16 August 2020
San Giorgio in Australia
Again, because the real ‘star’ of my pictures is the sky, I naturally allow it to define the ‘light’ of the painting, so I begin with it. The sky is after all, just air and gaseous tints of colour created by varying degrees of humidity added in. Consequently, being made of no visible substance it changes shape and colour. I basically had to learn how to treat this perplexing element in a new and inventive manner.
Fortunately, there have been lots of teachers over the past few hundred years from whom I could avail myself with this adventure. The Dutch, of course, whose light and airy seascapes still shimmer in technical perfection were an option, but alas, their pictures were mostly painted in studios and over many sessions. I wanted to cut to the chase and place my faith in the improvised combustion of speed at the beach.
The seascape genre is an old tradition, but obviously I still think it has mileage in it. The Fauves proved this in the South of France when they injected it with a new spontaneous life in the early 19th Century. Up north in Holland, Piet Mondrian, before he became a Modernist celebrity, had a giant love affair early in his career with the Dutch sky and made gorgeous and inventive pictures although I imagine they were painted in the studio. But regardless, painters have always loved this ephemeral motif.
But the Brits, who gave us not only Bonnigton and Constable, also loved the sea and sky at all hours of the day. But it was the emperor himself: J.M. Turner, who seemed to achieve a supernatural renown by just waving his brush magically across a blank page. His remarkable watercolour technique was a spontaneous response to the dense and damp atmospheres of both Margate and Venice where he painted the sea and skies incessantly. With the barest hints of colour, he carved out whole chunks of physical space by just following his evanescent curiosity and jotting them into tiny pages of his notebook.
One thing I began to understand early on, while painting at the beach, is that there are particular colours that don’t easily render this lightness of air in the sky. There are whole tints of colour that just don’t give buoyancy to the air. At the beginning back in early 2018, I was treating the sea and sky with faulty tints because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the kinds of reds and yellows I was using. Soon enough though, I realised that I was using reds comprised of too much ‘earth’ in them. In France, except occsasionally when in Cassis, I didn’t paint the sea and sky very much, so I wasn’t sensitive to this. I frequently used Alizarin Crimson for pretty much everything on the red spectrum, and at a minimum it worked. And yet, it also possesses an ochre componant to it that grounds it to the earth. So when I came here to semi-tropical Australia and faced this equatorial sea and sky I needed to rethink my colours completely. After trying various crimson hues, I settled upon Quinacridone Magenta from a company in Melbourne. Here, the airy sky at the sea wants to move upwards into the violet-blue of the atmosphere, so even a hint of an earthly tone can pull it Earthward. I wanted my pinks and violets to rise up effortlessly and resist gravity. So, I unloaded a few pigments and adopted newer ones, and because of that, a new path opened up for me here.
So although both these studies possess a thickish impasto of Crimson Red and Cadmium Orange, hopefully they still show off that deep rose bloom that certain twilight skies exude here to the delight of both beach walkers and amateur painters. For me to make any progress here, even on these small, simple studies, continuity has become the key to mapping out my own personal itinerary. To go from a small study of San Giorgio in Venice to a beach on the Pacific took fifty years, and one would naturally have the right to ask; What has the painter learned? I’m not sure how to answer that, except that when I think back on my life, I often feel something like Oscar Schindler, who, at the end of Spielberg’s film, breaks down in tears when telling his loyal Jewish accountant that he could have done more,,,, indeed, he should have done much more.
If one is already lucky enough to be able to work at their craft on a regular basis, that’s fortunate, because the pictures that come up will always keep teaching the painter through thick and thin, and their style will naturally sharpen like a hot blue flame into something authentic. Any progress always forges new ideas, and like any vocation, the whole point of an artistic life is to follow it and improve. I like that I've had a flexible compass throughout this series that has been guiding me both forward and backwards to places of known and unknown insight.
When it came to painting, my brain has been hard-wired with stress since I was a kid. So to find any sanity I had to learn to let go and relax because every picture in front of me had always seemed to be a kind of final exam, and that made me crazy. Fortunately, I’ve learned to chill and trust my own map. It’s like I’ve not only been given a second chance to return to the child’s playroom, but a chance to revisit the scene of the crime and find peace.
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