16 August 2020
San Giorgio in Australia
We have settled into some lovely winter skies now and these two pictures reveal my deep affection for them. This one, and the one on the following page, done a week later, look like they might have been painted on the same night. I’ve found myself pushing to take advantage of these rosy skies by using more pure colour with less white paint from the start. In them is more ‘body’, more substance than I would typically use for the sky. This makes them feel a bit more ‘muscular’ than usual.
I remember working this way at the very beginning of my earliest days when learning to paint outside in the world. I was in Venice and made a small study of San Giorgio back around 1974. Like for every painter, this was an important chapter in my life because I think that one’s early pictures usually always reveal a raw innocence, often be wonky but authentic. It’s why one should never throw away early paintings as awful as they may appear to an impatient and demanding beginner.
I also remember that the orange brick church began to appear across the same little white kind of canvas board I was working on at the time in much the same way as I approached these two recent studies. I felt in these two as if I were conjuring up an image from my laptop’s Time Machine that stores a complete memory bank of my painting life.
In these two, once I put the colour down it was not touched again. All the values were fixed, like set in concrete once I put them down. There were no corrections or sensual brushstrokes to cover any misteps I might have made.
In this series at the beach, contrary to my painting habits of the past fifty years, today, I always begin with the sky which I jump into first, so consequently, I lock myself into this ‘light value’ that’s responsible for holding the entire surface together. Thus, in this manner I‘ve nominated the sky to be my referential point of ‘light’ for the duration of the painting. Once that’s done, there is no changing it. And by doing it this way, I’m reversing an entire lifetime of habit, because out in the landscape I had always begun a picture by indicating the strongest accents of the motif à la Cezanne. This was in keeping with a traditional method that the Italians Renaissance painters defined as ‘Chiaroscurro’. The ‘light’ appeared as if by magic through an appropriate placement of brushstrokes that marked the accents which defined the values of the drawing.
In the early Renaissance fresco painting techniques had created a rather light-filled painting surface but with the advent of linen, and almost all the way up until the early 19th century, painters had been trained to add ‘light’ to the dark ground of the surface. These variants of brackish tar tones were used to protect the wood or linen from the slow decomposition of solvents used to mix pigments. Later on it became fashionable to cover all this with variants of red or ocre tones. Many painters today, still work in this manner. It’s only in the past 200 years or so that the French Impressionists turned everything upside down and again began painting upon a white surface. And this white surface re-aligned painting back to early Frescoes in Italy. Only in the Far East where artists generally worked on light-coloured paper did painting escape the trauma of dark grounds.
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