Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint

30 July 2021

Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint

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

This was the second of two from the other night, an evening of wild colours, a veritable pot-pouri of happy hues. This is the winter after all, when these skies DownUnder show off all their splendour and these psychedelic evenings strut like catwalk models at an Hermes show in Springtime Paris. In contrast though, the second study from the same evening that’s on the following page looks like the front door of hell.

Both pictures reminds me that though colour behaves the same way everywhere in the world, they can appear uneven due to the atmospheric conditions at various lattitudes around the globe. Towards the equator, so they say, colours will appear brighter and more embelished than towards the poles due to more light. This is what the scientsts say, but I’m just a painter and this bears out for me empirically well in the spots I’ve travelled around the world. 

For instance, coming from New England I had never experienced colour like I did when I arrived in Provence for my third year of Univerity. It takes most people about an hour to fall in love with the South of France, but me, it took two years because believe it or not because I was so uncomfortable under such a bright happy blue sky. The sheer cheerfulness of it all made search out dark bars in the narrow streets of Aix. This intense light of Provence gave me the jitters actually. I was so much more at home under the grey gravy overcast skies of the dismal North. This was a psychological thing, though I didn’t know it at the time. But when I decided to stay on for another year and I when moved out to the countryside and began painting the landscape, I became smitten with this talented light that changed costumes so rapidly in the day.

I suddenly fell in love with the rugged dry landscape that first Spring after I moved into the Chateaunoir only a few kilometers outside of town. I found myself overloaded with all sorts of new sensations, all the flowers and the bark and the olfactorius bed of pine needles in the dank soil that stewed in the mornings. By noon, a rush of rosemary, sage and thyme rode the wild Mistral like a bronco up and down the unruly hills. I had never experienced Nature so vividly, and it was all inextricably linked arm in arm with the act of painting. That first year at the Chateaunoir I read John Rewald’s two volumes about Impressionism and in it, I discovered paintings made by men (and a few women) who went out into the landscape and committed their lives to Nature in every season and under every bit of weather. 

I took to walking through the forest in the early evenings. It was May and I first heard the song of the nightingale. The forest was full of them. I was an American from the city and the suburbs, and I had never lived so closely to Nature, literally outside my kitchen door. It was a revelation. And because I had never really studied anything after the Italian Renaissance in High School, I barely knew anything about French Painting except what I had seen in the Met in New York. I soon delved into the earliest chapters of French Painting which led me through the Barbizon period where I met the humility of Daubigny, Dupré, Millet, and others, all of whom I liked for diffrent reasons. I saw through their eyes what it was like to go out and paint the countryside just for the fun of it. I understood that for the first time in its life, French Painting had moved out of the studio and into the wild wooly outdoors, and I discovered it all like a curious toddler learning to walk.

After the Barbizon, when I came across Manet, it was like a brick wall and he seemed to possess such a loud voice in this chapter of French Painting that it was impossible get around him. But by that time, I was already studying with my teacher Léo Marchutz whom I had met at university in Aix. He led me to other heroes of French Painting; Delacroix, Corot, Degas, and Daumier. Only later did I discover Cézanne and Van Gogh and the Impressionists. 

Funny, as I write this today, I realise that my contemporaries were all setting up studios in large lofts from New York to L.A. and Paris to Berlin, and many of whom were searching out a second act of Expressionism. This was the real beginning of the Art Market with POP Art, Contemporary Art had exploded into the international circus tent that it has since become. And there was me, wandering around dreamlike in the past and searching to cleave out of this landscape an authentic voice, but also my own salvation too.