16 November 2019
Diary, one cloud at a time
Sunny and windy here today, but down south, terrible fires are consuming whole towns along the coastline below Sydney. On the news are horrific images from Batemans Bay, where the roads out of town have been cut off and people are trapped on beaches awaiting rescue from boats by sea. I feel so badly for everyone, most of whom are tourists, but also for the livestock and wildlife all caught by the indiscriminate fury of fire. But also on the news are the man-made furies that kill Iraqis and Sudanese at the moment, and I feel so disheartened at times that I cannot seem to separate all of these tragedies. Sometimes, they all just bunch up in me like a traffic jam. But here, on the North Coast, there is open sunny space everywhere, and the peaceful beach keeps many of us sane and hopefully grateful.
This image was painted the other evening and strangely it even looks like a sky full of smoke from a fire nearby but it isn't.
I see now just how comfortable I’ve become working on such a small scale, because at this hour everything changes quickly and I’m forced to keep up with it. But I’ve also discovered that it suits my anxious nature. When I have too much time to think while working, I can falter easily. So maybe this process is what brings out my best qualities.
It's taken me years to get this about myself, and yet it's always been so obvious. I'm a jittery kind of guy, so naturally I just paint quickly. 'No drama Obama', as some of us still affectionally like to put it. But anyway, for any painter, it's an important insight because it's the difference between running at 33rpm and 45. Actually, don't we all need to find our own pace in this crazy world?
As I was working it, I sensed its form was something that I knew and liked intimately. That sounds like a cliché I'm sure, but not all pictures make me feel the same way. Some are new and fresh images that take me by surprise, while others remind me of all the dreadful ones. Still others, remind me of my favourites.
But this one has a familiar look to it that feels like I’ve always known it. This doesn't happen too frequently so it’s a great pleasure and very special, it's as if I’ve bitten into my very own Madeleine biscuit from Paris.
It's a compact picture and held together tightly as if constructed from an idea already built deep inside me and arose up from my memory banks. Like I imagine for everyone else, I seem to be just a giant hard drive made up of billions of images and texts. Some people during their lifetime try to make sense of it all. Others don't. We get one life and if we're lucky enough to live in a free country, what we do of it is our own business. The artist, I think, attempts to create some order out of that task and the result might be more or less what we call art. But we all do it in different ways and degrees. Creating anything in life requires choices and decisions, and whether we like it or not, these in turn always create the form of the art. And isn't that form not just how we communicate with ourselves but others too?
I'm not a writer but I did begin trying make sense of my own life when I began a diary. It's not art but how I chose to understand myself. But like most amateurs in this, I had to learn how to express myself and that means actually learning to write because language is the form.
It was daunting to begin writing about myself. I had tried a few times previously in my life but failed to ignite anything durable. For me it was like trying to build a fire in the wilderness with nothing just one stick and a few bits of straw. But one afternoon on the deck of a ship on its way from Ancona to Athens back in January 1986, I tried again more seriously and with more desperation this time around. On a deck chair with winter white clouds streaming overhead and a hangover, I found the courage to begin anew, one sentence and one cloud at a time. Surprisingly, I've managed to keep it going all these years.
But I'm loyal to my roots because my diary still begins with a weather report. Is it raining or is it clear? Is it hot or humid? What are the insects doing? And are the birds awake yet? Are they singing or complaining? But of my favourite creatures in the sky, I'll always ask the page if there are clouds above. Snd if so, what are they getting up to? So, no surprise that forty years later they've become stars of the show in this Painting series o the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia.
From the very beginning of this writing experiment, these observations helped to ground me instantly into the moment. I mean, what could be easier than just watching the sky? After I became used to this routine, it became a ritual something I looked forward to each day. This then allowed me to gently tiptoe into my feelings and thoughts about the days (and nights) with less overt self-consciousness. Eventually, just like a river at its source, it began flowing.
Cut to the chase, all these observations helped teach me to write because I never learned to grasp the nuts and bolts necessary enough to build an idea. Was I too anxious or too lazy to say what I needed to express? As a creative act, it's vastly different than painting a picture but both crucially need an attention to the task at hand and the discipline to see it through to its finish. I obviously didn't possess any of this but I didn't also in almost all other areas of my life (but that's a long story).
First of all, I had to admit that I was a ‘crap’ writer, as they say in both Britain, and here in Australia. But thankfully, it was the diary that helped me over the years stumble into a sentence and help me make sense of my thinking.
Being an anxious type of American, I had never possessed enough composure nor the discipline to put an idea together coherently. Then, after moving to France and living with the French, Mon Dieu! I was forced to think and speak with more precision and cohesion. I owe that great nation any communication skills I might possess today, but ditto for social skills too.
Throughout my life, it had always seemed impossible to ever get anything right, so why bother even trying? At 14, I was still like a 4 year old fat with perfectionism. Was I more chronically lazy, or just afraid of hard work?
I was impatient, but so fidgety that I was unable to sit still. My mind churned around in circles like I was a goldfish in a bowl. In school, it dawned on me that I was different than others, and I surely I must have some kind of a socio-mental affliction. Were my teachers too afraid to break the news to me? Worst still, although I wanted to fit in like everyone else and be normal, I suspected I was not repairable. Couldn't I just find some kindly old Swiss watchmaker to fix my hands? But when you're a kid though, it's hard to organise this.
True confessions, I'm also a college dropout. With few exceptions, I rarely made it past the first drafts of a mid-term paper, and the few I did manage to finish were pretty crumby. Despite all my ‘inspiration’, and ‘big ideas’, I just couldn’t get my pen to paper long enough to build a sentence.
Though I've always read a lot, I had not yet fallen in love with the simple sentence. That would be like a painter who enjoys painting but doesn't care about colour. Basically, I just couldn’t stomach the empty space necessary for me to sit still long enough to put small one humble word after the next.
Later in life, I saw it from another angle, it was the mother of all problems; I lacked commitment to just about everything. I was like an astronaut, untethered from the mother ship and drifting uncontrollably into emptiness. But all this changed when I began to investigate myself through facing my diary each day. So thankfully, I’ve learned a little about writing since then, but a lot more about myself. And just by looking more carefully at pictures, after I began starting painting years earlier, I also began reading more books with more care after getting the writing bug. This is how I waded into the world of literature, but like many of these small painting that may never hang upon foreign walls, neither will my diary ever be read by a foreigner. It's a workbook not a final exam.
But in the end I’m not really a writer, I’m a painter. If I were a writer I'd be writing all the time, writing short stories and novels and whatnot. But I’m an amateur so I don't. What I wanted to express is that just as painting has taught me to look and see, writing has taught me to listen, inside and out.
As a painter I understand that any picture has been constructed through an abstract arrangement between the eyes and the hands, similar, say to baseball pitchers, and ditto for tennis players. But there is so much more than that because somewhere in the body and mind, are creative juices that pulsate through the cognitive marshland of memory and turns them into an electrical current running throughout the system. This is the alchemical part of any creative process and many call this arrangement a spiritual one. I'm open to anything but I do know that it cane never be an academic process and cannot be spelled out on an intellectual blackboard. One has to just learn all this either from stumbling over one sentence or just one cloud at a time.
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