26 September 2019
Buckminister Fuller at IKEA
“I am deeply impressed with the designer of the universe; I am confident I couldn’t have done anywhere near such a good job” Buckminister Fuller 1895 - 1983
I put together an Ikea kitchen together two years ago and it taught me an important lesson; Ikea directions are never wrong. No matter how much I howled at the last stages of completion, if I haven’t followed everything to a dotted ‘t’, I would have to remove everything and start all over again. It reminded me of the classic Zen exercise, the one where the master orders the novice to make a long trench across the monastery grounds at two meters deep and a meter wide. When it’s done the master changes his mind and says, “..No,,,,No,,,, that is not correct, it is in the wrong place, you must fill it in and then make another one closer to the trees over there.”
So for me, I’ve also learned that painting in front of a motif is a lot like following Ikea’s directions, not exactly, but fundamentally, mostly yes. I think so because, like in this study from the other night, if the motif looks a certain way and I want to follow it into night, then I need to ‘read it’ like a kind of map with it’s own singular set of visual directions. It may sound crazy to express it this way but once I’ve strarted, a painting will always only go one way despite all the choices I may seem to have. Once I’ve seen something, I follow it around like a bloodhound even if I’m unsure of my choices, because my scent always knows where the dog bowl is hidden.
It’s an elusive track that jumps between what I see out on the motif and what the memory of it tells me what I remember of it. If I’m not plugged in I can quickly lose my way. Though my memory is not the photo of the IKEA cabinet in the catalogue I’m trying to assemble, it is the pathway that my spontaneous volition uses to get there. So I might have a reference for it and a place from where to start but it’s my craft that takes me to the finish line. In this painting thing, it’s never the IKEA photo that I follow but the ever evolving sunset into the night.
This study is so extremely simple, it may be even boring at first glance, but for me, it does has an organic truth in it. And looking further I notice a single small cloud in the sky that I wasn’t aware of painting. Upon examining it, I realise that it had been created by leaving the canvas blank, and herein, I reveal an old habit from my early fling with Cezanne as a student. It’s a good habit that I still treasure and it proves to me that the memory of the initial IKEA photo is actually quite flexible and can always bend to my will as I paint.
It had been a lazy Spring afternoon, a little on the warm side, and this was the first of three made that afternoon. It was done very quickly, maybe in just five minutes. I was hoping the sky would warm up and broaden into a rich big bloom but it didn’t and yet I like this for its improvised and smudgy verisimilitude. The five different layers of colours are a sensual take on the flatness of a picture from last week which I liked. I love that despite the similarities between all these paintings, they all have different personalities.
At home I binged on Woody Allen this past week and saw Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. What a treat. I know, I know,,,, he has taken a lots hits over the past few years, but personally, I’m someone who judges the work of an an artist not the person even though I understand that this does not allign with the current moral zeitgeist, but hey! Like really great paintings, all three films are aesthetic gems, and each of them are far more than just the sum of their parts. Don’t all great things share this same quality? So when Buckminister Fuller praises the designer of the universe in secular terms such as this, I agree wholeheartedly. It’s proclaimed without a trace of modesty and with a dose of truth like any real American artist.
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