On the Menu

 

2 November 2020

 On the Menu

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 October, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This study is so unusual that it took me by complete surprise. I enjoyed watching it take form as if I were channeling some Romantic painter from the late 18th century. It was the first of two studies for which I had initially had other plans, but at the same time, it too, had other plans for itself. 

It's disconcerting when I lose control over a picture and yet I secretly cheer it on like it’s a truant teenager inside me painting graffiti over all my noble ideals about art. Try as I might to wrest control over a picture on any given night, alas, it cannot be commandeered at will.

But somehow upon arrival, I even had this prescient feeling that this would be a wild painting if only I could nudge it in my own direction. I had felt like it was already in my back pocket and just waiting for me take it out like it was a map of Tokyo.

So like a chef at the fish market whose choices will dictate the evening’s menu, me too, I rely upon what I find in the sky each day. But although the motif may be on the menu, I still pretend  to be the chef.

An enormous cloud was aflame when I began setting up my easel and palette. Normally, I prefer to wait it out until the sun sets and all this colour dies down enough to give me a more stable path forward. 

Unlike other painters, I think, These kinds of scenes I quietly detest due to their supra-melodramatic nature which can easily veer towards the pornographic in paintings. But hey, it's more my real nature to savour discretion in all things artistic. But I'll confess anyway that with so little time to work these become impossible skies to work from. I think only a great artist like Turner, who with a set of watercolours, can portray such vivid histrionics It's also a fantastic scene, and had I not been impatient I'd never have chosen it. But oddly, even then it seemed to come out on its own volition as if I were just a bystander.  

So I wonder where did it came from? What image provoked it in my private library of images and memories? I cannot account for it, and yet, although it was certainly painted with my own hand, I think it came up from an older template, perhaps one from my early student days when I experimented much more than I do today.  

It's rough-looking too because not knowing what to do with it, I simply left it in its dishevelled state and by consequence it feels unfinished. 

Like for any poet or painter, pictorial images will often arise disguised as memories lodged deeply inside one where the oldest secrets all congregate awaiting instructions about when to surface. Whether in a studio or outdoors, the painter needs to be patient because when these things do surface, they'll need to be organised because they always seem to pop out like children playing hide and seek. 

I’ve found that though memories are cherished in my heart, they're still held firmly in my head for better or for worse. They may appear furtive or hard to reach, asleep or repressed, maybe forgotten even but they're never forsaken. They will always reach out to the artist or poet who is both brave and curious enough to seek order and communion even when I appear deaf and dumb. 

It’s strange painting, perhaps more like a dream that behaves like an occasional lover whose only real desire is to be understood by giving away as few hints as possible. This is why there have always been poets and painters.