6 April 2022
Thomas Aquinas at the Pharmacy
part two
Meanwhile, the Autumn skies are upon us yet hide behind these rainy afternoons. But today anyway, this evening’s bloom was unabashedly robust, like the rosy cheek of a shy young girl in love. It opened up widely in the sky like the small fan she might have carried to an opera house centuries ago.
In this second study the bloom really kicks in and the peachy-coloured sky has dropped into the sea and illuminating the entire picture plane. The light shimmers, and right in the middle of the picture, I remember briefly musing to myself like a tourist in front of a cathedral, “Isn’t this extraordinary?”
And speaking of cathedrals, being at this beach under certain skies like this one will often makes me feel like a child walking into a great big church for the very first time. Anyone who has entered Notre Dame or Chartres will know what I mean. Standing in that gulf under the vaulted ceilings of space, the expanse still seems to go on forever in my young imagination. These churches were designed to convey a sense of movement upward towards the heavens, and indeed, they seem to grow up and outwards quite naturally like any poinciana tree here in Australia.
And at the beach too, that universe is only limited by the far ends of the horizon on either side. But for all this space, there are limitations, and the painter being me, must create something within the constraints of a rectangle. He must define them through the drawing and this is where one’s own sense of abstraction is so vital because it requires an original vision. A painter needs to see the sky through the lens of his or her own feeling. Anyone who watches a child of a certain age paint the sky can witness this originality at work because the child decides how big the sky is through an abstract feeling and is guided by precision.
But despite this expanse of the sky and the imagination of the painter, this ‘seascape’ genre has still been around the block too many times and it’s worn-out, like the working women on Parisian street corners portrayed in too many paintings (by men) from a bygone era of sad and rundown charm. It is a motif both used, and abused by generations of painters, and like facing an object of naked beauty, it can easily rob them of all their noble intentions just to be in front of such magnificence. And yet, like in all things concerning desire, the seascape can also also be endless too, if one were to develop devotion in their affection.
Many of my studies are not great by any means, I admit it. No worries, for I see them as studies and nothing to really get worked up about. But occasionally, they do open up with something new and surprising which speaks to any talents I might possess. It’s in these three studies I’ve gotten closer to my future, and it’s for this reason I keep coming back for more and more, always hoping for a picture that might just astonish me first and for most. And after all, as many aspiring and wise painters know in their hearts, the best pictures are always the very next ones, the ones that will be done on the following day. For the artist, like for everyone else of every stripe, aren’t there just two basic choices we all wake up to face each day? Isn't one to be sour, the other, sweet?
But anyway, throughout this series I’ve learned that the beach is an open-ended subject with endless possibilities despite its long storied history. I’ve also discovered that there is no earthly boundary imposed upon its parameters except by the painter himself. Under this great cathedral of emptiness, am I clever enough to invent a new way to express it?
As I say a lot in these pages, I listen to France Musique thanks to the extraordinary fact of satellites cruising every which way, miles overhead and mostly unseen. Like other older folks I’m always a little amazed at this and I never take it for granted. I listen to it a lot because, frankly, I get home-sick sometimes and this soothes my anxious heart. The other day at the pharmacy counter I also got this crazy idea about what might happen if ‘Classical music’ became obsolete because nobody cared about it anymore? What would happen if music schools dwindled down to nothing but a few machines with loaded with brightly coloured buttons because nobody had the patience to learn how to play instruments anymore? As the world moves further into the demands of a quick easy production, will students of the future be just learning music through electronic consoles? Will musical instruments become relics of the past and collect dust in Natural History Museums around the globe?
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