Death in Venice

30 November 2017

Death in Venice

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From the other evening came this small study that appeals to me tonight than more than just a few days earlier when I packed it up at the beach. It came late, after a larger picture had gone awry. It was turning dark, I could barely make out the palette. The sticky dusk descended too fast even for me who works at the speed of light. The sea went inky black, and its uneven texture helped create a distance up to the horizon line. I like this black because it's not from a tube, it's been made from Prussian Blue, Alizarin Crimson and a few pinches of lemon yellow. These three colours help to harmonise the picture because they're already in the sky above. 

Dusk was falling quickly but the sky's light was still colourful just not as bright, as if God had turned down the dimmer attached to it. It's not perfect, but I can see my future in it because obviously I’m learning with each new painting, and the variety of ideas mean that nothing is stagnant. This is a good thing, it keeps me on my toes.

As I work more and more I begin to feel less afraid of failure in front of these intimidating skies, but at the same time I’m also more comfortable with their familiarity. Actually, I wonder if haven’t started to get that feeling one gets when they fall in love with an old friend. I think it would be a gradual feeling at first that builds up slowly over time until one’s defences break down and suddenly one looks at the familiar with a great new sense of wonder, but desire too. 

To be honest, I’ve never fallen in love with an old friend but I feel it’s possible. Perhaps even, it's a sane way of falling beginning a love affair. With a tiny painting full of delicate nuances like this, I might imagine what love could be like with an old friend. Not a hasty affair, full of lust that burns before the night is out and the date of expiration already printed on the heart, but a sticky thing that glues the limbs together and oozes slowly like Mahler’s poco adagio from his 4th symphony. 

A close friend of mine once confided to me that he had such a hard crush on a woman at work that he was beside himself for nearly a year. She was married, he had understood, so there was little to do about it except feel himself turn cold implode whenever near her. After hearing his sorrowful laments for months I came up with an idea for him. I suggested that he should find, or fashion himself, a small wooden chest inlaid with red silk. With great care he should then carefully place his ‘crush’ inside the small shrine and close the chest, then finally, he should place it into his heart for safe-keeping. A tall task, a physically impossible one, but as I explained to him, this wasn’t a carnal deal, just a mental obsession. And though I felt like a witch doctor with all these instructions I was certain it would work. So, he obediently followed my advice to the tee, and to my complete surprise, he was healed almost instantly of his torment. Of course, he still had a crush on her but it was completely absorbed by some new mysterious compassion inside him and he felt mysteriously freed of its tyranny over him. About a year later he told me he was getting married to someone new.

So this business of loving and longing looms large over us all whether it’s consumated or not. Who can say when we shall be plucked out of a large crowd and find our lives ruined or redeemed by love? But speaking of love, I recently saw Death in Venice again last week which invited Gustave Mahler inside me and he stayed for a whole week. Nice!

All this leads me to wonder if this emotional turmoil that irredeemably swamps so many of us with longing can also be captured in a picture? Of course it can, because a few painters have pulled it off from Goya to Picasso. In Music? That's, for sure. Poetry and literature? Yes, of course, that’s what it’s all about! But could an oil painting or sculpture convey such fireworks of suffering seems to me less obvious. Not easily I think, but in theory, yes. Painting is such an abstract and plastic animal, singular as a form, and so apart from the other arts that few have have succeeded.