12 September 2021
A painter gets it right or dies
I remember pulling this study from the boot of my car the other day to bring it into the house and when I quickly looked at it, I thought to myself, “Once in a great while, a painter gets it right.”
It was an early Spring afternoon with a slight fresh breeze and a few people up and down on the on the beach. This was the first of four painted from one of those hazy soft skies, the kind that gently obscures the pale clouds at the very end of the day. When I arrived to set up, I had noticed this small, raspy orange trace of sunlight that appeared to be glued onto the delicate sky and just ready to be painted. Then I remember thinking before putting these brushstrokes down, specifically in these words: “YOU’RE GONNA STUFF THIS UP!”
One doesn’t get a second chance when one stuffs up such a fragile image like this, but if one does, they must keep going until another solution is found. In these paintings from the beach, I personally hate going further into an image just because of mistakes I must try to fix. It means reconfiguring the picture completely into something else as I've already noted many times in here. It usually works out well but some images I really, really like so much that I don't want to hurt it. It's like licking an ice cream cone that you want to keep forever. Invariably though, you do what you have to do and accept that it becomes a different painting for better or worse.
So in this one, I still took a long pause momentarily before putting down these small whispers of orange just as I imagined seeing them. There was no space for thought, just intuitive movements like those made by an excited child. The picture was done in about fifteen minutes.
Writers always talk about the ‘crumby first draft’, and I always think to myself: Boy are they ever lucky, because a painter who works like me doesn’t have the luxury of a first draft. He must get it right or go off to suffer an ignoble death in some dark hole in the ground. Eventually though, he'll rise again like Lazarus and return to fix it, finding the courage to turn it into into something completely different. One needs not only a lot of talent or grit for this sort of thing but divine intervention too. As I noted a week or two ago, only the Dutch were very good at this sort of thing but they’re now dead.
Anyway, I've sort of come to appreciate these obstacles because left to my own devices I might be just churning out sweet sunset images for a Hawaiian calendar.
I've learned to be flexible late in life even though they say the opposite is true for older guys. But at least in this painting gig I'm able to adapt to the circumstances quicker than ever before. So, in every painting session, even though I know I’m not cool or calm enough to be a poker player, I've learned to adjust to the next situation. Naturally, this helps in every corner of life, but in these quick images at the beach it's especially fortuitous to be nimble.
What I really like about this small study is the complete unity of expression, a feeling as if the motif were both seen and felt all at once, ingested even through my imagination and then gently exhaled upon this modest canvas board with the light touch of a magic wand.
One cannot see the thought process involved in its fabrication for it was hidden even from the painter. It makes me think of how much I appreciate the frank conviction of a child’s painting, one which originates in their spontaneous imagination, only to then be pushed out with sudden glee.
This is one of the most fragile images to come out of this series.
