stolen work by the Nazis, Van Gogh!

I stumbled upon this organisation (The monumentsmenfoundation.org) last week through an obituary in the NY Times about Harry Ettlinger, a remarkable man who led an interesting life before, during, and after  World War Two. I had no idea that there were  so many really great things still unaccounted
for. I was astounded to see a Cézanne in this list below which I had never seen before. But also, so many other truly great things, most notably a Van Gogh portrait of himself on the road to Tarascon! And I wonder if he had perhaps made a copy or two; different versions? It seems strange for such an iconic image to be packed away somewhere on a dirty secret of a wall for a select audience of thieves. (this would make a great story or film) And how did they get such a vivid and colourful photo of it in 1945? What's the story around this strange anecdotal detail? Would they all be discretely hung in Palazzos or in bank vaults in Switzerland? Maybe covered in grime and stored in an attic somewhere, or (really, really covered in lots of grime) and hanging in a run-down and dingy antique shop somewhere in La Creuse region of France? 

Massimo Campigli and Gio Ponti

Last November, I was at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris where there was a marvellous exhibition centered upon the life and work of Gio Ponti, a Milanese architect who pretty much shaped Italy's post-war landscape. He was immensely talented in so many different areas; furniture design, kitchen ware, sculpture, watercolour, gouache and drawing. And of course hundreds of buildings. I was floored by the entire output. 

But, amongst everything I saw and liked, I was especially moved by a family portrait painted by Massimo Campigli which was behind glass. Campigli was a quirky kind of painter in that he seemed to specialise in primitive, naif portraits (as I note from Google search)

I had never heard of him but he obviously had a certain success in the post war era. At least, his output was large.

But the portrait of the Ponti family moved me very, very much. I wish I could have made better photos of it. What was it? Certainly it comes down to the Humanity which I found in all the expressions. Curiously, I sent the first image of the wife and child to a painter friend who dismissed it out of hand because he felt that the mouth was all wrong. I was surprised that I didn't receive a more engaging response. But anyway, what I believe he missed is the aforementioned sense of humanity. It's a quality which transcends the lack of technique, the clunkiness of a work and renders it original despite all its imperfections. This is a strange family portrait for a few reasons but it is this strangeness which makes it an original. And Baudelaire said one of the most important things about originality. He said that on first sight an original work usually appears ugly. This always made me think of the shock which so many people would have felt when seeing Van Gogh in his time.

I studied with Léo Marchutz, and as an painter himself, and as critic, he often spoke of this humanity in spite of any of its flaws while looking at a work of art. He showed me that this humanity goes back thousands of years and has revealed itself so often.

I am forever grateful for this quality of observance which he so kindly and patiently bequeathed to me as a young student in Aix.

There are lots of things to say about this portrait but again, it is in these expressions upon each face; as parents, as children, all somewhat separated from one another (excepting the mother and small child) through which I entered into this humanity.

looking at Philip Guston

I have long looked at these two drawings as they face one another in a large book about him which I pick up from time to time to see how a painter from his generation looks today barely 60 years on. 

I have always marvelled at the top one but felt disappointed by the one underneath it.

Why?

It makes me curious about my own thinking and my own sense of craft. 

I imagine they are both 'drawn from a motif', that is to say, from a still-life but that seems irrelevant to my point. Whether done from imagination, memory, or motif, it's all the same to me; a drawing either succeeds or it fails, mostly,... sort of.

Ruthless I am! Yes... but hey; an experience of art should be intoxicating. So if one wants to get drunk, why not pick the best wine?

The drawing above opens itself to the page. There is a luminosity which pours through its entire surface and which creates different spaces. Its light moves but does not seem to stop. In fact, it feels quite Japanese in this regard. I like it very much because it appears to be breathing each time I visit with it. Most importantly, it surprises, and this, for me, is an essential part of why I  crave the artistic experience as a maker or spectator.

The drawing below, the longer I look at it, never seems to get moving; it feels clogged up somewhere; suffocating, unable to open up to the page upon which it was born. 

But it isn't a bad drawing, it's just one which does not possess that spontaneous clarity which I find in the drawing above it. It is more of a declaration about itself than a question, and I like questions.

a reprint from 2013, but I find it so relevant

04 June 2013

surprise!

I just arrived back in France from England, and while driving south I was listening to France Inter; a discussion between Francois Busnel and the writer Antoine Compagnon concerning Proust and Montaigne. Compagnon said that literature must principally evoke a sense of the 'surprise'. He added that a reader must never read the preface before jumping into the book. 

"One should not lose out on the pleasure of reading by too much pedagogy". 

("..il ne faut surtout pas, surtout pas supprimer ce plaisir par trop de pédagogie"...)

I bring all this up because recently in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanawaza, Japan (but it could be almost any Contemporary venue today) I moved through an exhibition while reading the fact-sheet which I was given to explain the works and the artists exhibiting. There are, these days, certain code phrases which let one know that one is in a Contemporary Museum space:

"...the artist engages our sensibilities.."

"...he has created a world that calls our attention to ..."

"A continuing investigation of life and death is the theme informing all facts of..."

"...we remain confused by...."

"These works which compel us to question our 

visual understanding of the world and everyday 

awareness, engender a mysterious world of a 

different dimension...."

I am often surprised to discover that I am 'supposed to feel this', and I am 'supposed think that', that I was supposed to 'question this' and 'be confronted' by that. I have barely the freedom to have my own experience in front of a work of art as I am assaulted by what the curators and artists have already programmed me to experience. No doubt they do not trust that we, (the public), can be trusted to 'get it' without being armed to the teeth with all sorts of information and philosophical questions. But isn't it all a bit maddening? I mean: where is the poetry, after all?

Thus, how refreshing it was to hear a writer proclaim that surprise, an element so duly overlooked, it would seem, is a crucial necessity for entry into the world of literature, for this writer, (and reader). In other words: what is the point of our imagination if we cannot be present for our own experience in front of a work of art, even at the great, and delicious risk of getting lost in it?

So the questions begs: If one agrees with this premise, then; why the disconnect between the 'Visual Arts' and 'literature', and, how come the Visual Arts have been hijacked by intellectuals and anthropologists? 

curtains

This is a painting I made in France back in 2013. I was painting a series of large pictures about the sea which were completely invented from my imagination while landlocked in Dieulefit for the summer, and about 200 kms from the coast.

I must have been thinking of all the awful things I was reading about and seeing concerning the condition of our oceans. When I went to swim off the beaches in Marseille I was so appalled and ashamed that it was so poluted with human junk. At the same time I felt grateful that I had made the move to a small coastal town in Australia. The French coastline is filthy, full of cigarette butts. and plastic bags and cups. The beaches and calanques too were littered with ever imaginable refuse from our plastic life. What are we going to do about it?

Point of No Return

      “Trunkenes Paar” (“Drunken Couple”) (1981) by Lutz FleischerCreditInGestalt/Michael Ehritt; Lutz Fleischer

Love this painting, unusually light-hearted for German painting.

from the New York Times  

• July 24, 2019

The show, running through Nov. 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, is just a few hundred yards from the church where activists began regularly gathering in 1989 to push for change in the stifling, authoritarian East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R.

The exhibition, “Point of No Return,” is billed as the biggest so far of East German art, featuring 300 works by more than 100 artists, including dissidents who defied the communist regime and established figures who taught in its institutions.

“Der Agitator (Rufer)” (1988) by Hans TichaCredit                             Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

                         Paul Kaiser, one of the curators of “Point of No Return,” said that “30 years after the fall of the wall, the process of categorizing East German art within the Pan-German context is still conflict-ridden and incomplete.” The exhibition was “a further step in synthesizing the history of East German art into German art history,” he added, and in countering its “politicization and devaluation.”

the holy whale!

i-phone photo of the beast in question

This twilight sky has become my 'Moby Dick, My white whale', 'My dearest holy grail'. I am not sure how it happened but it has evolved slowly over time. 

I have always loved being anywhere by the sea at that hour when dusk seeps into the night. The hour of the wolf, some call it. And, it is not always the same everywhere in the world; similar, but not at all the same.

So thus, on a dune on an eastern point of Australia I find myself painting this motif in order to explore the faintest possibility of success. And though I know it is illusionary I have come to accept  its divine impossibility. Unlike the tortured Captain Ahab scouring the seas in a grumpy state for his Moby Dick, I gingerly maintain my patient vigil from a small dune for I know that each session brings me closer to thee.

more to be revealed

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 July, 2019, oil on canvas board, 25 X 30 cm.

first drafts

at the very beginning

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads,  19 July, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 40 cm

The top image is taken from the easel after the first strokes have been articulated  after mixing a palette. The second is the finished result.

After that, I have no idea where I am going. only It is the colours on the palette, and a vague sense of a drawing prompt my intuition. The sense of joy is in the 'not knowing'.

Sometimes, I wish I could simply keep these canvas boards like that; to hold those first strokes in their very sober, almost zen-like state. But I lack the right amount of chutzpah.

I don't put them aside them though, I jump into the canvas board with the appetite of a mad man. What I leave is a study of what was. They are both real and unreal, like the Art I like.

large paintings

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 April, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 40 cm

This was done back in April, and it is one which has inspired larger versions in the studio since then. It is very difficult to 'reproduce' a picture away from the original motif. There are so many considerations, one of which is the sheer amount of paint involved as the image scales up from 30 X 40 cm to 150 X 150 cm. And the cost of paint here in Australia is stratospheric. But also,  questions abound; principally, why bother? It is true that the 'studies' done from a small rise on a dune behind the beach have a raw and often rich sense of spontaneity, but they still remain small pictures. And, I love large paintings in my own home or anywhere, ones which sit quietly on the wall without much fanfare or need to make a point. I love a painting which continually asks questions but do not answer them but nor do they feel like images which resemble a banal decoration which feed boredom from overexposure. For me, I yearn always for a painting (large or small) which still possesses a life of its own, a spontaneous touch, and one which can be lived with day in and day out. That is why I have paintings around my home, done by me and others.

fading quickly

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 July, 2019, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

After making a larger study of this motif, the sky was still pulsating with light so I grabbed a smaller board from my pack, and jumped into it. My palette was barely visible but I knew where the messy colours were placed. The light was fading quickly but a moon was sitting somewhere. Happily, this came easily. 

Rothko and me

         

Evening Prayer Brunswick heads, 29 June 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Several people have recently remarked that my pictures resemble those of Mark Rothko. I was a bit surprised as he has never figured into my educational sensibilities. So I went to look at his work on Google. Of course, I was familiar with some of work over so many visits to museums around the world but I have never been so attracted to it. Online however, I found several images which I liked very much, but maybe that is because they felt to me like landscapes with a discernible horizon. These pictures of mine were made from a motif in front of Nature. I believe that Rothko’s were done in a studio in New York. So, I am now interested in what he was thinking about, what moved him; what inspired him to paint his pictures? I ordered this book with a sexy cover (below), in hopes that it will answer some of these questions. All I know about this poor guy is that he killed himself. Most original artists are to a great degree un-conformist, and sometimes just plain weird. I know, because I have been told the latter about myself. More to be revealed.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July, 2019

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 40

After two years of working from this twilight motif I begin to know it, feel it, and worship it. It is is not curse like Ahab's pursuit for his white whale, but a kind of divine, benign, and sensual puzzle. It beckons me further and further into its secret labyrinth  of misty colours each night. Will I ever arrive? Certainly not, but I am getting closer, somewhere.

I often wonder to myself that I just might be the wealthiest soul on earth. For each night, as I set up a palette to work, I am given another chance to paint this gift, this perfect horizon which has been offered up to everyone on the beach here. But I, like Prometheus, get to steal it from the Gods each night. 

Truth in Nature

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 May, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 40 cm

"Truth is in Nature, and I shall prove it."
Paul Cézanne 

Morrandi defies chaos

In this time of worldly angst it is reassuring to me that Giorgio Morrandi painted this gentle picture in 1942, at the height of World War Two, in his home town of Bologna Italy. It is from his garden I believe. Art is the solution against cruelty, and it outlives the chaos of man's greed and ignorance  

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 15 December 2017

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 December 2017, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Continuing these small studies from a little rise in the dunes most nights brings one the a great sense of pleasure. Even if the entire day has felt wasted, or irrelevant, by making a small painting gives me satisfaction. 

Evening Prayer, 24 November 2017

After a long hiatus, I am back to working from the motif most nights. As what Walter Pater sought in Art; experiences of brilliant intensity that promise "nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass and simply for those moments' sake"*

Whether one is painting (or taking in a picture), it is thus.

So, an otherwise banal horizon is at the mercy of how the sun and the clouds dance over the sea. These are prayers and small meditations at twilight.

*Taken from that great book by Stanley Fish entitled How to Write a Sentence.

Evening Prayer, Brunswick Heads, 24 November 2017, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Richard Tuttle revisited

I confess that when I first encountered the work of Richard Tuttle I was aghast. And even the second time I encountered it in New York at the Whitney sometime in the 90's I was even more aghast. It went against everything I thought I understood about Art up until then. 

A few years later however, after a subtle immersion into the ideas surrounding Art and Nature in Japanese thinking, I awakened to the beauty of expressed minimalism, if I can call it that. Then I came across Richard Tuttle's work again, and I kind of fell in love for the first time. 

Looking backward barely 40 years it is hard to imagine that his works could have provoked such an outrage, but then his influence was a tsunami of sorts for young art students everywhere. In fact, I cannot think of an artist who has been such a driving force of influence in art schools, and in academic thinking generally than Tuttle. He has merged the Personal with the Academic, and not always for the better I think.

It is a minimalism which made meaty and materialistic America uncomfortable.