30 March 2021
Mantegna’s cap
This was the first of three pictures from the other night. It is unusually austere but sensual, and it reminds me today of Montegna’s magnificent Portrait of a Young Man, in Napoli at the Capodimonti museum. I agree with everyone who believes that he was one of the greatest painters of the Rennnaisance. His portrait is very small, maybe only around 25 X 15 cms tall and its seen in profile. He wears a rose-coloured cap virtually identical to this pink sky, hence my association. I can often fall in love with certain paintings but this intimate portrait by Andrea Mantegna, I place in a special drawer in my memory. How does one fall in love with a work of art? It’s easy for some of us. I mean it’s certainly as easy as falling in love with another person and certainly less problematic too. But the feeling is the same if you are a painter, because you are pierced right through the corps of who you are. A great work of art is the top-of-the tree, as Australians here would say, and it will always grow taller for you, and neither will it will let you down or deceive you, nor even talk back. Whether it be an opera aria, a film, a book, a picture, or a small Mayan figurine, the love of an artwork can be a perfect and everlasting union. But obviously it’s not for everyone. Some people love their cars to death, polishing them each weekend while others worship their dogs and cats more than even their spouses. It’s a deeply personal thing and that’s the way it should be. Isn’t that what is so wonderful about an object of beauty? And like a girlfriend or boyfriend, our love interests come in all shapes and sizes, with or without tattoos. It’s only our imagination that creates such attraction, this lust, or affection, or both. It’s a true democracy of feeling and we’re all free to love what and who we love unless we’re in Putain’s Russia. But even better, we can make of it all what we wish. It’s like a giant food hub like those one sees in Singapore where our choices are almost limitless and where the varieties on offer can make one horny or more hungry by just having a peek.
So, that said, I house an enormous affection for this small study of mine from the other evening. I think it’s actually my very, very favorite painting out of several thousand done from the beach here. In fact, because I’m not the jealous type, if it had been painted by someone else, it would still not dim my infatuation for it, not even a bit. That it was painted by anyone anywhere, and that it exists somewhere out in the world is already an extraordinary thing. Why? Who knows? Let’s just say that it rings my doorbell. And yes, I fell in love with it. But it’s not a possessive love that makes one uptight and full of carnel desire. It’s a spiritual one, like how one can feel for their very closest friend on earth or maybe even their parents whom they cherish.
As a painter, I sometimes traverse culural time zones in a flash with the ease of a child’s flexible imagination. I flit about easily between pictorial things and intemporal places. It’s all in my head of course because all these artefacts from so many periods of history are long gone: pre-Columbian, Cycladic, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Africana and Asian art Everything in my time-bending cultural mind is completely fluid as the painter I seem to be in this 21st century. It’s sometimes confusing because it asks me what it means to be authentic. That’s always a great question to ask one’s self in every circumstance in life. Outside of a therapists office, how often do any of us contemplate our histories, both personal and collective? We sit upon a treasure trove of riches going back 10,000 years or longer, and yet we don’t seem to use it as either artists or philosophy students. Why not?
Lucky for me, this humble motif at the beach seems to be my own private philosophy tutor. By day it’s just another humdrum-looking tropical beach but by early evening it’s transformed into something beautiful, like watching a woman dress for a night out, it’s magnificent thing to behold. And just like a person whose life is enhanced by a partner, I too, can be transformed by this motif at dusk, and it completes my own sense of well-being,
I admit that it’s such a small picture to get all worked up about, but then I think it must be not unlike how any engineer might feel when the project he or she has worked on has left the hanger and now flies overhead transporting millions of passengers to far off places around the globe. Is it pride one feels, or love? Or both? Does it matter what it’s called? Isn’t it that sensation that arises in a person who has discovered both of these feelings all wrapped up in a bundle like they’re a proud parent? Painters too, can feel like parents sometimes.
So yes, I really do have an emotional connection with this picture for some curious reason and it may even seem odd to hold such feelings for an art work but I would add that it’s not just a picture or the motif, but more specifically it’s a space in which an artist has fallen in love. It has meaning. I’m reminded of one of my very favorite films from the 1990’s called The Object of Beauty wherein a poor deaf maid working in luxurious London hotel steals a small Henry Moore statuette from a room. When asked at the end of the film why she had taken it, she replied to the police through a translator that it had spoken to her. And that, is what Art is all about for many of us.
I’ve spoken of my emotional attachment to this small picture, but now critically speaking, I’ll address why I think it works. As a painting it’s as inventive and concise as any painting I’ve ever admired anywhere. Though I may come off as pretentious, this small thing is itself quite unpretentious. I daresay that a young child with talent could very easily have come up with such an image because it’s simple idea has been reduced down to just a few stripes of colour. They are however ones that correlate to nature via the motif at the beach. My only regret with it is that I cannot seem to ‘scale it up’ to a larger format successfully in the studio. I cannot seem to get close to the same spontaneity of it but I hope in the near future that will change for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment