Midwives forever!

6 October 2023

Midwives forever!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 October, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here one of four studies made a few nights ago. It was a good session, sometimes they just roll out like on their own. Because they’re small they might seem somewhat insignificant but it’s what I’m doing in this period, so I don’t over-think it, I just roll dice each night in front of the motif. What will they bring? Will I win or lose, like on a craps table in Vegas? 

Actually, there is no losing in this creative business since I’ve wised up enough to learn from every picture and each failure.

I like this study more than the other two which I don’t include here, but I like them because in them all, I feel a sense of place and time during that singular moment when I painted them. Some evenings I might feel like the mother but also the midwife too.  These pictures are proof of my own existence, both physical and spiritual from that space in time. On my best days in this life, I’d be hard pressed to show evidence that I even existed at all, but a painted image must surely proof. 

Elevated slightly up on the dunes I see everything going on. I see the last stragglers of the day who walk the beach and at that hour too, are the bathers who arrive to peel off their clothes and run down to the water’s edge jumping into the sea with, or without bathing suits. Because it’s the calfing season, these days I’m distracted by whales that breach, splashing just offshore and close enough for dogs and kids to see. Me too, I’m like the good king who, from my small perch on the dune, looks out with munificence upon all living things, animate and otherwise.

And those who share this stretch of the beach might see the same sky or perhaps even feel the same way about it, but they won’t express it the way I can. Though we may share the same exhilaration for the sea and sky at this twilight hour, but it’s me today anyway, who will affix it into eternity with a cheap canvas board from China that I buy by the box loads. And yet we all share in that brief moment the withering sky of our own mortality on this day.

I guess what I’m trying to express is that I’m increasingly attentive to the painting session as a specific instant as well as a specific place. These days, in my mind at least, I know I can be quite critical of too many paintings (and painters) because I feel that in them I don’t connect with a specific moment in place or time, so consequently, I cannot feel grounded, and because of that I’m actually nowhere. If my picture can offer anything to anyone, it’s a specific expression that’s tied to a place and time.

Yes, like some others I know, I do wish to make pictures that embody a universal aspect of Painting, something that reveals a world bigger than myself and more permanant. But I’ve come to understand that the Universal aspect of art can only manifest itself if it rises up naturally through a specific work of art. 

I wish for any picture to leave traces of where and when they were born. If a painter is lucky enough to be authentic, this will express itself effortlessly through the picture because like the snail, a painting should also leave a trace.