The whole darn sky for sale!

11 January 2021

The whole darn sky for sale!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 January 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This turned out to be the start of a study from last week that I wisely stopped in mid-sentence. I had arrived early to jump in the sea before painting. It was one of those giant blue days and the sand was so hot I had to sprint to the water. 

This was to be the first painting. It was unusual for me to start early in the afternoon but the day was a scorcher so I went to the beach earlier than usual. Everything there appeared so crisp and blue. Hardly had I begun, when for some reason I just stopped. It’s rare that I show this restraint because normally, though I may like the start on a painting, I’ll just grab a quick shot of it and continue working. Only rarely would I put it aside for a rainy day. Because I don’t always have an idea in advance of where I’m going, a picture usually morphs into something unexpected. But this one today spoke to me and told me to set it aside which I did. I then quickly jumped into a new canvas board. But this raises that big question that bedevils so many artists. When does a painter decide when a picture is finished? A painting isn’t a jig-saw puzzle after all, it’s a whole organism existing on a flat board and full of nutrients that want to expand in every direction.

When I set aside a study that I may feel ‘unfinished’, I’m aware that what I want to preserve is the fresh idea, maybe even just a fragment of some fleeting sketch of a feeling that is to me alone, authentic. But this means that by keeping just an abridged fragment, I’ll be necessarily preventing the completion of something else that could have been created, a Sophie’s Choice of sorts. This isn’t an habitual practice, so I don’t generally worry about it too much. For me, a sketch is but an abbreviated pictorial idea and no big deal, it’s usually for me alone.

And yet, I’m still aware of cutting something short, and there is danger of this becoming a habit. One cannot always hold onto all great beginnings after all, if we did, we might never get beyond the first kiss or the first few delicious dates. How would we ever move on to marriage and children? We’d remain a teenager forever. No, we must jump in further, making mistakes along the way with a secret hope that they’re repairable at least until they aren’t. Then maybe tears turn to divorce and recriminations from all sides. But life, I know, is a lot more nuanced than painting. I’m really just trying to discuss a picture but you can see how all things are related. Love affairs that may start so beautifully can quickly turn ugly, full of messiness and regrets. Then comes the end alongside the truth which is usually the hardest of all lessons to face. In a painting I'm always trying to be truthful, but in a love affair this isn't always practical.

Like a love affair, a small painting is also bound by the rules of harmony and discord that create their own dramas, but both these disparite things are a search for resolution no matter where its takes us all for better or worse.

The start of this little painting, though not great at all, had a germ of pictorial promise in it which I had wanted to keep. There was something in it which also reminded me of Japan and my Nippon fascination. Once bitten, one is smitten, and then it’s a life-long infection. If I could, I’d visit Japan two or three times a year. Who can argue with emptiness and space, even when they’re crowded all together? 

This precociously small sketch of painting evokes both the sand and the deep blue sea as unsteady stripes that run across the picture plane. Above them, like some displaced polar bear, a monster white cloud seems to barely fit under the eaves of a blue ceiling.  

But in it too, it also evokes for me something truly American, like in the heyday of large Minimalist Painting back in the 1960’s when life seemed, oh, so much simpler and expansive, happier and optimistic too (but mostly if you were white though).

Come think of it, when Americans see emptiness, they immediately think; “This needs to be filled” because this is Marlboro Country. Suddenly this big blue sky unveils to me that voracious American appetite, the one that screams ‘More Park sausages Mom!”. And at the same time, this small start of a study also speaks to me of a giant oversized and slightly faded billboard somewhere out on a desolate stretch of desert off the iconic Route 66, one that advertises the sale of the whole darn sky with clouds included!