4 February 2020
Daedalus and Icarus
I have been looking at some of the first studies at the beach and thankfully, I can see progress. The palette has lightened up radically and there is more concern towards what I’m seeing instead of how I imagine I’m feeling, simply put, less of me and more of the motif. I’m using my eyes maybe even for the very first time in my painting life.
There is always a danger, when working from nature, that one can fall too much in love with the ‘motif’ or ‘nature’ as it were, by creating a sentimental attachment to it. So too, one can be too attached by an idea of nature instead of the real thing. Yet conversely, when one is too fixated upon one’s own self-expressive feelings, including conceptual ideas to which artists are always prone, it can also blind one front of all that nature has to offer.
In any event, for the moment, I’m throwing myself into the middle ground, for like walking a tightrope, one needs to be balanced right in the center. I try not to be too close to the ‘sentimental’ in nature, but at the same time, I’m careful not to be excessively pulled into my own fanciful sense of expressive ideation such that it is no longer a communication with the outside world. It's a delicate balance, so at least for today I try to follow Daedalus not poor Icarus.
As Pierre Bonnard famously once proclaimed after perhaps being too exasperated by Impressionism’s stringent focus upon the motif;
“There is so much attention put upon the motif out in nature that one can forget that there is also the attention to the canvas itself.”
This is one of those secrets of Painting, hidden in plain sight as it were, and every painter anywhere, or at anytime, has intuitively had to grapple with what he means by this. For myself, I think he expresses that a painter’s ultimate goal should always be concerned with the success or failure of the picture on its own merits and its own logic, separate from where it has been taken from. Like an infant whose umbilical cord has been cut from its mother, the picture too, once removed from its easel, should (ideally) also be an independent entity with it own autonomous raison d’être. It has to function separately from the mothership, the ‘motif’. Hence the tightrope that a painter needs to traverse while balancing between the appearance of a motif out in nature and the ongoing picture on the easel.
If one understands this there is a great possibility for success because there is this avenue running right between these two disparate ideas, a sacred kind of space unique to each artist and one that can open up their real stylistic originality. A painter finds a freedom somewhere in between these two magnetic poles.
My nature too, has always vacillated between a slightly rebellious nature and an obedient one in life. So when it comes to painting I'm a bit of both depending on my mood. When I started out painting I wanted to do things my own way, but I quickly discovered that there were so many things I needed to understand that I quickly felt stymied by my stubborn ignorance. So many simple things became complicated for me. How to frame an image on the canvas? What was light? What colours to use and how to mix? etc, etc... Of course the best way to learn is to just paint a lot, and fail a lot.
But eventually those frustrating exercises led me questions, eventually they turned me towards painters whom I admired. Both my teachers Leo Marchutz and Vincent van Gogh, (one alive, the other dead) advised me to copy the Masters. But who were they? And do I really have do that?? I had initially rebelled, but in the end, I was humbled enough to ask for help. So I finally copied a few of the usual suspects; Cezanne, van Gogh, Turner, Kokoschka, Picasso, Michelangelo, and even Diebenkorn, but a few others at various moments too. Eventually, after making enough failures in the studio and working out in the landscape, I began to find my footing. And by that, I mean that I found my own voice; a style comprised of using brushes and certain colours. How they composed an image, however badly, was at least something of my own that led me to continue day after day, and that was enough.
Then something marvelous happened, after all the stumbling and bumbling, bits of joy began to arrive. Much later, when I wanted to learn piano I realised that by playing the music of others was indeed how everyone learned music, whether it was Bach or BB King. I still don’t know why it’s so different in art schools today.
And yet, despite all that searching around for answers so many years ago, I still feel a certain tension each time I go out to paint at the beach in the late afternoon. That's a good thing too, because otherwise, I would easily become complaisant and my pictures would suffer terribly. So the taut tightrope is a good plan for a lazy guy like me.
Here is a study from the other night that came after a long swealtering day. There was so much humidity all afternoon that it was the talk of town and everyone seemed to have fled to the beach early. When I finally made it there in the late afternoon, I set up fast and then ran to the down to the sea and jumped in, skipping all the way due the hot sand. Even at the late hour, the beach was still somewhat crowded. When I say crowded, I mean maybe a few hundred people scattered along the endless beach, this isn’t Coney Island after all. Eventually I got to work and made three studies. This was the second. Not sure if it so successful but it does have a feeling in it I like. It captured that lazy haziness of a humid summer afternoon that I imagine appears anywhere throughout the world in the summer heat. Afterwards, it was getting dark as I packed up my things and because I was hesitant to swim in the ocean at that hour, I went down to the small beach at Torakina, a tiny spot where the river meets the sea and is protected by the breakwater. Often at that hour it’s empty and I can swim naked in the dark.
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