Emily on Christmas Eve, cont

24 December 2024

Emily on Christmas Eve, cont

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 20 December 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I guess I've wanted to speak about how Aborigial Painting has helped me to open up. Though so many of my own pictures that comprise this diary might appear ‘European’, there has always been a thirst to break through the walls of this tradition. The only way I know how to do this is through the ‘making and the doing’ of the work, not by ‘the thinking about it’. 

Most importantly, I’ve learned to let this land lead me to the pictures like one does with a horse to water. As a dear friend once advised me a long time ago, it’s better to act your way into right-thinking, than to think your way into right-action. In the world of creativity, this has come in handy at times when I found myself wanting to run away from the work at hand for whatever reason. Like they say, showing up is 95% of the task, and for a procrastinator like me, I had to get to the root of the problem; my perfectionism. 

Prior to coming to this investigation, I had always tried to think my way into solutions, but not just in painting but pretty much everything in my life that posed me difficulties. In this Painting series though, it was the work itself that led me to answers and it altered the way my mind functioned. This seems to have taken me forever to understand. Most of my life I had faced Painting as a foe, an adversary that wanted me to lose, so whenever I achieved anything of value I assumed it was by accident, maybe even something I had cheated in order to gain. Strange, and sad even, now when I think of this, but it was as if I chose to live in the shadows of my own light. 

Showing up at the beach at a certain hour of the day with my painting gear and getting into it was my redemption. I began to paint my way into a whole new mind-set. As I’ve already said ad nauseam, in this diary, painting the sea and the sky here on the Pacific Ocean has transformed me. This ritual of which I’ve so often spoken in these pages has connected me with this Australian continent and subsequently, in a round about way, to the work of all Aboriginal artists who have been visually connecting with ‘The Bush’, for thousands of years. 

What is that connection then? I wouldn’t be bold enough to declare that it's a spiritual one, but I might say that I’ve certainly connected to Nature in a new way over these past few years. Anyone, anywhere in the world, who uses Nature creatively, can access this space because it’s freely available when one pauses long enough to work from it. That I was ready to plunge into it here in Australia, is personally satisfying because in fact, it could only have happened here and at this time in my life. 

I am secular, but I do believe in connections wherever they exist, that this understanding came to me here on this marvelous continent is providential. And yet, I still feel like a foreigner here despite everything. I’m a European at heart, and vaguely a bit American too, but like a seed blown in from afar, I was destined to come here to blossom. This I know.

So though I cannot fully understand Aboriginal Art, I am curious about it. That said, like in all traditions, no matter what they are, the art forms can grow stale after so many long generations operating off the radar like in Australia. The risk for us all is that when originality declines, it is too often  replaced by a style which is no longer authentic. Look what happened to French Impressionism and American Expressionism, two transformative waves that changed the course of modern Art. Although they are not the only ones, they follow the same patterns that have ruled art history since forever, because when the innovators are long gone and their fires have died out, who will rise up to re-invent their traditions with a new form? 

These are hard truths that keep the arm-chair specialists busy, but meanwhile, the dutiful artists just keep patiently digging in the dark until they stumble upon a new vein of silver hitherto undiscovered and awaiting the next lucky explorer. 

Despite the community and no matter the ‘school’ or ‘style’, it’s always the painters, as individuals, who continually shift Painting into a new form of expression. In the Aboriginal tradition I hope the next generation of young artists find the authentic means with which to transport ‘their elders’ further along into a new territory of connection with their land into this 21st century. I also hope that they are images that go beyond just political slogans or re-hashed motifs from the distant past.

So this picture here, the third one from the same evening, follows the curve of colour further into the twilight. Whereas the first one appears almost like an apparition, an ephemeral iridescence, this third painting seems to embody the physcal earthiness after the dusk has strangled the delicate light out of the first picture. Ironically, it also reminds me of the Aboriginal flag. 

It possesses a feeling that only the French word ‘charnel’ seems to work for me in to describing it; ‘Material and fleshy, as opposed to the spirit', says the english translation from the dictionary. And so in direct contrast to the first image of the evening that embodies the substance of a pale apparition, this solid image 

curiously contains a feeling of the Australian earth. What strikes me as remarkable is that they are separated by just twenty minutes of time yet by made by the same mind and hand. 

Sometimes, I wonder if my own evolution throughout these pictures has mirrored Darwin’s theory of evolution. In this case; butterflies. 

My images have changed over the past seven years by steadily evolving into newer and varied forms of colours, shapes and patterns. That they exist at all, that they even took form, they must therefore have a purpose in this world.