21 June 2022
‘Twas beauty that killed the beast’ part 1
This is from several nights ago. It's one of two done on the same evening on a chilly beach. I arrived to find a sublime 'bloom' about to explode. I set up in haste and luckily, it allowed me in easily like an impatient lover waiting at the front door. And for some reason, I love this one particularly. It satisfies me emotionally, which I think is a funny thing to say about a seascape. I had been home all day and nothing seemed to be going right for me. It was one of those days. So lucky me, when all else fails in my life, the beach awaits me eat dusk and sometimes with ardour.
Both images share my proclivity for large bands of colour like those oversized ribbons used to wrap automobiles on American quiz shows in the 1960’s.
But today, it’s the 21st of June, and being the Summer Solstice, France will celebrate the Fête de la Musique today. As its title implies, throughout the country, music festivals will explode everywhere all day and into the night.
The idea initially come from an American musician in Paris working for France Musique who had proposed the idea for a music festival on each of the Solstices, both winter and summer. Jack Lang, the then Minister of Culture, liked the idea so he created the festival back in 1982. It became an instant success because, who doesn't like a music festival? It has since blossomed into a monster day of music and has spread throughout the world though mostly in Francophone countries. In cities, towns and villages, one can hear anything from someone playing Debussy in a tiny garden on an upright piano to a band of Gypsies driving around on an open truck. It's a cacophonous zoo that runs late into the night and also another reason to really love France. And by good fortune, Roland Garros, the French Tennis Open is in full bloom at the moment and it's screwing up my sleep cycle here in Australia.
I’ve noticed that on the prestigious Center Court is a maxim engraved into the sliver of thin wall separating the upper and lower stands. On the West side of the stadium is written in English these words; “Victory belongs to the most tenacious” while on the opposite East side, it's in French, “La victoire appartient au plus opiniâtre”. Though I’ve never seen nor heard this word opiniatre used before, the dictionary assures me that it’s stronger than the more plebian, ‘tenace’ (tenacious) because it adds a stronger nuance as in, “he doggedly kept at it till it almost killed him’.
I recount this because every year I see it on television for two weeks on end during the tournament and it makes me think of painting. It reminds specifically me of just how much this painting motif at the beach has changed me in so many different ways over these past few years. It would be impossible to qualify or quantify it but because of it, I feel like a completely different person. Hard to imagine that just by going to a beach and painting the sky one could change so much, but it has happened to me. And I know it happens to everyone who find a vocation into which they can sink their teeth.
Personally, I think the most obvious change is that I’ve developed grit because I don’t think I’ve ever stuck with anything this long in my life except sobriety. So thus, these words engraved on Center Court at Roland Garros have stuck with me over time. It also makes me ponder so many tennis heroes; Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal, Steffi Graf, etc, etc.. who understand the grit of the fight.
Like these tennis heroes, there are also so many painting heroes out there too, and though it's a different kind of fight, the grit is the same. There are so many painters out there that in fact, somewhere during the past several centuries, it surely must be true that a French painter must have proclaimed something similar to this about their own painting. But mightn't they have turned the phrase around slightly to read;
“With time and persistance, one tames a motif”.
One could easily imagine Eugene Delacroix writing such a thing 200 years ago. But couldn’t Monet have also said to his wife? Pierre Bonnard? Surely, Cezanne or Van Gogh in their letters, non? Perhaps it came from Matisse or Picasso, but I doubt it somehow. Perchance, might it have been Giorgio Morandi, whose life is inextricably linked with his endless small studies of bottles and cups? But ironically enough, maybe none of the above, maybe it was just me! Me, who even decades before I fell in love with this motif had noted something to this effect at some point in my own diary. Having digested so much correspondence between so many artists over the years, I can no longer be sure what came from whom, or when, or where?
Nonetheless, this figures deeply into the universe of painters like Morandi and Monet in particular who faced the same motifs over and over again.
Before he became a champion on the Grand Slam circuit, Bjorn Borg was apparently a very tetchy player and had to deal with impetuous rages when a junior player. He apparently did quite successfully, because as the champion he became, he was known as the 'Ice Man' due to his cool demeanour on court.
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