5 December 2021
Giotto’s sky
A wonderful sky the other evening.
I’ve been looking at a book on Giotto this week and I continually marvel at his pictorial genius. His plain, concrete, no-nonsense notion of forms that feature distinctly in our natural world of trees and stone, donkeys and sheep, palaces and rocky hills with adjacent flora and fauna that enliven his austere-looking world. It’s a world filled with fantastic-looking angels that people his biblical stories, all so unlike anything that came before him, or afterward for that matter. His ‘plastic’ rendering of Nature feels super-charged as if bouncing right out of the flat Byzantine landscape on a Pirelli trampoline. When looking through my father’s book about him, I still remember the fright I felt when looking at the tortured looks of anguish on the angels. These angels looked nothing like the saccharine statues I saw in church on Sundays in New Jersey.
Years ago, I was friends with a painter in France, Christian Martel, who died two years ago, and with whom I argued incessantly. What drove me crazy was his inability to even look at Giotto or any painter who depicted even a hint of anything religious. I drove him crazy with my own pompous confidence. For me, it seemed a great shame, and especially so for a painter. If a painting depicted anything that smelled of the Church he wouldn’t look at it. My problem was that I wished to share so much art and speak about with him. I used to joke with him that he was a kind of vampire who would turn away from the sign of the cross.
Having lived in France for a long time I could understand his mindset up to a certain point but as a painter to ‘write off’ the riches of the Renaissance and the many Gothic and Romanesque churches that surrounded was beyond me. He seemed allerigic to anything ‘Divine’, but obviously we had had different educations. France is very particular about its secular tradition that allows one the freedom ‘from religion’ unlike America, where one is alowed the freedom ‘to exercise’ a religion of their choosing. Understandably, Europe has a dark and complicated history concerning this subject, yet all the same, I was sorry I couldn’t share my love of Giotto and so many other painters with the artist who lived inside of Christian.
Recently, I’ve been looking through a thick but compact book on Giotto lying my overly large ‘coffee’ table. While perusing it I came across his frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and it occurred to me that many of those images share the same light as my own from the beach here in Australia. Despite all the clarity and incontrovertible construction of elements, all so solid in Giotto’s world but in direct contradiction to my own work, the light appears remarkably similar.
This study from the other evening is an example. I wonder if it could be because it has a translucent aspect to it reminding me of a fresco? And yet, my study appears so fluid, ambiguous and so very unlike the dense durability of a Giotto sky. Maybe I feel all this because my sky in this picture reminds me of an Umbrian sky in the dead of the August. Going further, I reasoned that maybe this fluidity is of a modern era, another sensibility, one built upon a Post-Modern uncertainty unlike one constructed with the firm conviction of the 14th century Church.
Long before Photography came into view and changed everything, the Arts of yesteryear were the sole items on the menu by which stories, biblical, and otherwise, could be told. Thus the magnificance of my favorite trio; Giotto, Paolo Ucello and Piero della Francesca, whose paintings, all of which were so wildy different from one another. But the camera changed everything and since its invention, visual artists have been liberated from everything, even craft.
Today, Conceptual Art has swallowed up reality and it has eclipsed the Painting craft by making a bee-line straight through to ideas alone. But hey! It’s a big tent and I’m cool with all of it, even if I stick close to the craft of Painting, albeit loyal in a 14th century sort of way. What else can I do? I am a sensualist at heart, an old-fashioned guy in all things, an analog guy, who still listens to Jerome Kern. Like a four year old, I still also love the gooey feeling of mixing pigments of colour around a palette. But happily I’m not alone, for there are painters everywhere who all still struggle with how to render an idea through paint alone.
As I look at my own study here, I notice that the elements, though distinct, are barely recognisable as objects in themselves in such great contrast to an artist like Giotto, who explicitly clarified everything in his own meticulous way. This small picture from the other night possesses an almost flagrant disregard for the anatomy of the parts of the paintings; the nomenclature that was so vital to Italian Painting of the 14th and 15th century. And yet again, I can still see similarites with Giotto.
Christian and myself both shared a love for the sensuousness of pictures, and maybe that was what kept our friendship alive in the end. I learned about graphic
unity from the three Renaissance painters previously mentioned. This is something I tried to convey to him but with no success. It was so frustrating for me because he too, was a great lover of a graphic image as well as the sensuous surface of a painting. And yet, I still couldn’t share my joys and amazement with him for any of these painters. I realise now, that I had wanted to express just how contemporary their work still appears today but I didn’t articulate that because I hadn’t understood it for myself at that time. How, after all, did these painters manage to subordinate all the elements of a picture plane by condensing its graphic unity into a singular image way back in the 14th century, while painting for the Pope? I wanted to all share this and so much more.
This was the last of three studies from a hot muggy afternoon. The sky had mellowed out by the end of the session and I was ready to jump into the sea. As I described it previously, it has a hazy, ephemeral quality due to the humidity and thus it lent itself easily to this delicate surface. It’s certainly the best from the other evening and I enjoyed painting it, so maybe it's for that reason I like it.
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