Searching for a family of light

28 February 2021

Searching for a family of light

South Beach, F.I. August, 1974, oil on canvas board 20 X 15 cm

This tiny painting, (approximately 15 X 12 cm) was made sometime in August, 1974, at South Beach, Fishers Island, N. Y. It was my favourite beach and like Brunswick Heads, it too was almost aways empty. The dogs loved it as much as me and my brother, who took them most evenings for a walk there. I was introduced to painting in France that previous year, and I was learning to paint out in Nature for the first time. This was one of the rare survivors I managed to keep from those weeks in August. 

It interests me today because it reveals something about my emotional investment in deserted beaches by the sea. It’s also a reminder that like many others living by the sea, I’ve always been enamoured by the light over the ocean at all times of the day. It’s as if I expressly became a painter in order just to emotionally connect with life through these elements. This tiny little image marks the very beginning of me being an artist and not just a painter. This is because my love affair of working at the sea appeared to go deeper than just painting. There was a personal connection with the elements not just with a conceptual one. 

I remember working on masonite at the time which I had clumsily coated with gesso. They were small because I felt small in my life at the time. Like everything that’s really personal in life, it’s too complicated to explain. But, I had small my ambitions, if any at all, and looking back now, it’s perhaps so that nobody would notice me. 

I was only there for a month that year and I only went back a few more times before France swallowed me whole. Most of these studies that August were done on masonite but for some reason, this one could exceptionally be a small canvas board. I don’t have it anymore as I offered it to a friend in France who had liked it. 

By this time, I was already under the early influence of Cézanne’s watercolours, and so this is apparent in the delicate handling of everything. The drawing is almost minimalist and there is a paucity of material which lends itself well to a pale sky. There is a real distance established between the foreground, middle, and background, though it's quite subtle and almost imperceptible. Looking at it now after so many years I am simply amazed that I was able to paint it because today it seems even well beyond my pay-grade, now fifty years on. I know this because I have floundered and failed from so many other motifs which were far easier things over the years. 

What I cherish, is it’s light, a white New England light of the fading summer by the sea. And thus today fifty years later, I find myself painting from a dune at a beach on the rim of the Pacific Ocean. The beach looks almost the same, nothing but dunes as far as one can see much like at Fisher’s Island on the Atlantic ocean. But here, the light is more vibrant and generally less subtle than up in the Northern Hemisphere.

Below are two studies from a few nights ago that reveal that I’m still quite obssessed with light, and its effect on the sea and sky. Done within days of each other, they also display the great variety of weather that churn through here on the coast in any season. They also have distinct personalities because I’m a painter who adapts to whatever Nature throws at me. That is the nature Art.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 February 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 February 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm