Marthe’s perfume

28 July 2022

Marthe’s perfume 

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

I’ve had some wonderful evenings lately as I rediscover the delicacy of these winter skies when the sea can be turquoise and the sky champagne, the colour of perfume. I made six or seven studies over the past few sessions and I’ve felt drunk with joy. 

This is the first of three studies from the other evening. The drawing in this first one is more conventional than the one on the following page. It began with a very pale sea as the cloud bank turned pink. It’s the kind of picture I’ve dreamed of blowing up in size. In the studio I’ve tried to scale up similar ideas but have yet to succeed. My problem is always my own impatience but maybe I also lack the necessary skills to proceed thoughtfully into larger versions (150 X 150 cm) because it’s such a different process. Everything I’ve done in the studio so far, feels like I’m cut off from the wind and the changing colours but the light too, from all those spontaneous elements that feel so necessary and natural outdoors.

One of my heros, Pierre Bonnard reworked his paintings over months and years in the small studio of his home in Le Cannet above Cannes. I imagined him painting with speed of a snail. Ensconced in his private quiet life life, he painted everything around him: his wife Marthe in the bathtub, a whole host of still lives from the dining table, the dresser tops, and the open door which always led out somewhere towards more light outside on the terraces and the gardens. He painted vast views looking West down to the coast when needless to say, the view was unobstructed in that period before the Second World War. Strangely enough, when I was thirteen, I spent a summer there not a stone’s throw from his house and must have ridden by it a million times on my mobylette, but I was oblivious to Bonnard then. He is a giant for me now, but also for so many others of the art public who yearn for his slow-motion notion of beauty.

He tacked up loose canvases around the studio walls when working, and one only has to look at a photo of him to glean his gentle, stoic patience. He worked like this for years on various paintings and yet his output was remarkable. These photos of him in his studio puttering around his simple home and gardens can be a shock to see when juxtaposed with our contemporary world view of artists in their respective studios that fill fashion magazines. 

I love his entire oeuvre because it’s both deeply personal but sensual too. It’s rare that his pictures don’t open up like windows through which we can collectively voyage outward with him into a mysteriously playful but complex vision of Nature. 

He was a colourist, and his oeuvre is so full of lessons that one could learn everything about both colour and light from his very personal and exotic understanding of it. But in his drawings too, there is a universe of small pencil drawings that fill hundreds of sketch books which are intimate and completely realised with so little material. Unlike his pictures, one can experience his quick and spontaneous nature.

 

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