Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

22 April 2018

 Monk and Van Gogh at the Optometrist

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 March 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been tormented and bursting with water over the past few months giving me some wild paintings. Here are two real curiosites from the same afternoon last week. This one, to be fair, is bit of wreck if one judges it through a sanitary lens. Like many of the things I’m doing these days it’s messy and far from conventional in every way. It does however convey a feeling of storm clouds over a dark mysterious sea. It’s the sort of sky that's generally impossible for me to capture and condense quickly, so maybe this is why I see something special in it. But I admit that it’s also a tormented, and it's a brooding image that might not be easy many viewers.

For the longest time I couldn’t pull this the picture together until out of frustration, I took a larger brush and began sweeping it with circles as if I were using a small broom like in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To my surprise it worked and I stopped in just time to let it be. What holds it together are the small pink bits of open sky in both the right and left hand corners. Like fingers, these fragments of pink space grasp the whole form and appear to hold everything firmly in place. I like that it’s so full of colour despite the deep twilight hour when the sky barely brims with luminous pinks and violets. 

It’s a scruffy-looking picture too, as if it had been kicked around like a old ball on the beach, but personally, I kind of like all these spontaneous bits of slap-dash marks made naturally during its creation. These impromtu scars remind me of how animals, both in the wild and in the deep sea, can appear in old age after a lifetime of survival. Though importantly for me, this ‘mark-making' as it’s now called, is but a by-product of painting from a motif and never the destination itself. These wounds sometimes skulk around in many of my landscapes. One either likes them or not.

But what I really like in this image is the way that both the sea and sky seem to be glued onto the same plane and flattened as if like dried flowers and compressed into a book of fairy tales by a young girl who locked them into a coffin between two pages of her diary. These flat massive and menacing clouds have been pressed into time immobile, yet still full of ruptured energy.

I think it manifests a certain feeling I’ve been aware of within me when working here at the beach under such skies. Although it wouldn’t perhaps appeal to a large public, some painters might see something in it. I secretly wish I had the formula to paint others as easily as I painted this one today. I can still feel like a beginner all over again each time I go out there to work, but it’s a better gig than that of poor Sisyphus.

Another thing I like is that the effect of the picture is immediate and in your face whether you like it or not. It might even appear ‘ugly’ at first glance, but as Baudelaire reminds me in front of such images, “All truly original paintings often appear ugly at first”. F.Y.I. He doesn’t say ‘great paintings’, just original ones.

But Baudelaire was not only speaking of great artists like Van Gogh and Igor Stravinsky, but of so many others too, professional and amateur alike, who all linger like me, in the shadows of Art’s long and wiggly road. I feel confident, even arrogant enough, that he may have also been speaking about an image like this, one hundred and fifty years before its creation. 

It’s always been in me, this desire to create pictures as things ‘alive’. In front of such a picture, I wonder if I don’t simply desire to feel that ‘poof’ of a feeling like at the optometrist when given the glaucoma test. In a fraction of a second the machine punches out air at high speed at your vulnerable eyeball, testing it for pressure on the cornea. In this painting I want that visceral sensation thrown out at the viewer in the same way; ‘Poof’, either one gets it or not in one blow. 

To me it also reveals an unusual aspect of Nature, one from a very particular perspective; close up, and cropped. It doesn’t display a concept or a conventional viewpoint, it derives naturally from a wild Nature. It’s a set of clouds mushrooming over a sea at dusk in almost miniature scale as if selected by a 75mm telephoto lens. It evokes for me, a Thelonious Monk, off kilter and in your face, a sloppy primitive voice in all the right places, where Monk’s genius is camouflaged as an autistic child.