6 May 2022
A palazzo in Sorrento
The other day I was looking at a very small landscape I had made while in Tuscany back around 1986. I’m not sure where it is now but I am fortunate to have photo of it somewhere. Immediately upon seeing it’s sloppy technique I was quickly reminded of the fact that I’m still a sloppy painter even after all these years, but it’s a fact that I’ve finally accepted. I’ve also come to see that it’s part of the way I am in my ‘civilian’ life out in the big world. Though I learned a few healthy habits at summer camps and boarding schools, I still don’t make my bed each morning or fold my laundry, do I nor organise it it all nto drawers. I’m clean, but I do lead a messy domestic life such that it’s no surprise that I’m a bachelor today.
Like my messy life, my ‘style’ (the way I paint, simply put) has always been as loose as a goose too. This, I cannot change either. Like the study from Tuscany that expresses the dry and terrible heat of August in Siena, this
picture, though made here in Australia a few night’s ago, also conveys a specific moment here at the beach through my own loose lens. Looking out at the placid sea of this small sensuous image, I wouldn’t say that it’s a sloppy study per se, but its structure is rather freely articulated by my own handiwork and isn’t that one of the elements that gives a painting its mark of originality? In my own case, it’s surely the most visible of attributes. But there are others too; subject matter, a drawing idea, colours (and their harmonies). There is always so much that affixes a painter’s persona into place on a canvas. What’s a picture after all if it isn’t a window into reality? Could it be that the gauge into a picture’s quality is how inventive is its novelty?
So, curiously, this small study reminds me of Italy, not exactlyTuscany, but further south on the coast near Napoli. There is a gentle feeling in it that pulls me back in time to those sensual Italian pictures made in the late 18th century. I could even imagine it being a small fragment somehow extracted from a large fresco in some abandoned palazzo near Sorrento. Might it even be a hazy antique patina stolen from a summer evening that had somehow smoked the dusk light into the picture surface like in an old mirror? Would it not give one a feeling of standing on a crumbling terrace in Sorrento or Amalfi whilst looking out at sea under an 18th century summer sky? Yet despite its minuscule size against such age old elegance, I would hope that it still evokes an aroma of time and place. All this I easily muse this morning from antipodal life here on the Pacific rim.
I imagine that even to like or understand this study, one would have to accept that it’s inherently abstract at its very core. To miss this, one might misread the road map I’ve created and perhaps become lost. Even if I work figuratively from a motif in Nature, I’m always only interested in the freedom of paint because I’m basically a messy guy.
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