Pictures are made of bridges

20 March 2022

Pictures are made of bridges

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

Seeing colour is a cumulative endeavour, an acquired habit, as it were. Where I see a peachy yellow cloud, many civilians (non-painters), might see what they consider a generic brand of grey as if from a tub of paint, perhaps something with which to paint a US battleship. Therein lies the problem; for Grey in Nature, in this way, doesn’t really exist at all. Grey is the result of any relative complimentary colours mixed together and it’s also but a ‘perception’ created by the eye.

Colours are so interconnected in Nature that purity cannot exist because all colours are inherently ‘broken’. Except for colour created from a light prism, in Nature, nothing is ever pure. At dusk, when I work at the beach, colours are a variation of pear grey, peach grey, plum grey or grape grey, and they mutate continually along with all the other colours as they deepen into the colder tones of night.

But during the bright daylight hours, colours are washed out by the strong sun, and being the vampire that I am, this bright intensity is less interesting for me but this it’s a personal thing. Someone like Van Gogh, who worked outdoors in the blazing light of Provence, made sumptuously colourful and vivid pictures. But he was Van Gogh. In his letters to Theo he also wrote eloquently, cogently, about all these issues of Grey, and how it functions in the colour wheel. The rest of us just limp on as best as we can. 

Theoretically, a working painter, over time, should develop an increasingly nuanced understanding around the nature of colour, whether they work out on a motif in Nature, or in a studio. So thus, empirically speaking, the more one works with colour, the more one learns about it, and consequently the more one learns, the better one sees, hopefully.

A painter can bring to a session a mind full of memories and images, or none at all. But what one does bring is embodied in so much of what one has been seeing and painting for many years. Painting as a life’s work is a cumulative endeavour and if one isn’t getting better at looking and seeing, then maybe they should take up needlepoint or just find a new optometrist. 

I know a few wonderful painters whose work, sadly to note, went backwards at the end of their lives by retreating from their youthful originality and innovative greatness that had once possessed them. This happens but it’s unusual. André Derain comes to mind.

I so love his early work as a ‘Fauve’, when he painted alongside Matisse in the early years of the 20th century, and when their paintings 

exploded onto the Art world. It was an original school, a group of unruly and diverse painters that sprang up like wildflowers in the South of France. Sadly, to his detriment, I think Derain lost the bright colours and courageous invention of form after his Fauve period. Later his paintings done in the Var, not far from the colourful world of Cezanne in Aix, Derain somehow retreated into a dull somber place in his pictures as if he had become colorblind. 

A shame, yes, but for me personally, a warning that as a painter, one must remember to always be moving forward like a shark into the unknown ocean, not into the backwaters of the known. As much as I love these afternoon outings to the beach, I am acutely aware of the risk in my own endeavors. I am hopefully mindful that I’ll need a new motif to present itself on the next horizon line to wisk me away to somewhere new and unknown. But that’s for tomorrow. But that said, I am also aware that this study here from last week, might be telling the world that I too might be going backward. Ha. I cannot know this over the short term, I’ll need to ride up higher over the longer arc of this beach series before I know what’s next. I’m on for the long haul, not persuaded by much in the short run.

But I like this study anyway for its sensuous response to a large cloud in full bloom over the horizon line. I also know my own Achilles Heel in this Painting business is that I have a soft spot for creamy sensual textures that evoke the Past. That’s my secret dilemma, one that pulls me continually back to a painting world where an artist indulged in pure pleasure, not carnal but poetic.

Because I see that pictures done like this can go backwards as well as go forwards depending upon both the sky and my mood, I don’t worry too much about it as long as the learning curve gradually moves up and outwards towards an image that is paradoxically thrown up at the canvas board as if from an image projector deep inside my library of desires.