Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25
Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 July 2026, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25
A few things from the winter beach light here in Australia. The first four are from the other night while the last one is from last month and it's the ugly duckling of the group.
These winter months provide the most sublime light here. The nights get cold but the days are generally easy between 16 - 22 degree celsius and these winter skies (and seas) can be blindingly bright compared to summer conditions. They can go from the palest Prussian Blue to Lime Green before transforming into yellow, then pink, and ultimately a deep violet. Nice!
I'm not crazy about all of these studies from the other night but I do like the top two. Like a poster of a sexy port somewhere in Italy that I might see in a Travel Agency, it reminds me of a place I'd love to soon go. Painters always see their future in drips and drabs which I guess is a good thing because in the state of the world at present, life feels weird and out of control. We all need to know that there is a future out there beyond all the nonsense of the present. I'm American, so I'm sensitive to these things in this moment.
But pictures, for a painter, will also show us what we might want to be doing in the future and not just where we might wish to be. In this top painting for instance, I can see large pictures painted with great simplicity and almost completely Non-Objective. This is my Holy Graal.
The other studies are a little less interesting to me, perhaps they are too referential and speak too much of Nature. But hey! I'm happy and grateful for any productive session that the Gods grant me.
It has been crumby weather all winter and full of rain and stormy clouds so whenever it looks good to work, I'm out the door. It's my only real therapy.
This last picture (at bottom) still looks like a mess to me. It was done last month under a very difficult sky. I knew it would be hard, but like I said, it's my therapy so I go out to the beach even when the sky's in a bad mood because I need these sessions. So the other evening, I was plodding through a few pictures without success when a lovely woman came up to say hello and look at what I was doing. This happens almost everyday, and honestly, if I were forty years younger and great-looking, I'd get a lot of dates. But anyway, though I normally hate painting in front of anyone, I didn't seem to care at that point because I was so lost in that hopeless sky. So we chatted while I worked on this last picture. She liked it and even wanted to buy it so I gave her my Instagram details. She left eventually and because I still wasn't happy with it I fiddled so more with it. I knew it was a mess, and I knew she wouldn't contact me, but everything was cool. I'm used people telling me they'll buy something only to disappear. No worries, in fact, I would have given it to her just for the fun of it. This is the life of a painter.
But despite everything, like my Uncle Boris up in the Bronx used to say, "Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes it eats you".
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