrived in France after listening to so much folk, jazz, rock and roll in the US. France Musique, began teaching me everything about Classical music and filled me in with centuries of European music. At this same time I was also wandering around museums in France and Italy mostly, but also in Spain and Holland, and everywhere else I could during this pivotal time in my young life. Just the sheer volume of Painting I had looked at during these early years gave me a visual foundation which formed both my conscious and unconscious feelings about Art. At the same time I was still trying to make sense of it all while learning to paint. But as a student, and possibly a painter, and like most young people, it made me impatient to want to be further down the road of life already. I wanted to take everything in, but I also desired to find a path for myself alone towards some meaning.
Here, in Australia so many decades later, I discovered that painting a seascape is really more just about the sky because painting the sky is essentially about depicting the nothingness of air in fact. Like for this picture, the air appeared to me as pink cotton candy, the kind found at country fairs everywhere. But on other days, for other pictures, it could also appear like tomato soup. Yes, it’s oxygen and nitrogen, but it's also just water vapour, and that’s what a painter has to work from. This gaseous air is a chameleon and it can appear any which way depending upon the local weather.
So, the sky here at dusk, being empty of substance, unlike even the sea, or the woody forests or stony mountains in the landscape, holds its colour through some atmospheric nuance of aerial magic. For the painter, there is nothing less solid to work from than this fulgurant airy substance where there are no love-handles onto which one can grab because there are no hills, no arms, no trees, nor branches to hang from. There are no roofs or bricks; no ears or noses to latch onto, for it is an ephemeral world of pure nothingness and working from it can make many painters crazy. Air is a colour enshaded only in the divine; it’s a luminous hue embalmed in the scent of a pale perfume of light. And yet, these frail elements of the picture plane must also be joined and reconciled to make up a whole image. The conundrum! How to paint something from nothing? How to paint the wind?
Somehow, I've managed to find my own way into a form for it, but only through the endless repetition forced upon me in this twilight series at the beach. Clouds of every shape and colour are great teachers.
Thankfully, I've always suspected that the Muses have a special affection for all artists, but seascape painters in particular, are dear to them. They guide us around the sky, in and out of all sorts of weather like we're lost pilots. Why do I feel this? Not sure, it's just a feeling I have.
This study from the other night might be the most Cubist image I've made here at the beach. It's unusual because I never found a way into this movement enough to explore it even out of curiosity. But no matter what kind of painting one makes I think every painter has to deal with the essential problem of connecting one plane of colour to another in order to form the image as a whole unit. How we build an image is a communal problem for us all. A picture can succeed or fail from this one structural issue alone. It's the ligaments beneath the sexy colours on the surface that hold everything in place in a painting.
So, like all those flatted 5ths and sharped 9ths that smoothly blend one chord into the next, these planes of colour in this study fuse together the fractal edges through airy sensual brushstrokes.
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