Marthe’s perfume #2

28 July 2022

Marthe’s perfume #2

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 July 2022, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the third study from the same night and unlike the previous two that seem more conventional, this appeared to be a new and unusual destination. It’s barely discernable as a seascape, rather more non-objective, a place I love to visit as often as I can in front of these twilight skies. It’s a simple picture, so austere really that it’s just three planes of colour that appear to melt into the twilight haze. Whereas the previous one appears to also fade into the twilight air, this one appears to be baked into it like a sponge cake and I would love to see it as a larger picture. It’s an idea that naturally appears more adaptable to a larger format I think. It also seems to open a glass doorway into a place where I'd wish to find myself quite soon. I live for these moments of pictorial clairvoyance, it’s like I’m receiving postcards from my own future.

I work so quickly in front of these shifting colours at this hour that I have no time to think. That’s a relief, but redundant too because I find myself writing this fact ad nauseam in almost every diary entry. This is in such contrast to a studio space where I would have leisurely moments to think and postulate, fantasise and reflect, all the while smoking lots of cigarettes in order to disguise this procrastination. It’s definately not out there on the dunes where I am harried like a New Yorker during rush hour. But anyway, I’ve come to understand that art hates procrastinators. 

This image in particular, made me think of Thomas Aquinas today because he speaks of art’s imitation of Nature as being contingent upon how I see and interpret what Nature is giving me at every nano second while working. If at the motif, I’ve been faithful to the information I’ve received, then there is a good chance it will reveal some truths about the motif. 

And so thus in this picture, if I’ve been true to both the drawing and the colour in the motif then it has a good chance of working as a painting. If a painting doesn’t ‘work’ then it would either it be deficient, or that maybe the viewer cannot buy into the illusion I'm presenting. Tricky business. In Painting, unlike life, one might say that what is true doesn’t always appear real because what appears real isn’t always true. 

For me, unlike in Maths where two + two equals four, it's in art that two + two will always equal five, because a successful solution in a picture will always be greater than the sum of its parts. 

I had always imagined Art in this way, so it was a surprise to learn that George Orwell had already created this metaphor in 1939 to illustrate how an authoritarian leader dupes his citizens to believe that two + two = five when the leader says so. So yes, for me, this surreal equation means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts only when referring explicitly to a work of any kind of art. 

It’s actually closer to Aristotle’s meaning that the whole is something else, more ‘mysterious’ than just the sum of its parts. This adds an additional element that binds art to the mysterious, something which I like.

But in the end, all these words and ideas of Thomas Aquinas, George Orwell, and Aristotle, don’t mean a hill of beans if an image doesn’t live. If this painting above cannot stand on its own, then no rhetorical gymnastics can keep it upright. For me, the structure of a painting can even be as fragile as perfume if all its elements are cohesively united.