Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads NSW Australia

Introduction

                 February 2006, Tombo pen on Muji paper, 15 x 10 cm

For the past eight years, I have been making studies here at the beach on Brunswick Heads on the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Done at at the end of the afternoon when the twilight hour approaches, they represent a visual diary of my evening sessions which I came to call ‘Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads.’

Many years earlier, I had seen the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto who spent years travelling around Japan making large black and white studies of the horizon line that appeared to cut it in half. He used an 8 X 10 camera, often with long exposures during all kinds of weather and in every season. I was deeply moved by these things. And although prior to seeing his series, I had never been too fond of black and white photography, in his case, I was taken aback by the painterly nuances of black, white, and a vast multitude of greys. 

Although his images were the inspiration for my own series, I only wished to explore the horizon line in colour using oil paints at the dusk hour. Like so many people, I had spent a lifetime of walking the beach at dusk, and I had long been intrigued with the idea of painting twilight skies. But while Sugimoto’s photos were created using a long exposure, my own in complete contrast, are painted with lightning speed due to the quick colour changes at that hour. 

Although I call it a series now, when I began I had no idea that it would become such a long project. Initially, I had simply wished to get back outdoors to paint again and have some fun mixing colours from the evening light at the beach. I had been previously working in the studio for a number of years where the creative process is so completely different, but one evening I just went out with an easel and a backpack full of colours, rags, and turpentine, to see what I could make from it. Nine years later, I still go out regularly when the weather looks interesting.

I now practice two kinds of Painting forms simultaneously, one complimenting the other. One is done in the studio while the other is out in front of this motif at the beach. They both bring pleasure yet in different ways because they speak to different corners of my curiosity.

Although at the beginning of this exploration at the beach I hadn’t imagined these paintings as being ‘site specific’ or even a serious project of any kind. The early pictures just naturally became a series without much thought at all. It was more of an accident because I had no idea I’d still be painting out there nine years on. Only later did I understand that it might be a kind of ‘site specific’ term to describe it. I had assumed that ‘site specific’ referred generally to a site chosen, then altered by an artist who subsequently documented it in one way or another. In my own case however, it turned into a series simply out of repetition. And though I haven’t altered the site in the least, I see now that I have been certainly been altered by it. 

Because the motif is so inherently abstract, being just the sea and sky and separated by the horizon line, I use colour as the principal vehicle with which to push the foreground backwards into the painting while at the same time bringing the background forward up to the surface. This is for me one of the greatest lessons from Cezanne, who in the 19th century, single-handedly ushered us into the era of truly Modern Painting by demolishing perspective and breaking down distance. 

During these years I’ve made lots of studies, and through many failures, I’ve learned a great deal while at the same time also growing into the ‘motif.’ I’m always looking for a pictorial resolution in each picture that carries its own illusive logic. I’m interested in the unity of the whole surface as being one that creates a formal integrity for each visual idea. Consequently, these studies might appear scruffy, a little sloppy and unfinished because I’m certainly more probably Expressionist than Impressionist. But personally, I like all these spontaneous and accidental elements in my own work and in others’ too. It’s a matter of taste.