4 May 2024
Dogfight, part one
This was the first one of two that came out of an evening last week. I had to drag myself out of the house where I was nursing a cold but I could see from the comfort of my sofa that the sky outside was showing great promise so I knew I had to go.
This one reveals something a little new, a deviation away from all the tight control I consistently exercise in all of these pictures. It's tiresome, and I'm trying to lean into a more free-for-all mind-set. I enjoyed finding the willingness to loosen up in this small image.
The weather, sadly, has been so unstable these past six months that it’s been really difficult to navigate the uncertainty, so when it does look decent, a 48 hour man-cold or not, I am out the door.
My desire for these sessions has been to push myself into newer visual ideas, to open up and work more freely with less conceptual oversight. And so I’m trying to paint wildly and without caution as Paul Gauguin advised his students up in Brittany 150 years ago: “Paint wildly!” he proclaimed. One should remember that this was just after Impressionism and before Fauvism shook up the brushwork.
But back in the future, it was a beautiful evening the other night, and these skies are a steady joy despite my ritual here, over and over again. The only thing that changes; c'est moi.
It was an easy placid sky and rich with colour despite a messy mush of a drawing overhead, a wave of low hanging clouds were rolling in onshore and moving fast, so consequently, this image is a little wobbly and discombobulated because I jumped into the sky without a drawing in my head when starting out.
I quickly found myself lost and all I could do was try and lock on to the clouds like a fighter pilot in a dogfight. I thought, “I’m on them, locked and loaded”, and in the end indeed, it looks like a sky full of flack.
I was determined to be as fresh and spontaneous as possible this night even as I suspected I could fail miserably. If I had started with an idea in my head, it was ironically not to have an idea in my head. Go figure, but sometimes it’s just like that and I accepted it.
Honestly, I'm not so crazy about it, but I was happy to see myself pushing to do something new and unbridled so I kept it. I'm such a control freak, it kills me. It was done quickly in any event as was the second one that night.
"An experiment", I thought to myself after finishing them both, but aren’t they all? Ruts and routines are easy to fall into in any creative life, and finding a way to climb out can be tricky. Hopefully, the more one paints, the more one's intuition is strengthened which I guess is a lot like radar helping to guide us when we get lost.
Artists are alone in this task, we're not like those tennis pros who bitch at their coaches in the stands nearby when they play poorly in a match. Artists take responsibility for their solo vocations, it's not like they have a nagging spouse to kick our butts all day.
That said, I do ask myself at times, “could it be that I’m tired of what I’ve been doing here at the beach? Have I finally hit the wall here?”
But this is just what I wail to myself when I’m feeling really lost without a coach in the stands to encourage me onward.
Maybe I just yearn to break free but cannot admit it to myself? But free from what? From the motif? From myself?
And yet despite this wavering in and out of these cloudy thoughts in my head, I do manage to find newer, more nuanced solutions to the motif, and inevitably, I come back for more. That I do this, always amazes me.
At my age, I should know from experience that all these doubts only sprouts up when I’m about to find new solutions. At least, this is how I reassure myself. All the same, I wonder if perhaps I'm afraid of being cut loose from a project that has moored me, and kept me somewhat sane these past few years. I also know deep down in the center of me, that these past few years have been the richest of my whole life. Quoi faire?
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