Macy’s Day Parade at the beach

5 September 2021

Macy’s Day Parade at the beach

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

I arrived a little late to an already buoyant sky full of colour, and while looking high above me at these expanding clouds I was suddenly filled with a surreal nostalgia at the memory of being a child underneath giant balloons at the Macy’s Day parade in New York. Enchanted all over again, I found my small frame stretching upwards, over and over again in vain, hoping to touch those oversized rubber cartoons that hovered just out of reach. 

And here, years later at the beach, I find the same pneumatic bliss watching clouds mutate from one gentle and friendly form into another. I set up my easel quickly and began work. I made three studies which all began 

brilliantly or so I thought but I lost them just as quickly, one after the next.  

Sadly, left to my own devices, I’ll overwork everything due to my lingering perfectionism still living inside me. “Just one more touch here,,,, there it is!” I think to myself as I work, but then, in no time at all, I find myself still locked in the same picture and searching for a fire escape. When things go badly in a painting I’ll yearn to be anywhere else than to have to complete what I’m working on. Like authors, painters too, need to find endings. And like composers, painters too, must also find resolution through the chaos of harmony.

In this series I’m finally getting a handle on how to stop just at the peak of a painting where brushstrokes are no more and no less. I imagine it must be like the wise comedian who leaves the stage at the peak of applause, or perhaps like they say, the wise cook is he who cuts out the flame before the milk boils. All this because as some bright fellow once said, brevity is the soul of wit.

In any event, this picture was the first one I battled with and had thought ruined, but at least finished. But to my great surprise it doesn’t look half as bad now as it did when I packed it up the other evening. It’s certainly a curious painting, I’ve never done another similar to it though I’ve certainly always wished to. It only took about fifteen minutes and looking at it now, maybe indeed, I did actually find an ending for it. I stopped when I did, and I sense now that it was at the right intuitive place. What else could I have done?

I can also see that there is a light airiness in it which appeals to me. One can come in too heavily when rendering clouds by giving them too much ‘material’ worth, too much ‘weight, as if they were hills or a stony mountain range that recede into the distant sky. But of course, these clouds are made up of gasous vapour and their shapes change pliably in slow motion almost like watching someone do Tai Chi. And most remarkably for the painter, they can change colours almost as quickly as an octopus.