Cézanne's apple and Van Gogh's pear

In France many years ago I dropped in on a painter friend with whom I was associated. He is someone I admired, artist whose mind had been educated in the French system, one shaped by rational thought. It was a Spring afternoon and he was in his garden when I arrived putting some last touches on a picture. Our usual banter almost always turns to Painting but on this day we spoke of a programme which had aired the previous evening on France Musique which highlighted the relationship between Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. At one point I said that although I loved Debussy, I had a deep emotional rapport to Ravel. 

Ravel seems to me more like a comfortable armchair of 19th century Romanticism in which no doubt Brahms had certainly napped. Debussy on the other hand, was steering music into the 21th century. So it was no surprise to me  that my friend replied that Debussy was the greater artist. Though this conversation was at least thirty years ago, from my diary at the time, I would summarise his thinking thus: 

"Unlike Ravel, Debussy's musical ideas were not weighed down by an excess of emotion."

We then engaged in very precise criticism as always, sometimes to the point of didactic exhaustion. But that is also what I loved about living in France among these hyper-opinionated participants in our collective cultural brawl. And Art criticism was part of our own brawl, our bond, the artistic glue which allowed for the relationship to replenish itself over years. And yet, I was annoyed by his confidence, his certainty, in placing one accomplished artist above another on a shelf in the Pantheon. 

Any avid listener to France Musique receives a large dose of both composers on a regular basis. I had listened a lot to both Ravel and Debussy since arriving in France years earlier. But for me, I have learned to love artists for a variety of different reasons and I  don't generally attach my feelings to a hierarchy. I have learned over the years to critique the work by an artist, not the artist himself. It keeps me out of a lot of problems. It is diplomatic, for sure, but also it is a cleaner, more precise way of looking at art. I have found that in all things artistic, roads should never lead to Rome, but away from it. And Rome, as destination, would be a conventional art of little interest.   

Paul Cézanne is generally considered to be the father of Modern Art. Like Debussy, he ushered into the 20th century a new structural form which broke away from centuries of pictorial thinking as if a dam had burst and swept away most of what was housed in the Louvre. To a great extent there is much truth to this. 

Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, isn't considered in the same light, and he, like Ravel was steeped in the 19th century structure of Painting arriving from both Delacroix and Rembrandt, among so many others including artists from Japan. Yet Vincent Van Gogh opened up the palette to more light than the world had ever seen or experienced beforehand. He was a new lightbulb.

But According to Emile Bernard who knew both Van Gogh and Cézanne, Cézanne had heard of Van Gogh, but thought he was a mad man who made mad paintings. Alors? Quoi faire?

I am someone who detests the word genius, and I never use it. But I do use the words Greatness, Great, Good, OK, and Awful, to describe Art in general, but also people too.

It has been many years since I have often remembered that conversation with my old friend. I remember being a bit shocked at the audacity of it. It still shocks me in a way. 

All these years later have given me more clarity to see that greatness comes in different colours, different forms, other even newer tastes. To compare two very great composers is like trying to compare Cézanne to Van Gogh; an apple to a pear. 

Satie went out without an umbrella

SlH

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 June, 2020, oil on canvas board

In Painting, I never struggled with the painting, nor colour harmony, not even drawing. I had to learn a lot and work at it of course, but it was never, ever foreign to me even from a very early age. It was a gift which allowed me to proceed in this thing I came to understand as Painting. I had a very intuitive grasp of Art, and in fact I took it for granted. I couldn’t believe that others around me didn’t share this.

My problem in Painting arose from me. I had to overcome all my own very personnel issues around creativity. I was my own problem, but Painting never was.

By studying music I have had to overcome the difficulties of the music. I was propelled

into piano from a long secret obsession with this black beast of creature which we had in our house. I never took lessons which were somehow reserved for my sister who didn't really give a hoot. But I languished underneath the piano until I was discovered and thrown out. 

Fortunately, by the time I really did get ready to jump into the work I had been sober for a long while yet sadly, I am already of a certain age so my hopes have been somewhat muted thus far.

It has been work, and work which I have loved doing. Most of the time I am a mountaineer at the bottom of the cliff looking up to see what the task is for the day. I wasn’t given the gift of music. I was given the gift of Painting but something deep inside of me wanted the music. 

But how?
At 14 I imagined that I was too old to start but began a few lessons anyway with a teacher at boarding school. I must have been so unteachable and scatter-brained that she lost interest in me and I gave up. At 19 in my second year at University, in the Art School, I thought I would really love try to play piano but I then thought; for sure I am too old, so I gave up again. Much later in New York I exclaimed: Screw Everything! And I bought an old creaky upright which was delivered on my 30th birthday. So now, I have played off and on for 38 years. Yes I have learned to read a little, I have learned a few classical pieces under my belt. Satie especially makes me long for the Moon like a teenage girl in love.

But now I have jumped into the Standards, the old show tunes from my parents youth with an abandon which almost shocks me. I determined to understand enough to enjoy myself which, to be fair, I already do a dozen times over. More to be revealed.

Chopin's grand spiderweb of melodic harmony

I was listening to Chopin's Études (Opus 10) this morning as I moved around my house on a small project all the while I was glancing at a few pictures on the walls which had been framed and recently hung. 

"That's it!"

It suddenly occurred to me that there was a poignant relationship between what I was looking at and the Chopin Études. It's strange because from the very beginning of this series at the beach three years ago I had imagined these pictures as 'etudes' even though they are hardly more than twilight's faint whispers, but I don't wish to reduce Chopin's Études to that description. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 31 August 2020, oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

This is my own understanding for things that I've made quickly to capture this passing aspect of Nature. But saying that, there is also a lightness in many of these 'Études' which Frederic Chopin wrote when he was only 23 years old. There is a quirky and sometimes frenetic side to them with which I can also identify in my own small studies done at the beach. Each one has its own emotional logic embedded in its brushstrokes, and there is a repetitive motif which cycles through the colour wheel in the same way that Chopin cycles through all the different keys, one Étude at a time.

In fact, like the Études, each of these small pictures have their own idea like those of Chopin. And because they are small studies without a whole host of different relationships which might be housed in a larger and more complicated painting, there can only be room for one idea at a time.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 25 April 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When one listens to these small Études by Chopin I think one can understand that they too, possess but a simple melodic idea. It is in his Concertos where Chopin develops a grand spiderweb of melodic harmonies. And a musical sketch is not so very dissimilar to that of a painter's.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 26 November 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Each of these small pictures are as distinct in the same way as Chopin's Études which are each are done in a different key signature. And, although I also think that each picture is original, they are as different to one another as one sibling is to the next. Yet in them all, there is always a family resemblance somewhere, however obscure. And this ressemblance isn't just physical; not just the eyes, the ears, the smile, the feet! It relates also to the voice, the laughter, the sense of humour and the weird personal twitches shared in common between siblings but hardly discernible to outsiders. These are for me, in painting, the indescribable little quirks of a picture, the inexplicable brushstrokes or erasures, the marks of a mistake that renders a work of art so distinctive and original, a fingerprint so human. 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 18 June 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

And one only has to hear the first measures of a piece of music before one recognises the hand and soul of Frederic Chopin. And so it also is with a painter whose originality is visible for the astute observer to witness at first glance. It's in the signature of the handiwork, and it cannot be faked.

This is for me the remarkable way in which Art runs parallel to Nature in that Nature's logic is as original as it is repetitive in our visual world.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

trees wearing red rubies likes medals

 Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 June, 2020, oil on canvas board

I began a diary on 26 January, 1986. I was on a boat from Ancona to Piraeus, two nights and a full day of travel. The boat left late on the evening of the 25th and I had drunk much wine in a cafe in the Port before embarking. The next day in the early afternoon with a slight hangover I sat on the reclining chairs and started this diary in earnest. We sailed South and in the sky an army of small white clouds seemed to run past us in great haste back towards Italy. Surprisingly, I have pretty much written everyday ever since. It became a habit as I was hoping it would, finally. 

So, I include excerpts here in these pages as a supplement to my visual life. I began to transcribe them into my laptop 2 years ago. Little by little, word by word, needless to say, it has been a very, very slow process. I am only up to BOOK 4,... that's how slow it is. And yet what a pleasure it is to relive old memories, old trips, so many failed paintings, but so many great sunsets! So many museums in Europe in which I loved to be lost. There are two weird truths which come out of going through these old diaries.

One: I see that I was so much more grateful and full of joy than I remember during all those years. I had always, erroneously imagined that I was eternally depressed, but the diary tells me otherwise despite my sadness and sense of solitude often expressed in these pages.

Two: I realise just how golden it is to have youth on one's side, to have one's health. This is a precarious life for most of us, and to have good health is to have a great advantage. Health and Youth! 

And I come away from this by seeing that if Then was golden, then surely today is just as golden too. In twenty years time when I shall indeed be an old man, will I look back and marvel at,... no,... will I be Grateful for just how wonderful my life is TODAY?

1 November, 1989 (Châteaunoir)

Blood red sunsets these days. Small red lights sit on the trees as if they have been pasted upon them. It reminds me of the women in India who paste their cow dung onto the trees for drying, then use them for cooking. I remember so many trees covered with pale polka dots lining the dusty roads as far as I could see. And these trees too, at the Châteaunoir are also a tactile experience as well as a visual one. These Oak and Pine trees wearing red rubies likes medals pinned to their chests as far as I could see this evening.

Forsake the rose, and blush thyself!

amb

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 June, 2020, oil on canvas board, 40 X 35 cm

My teacher was Léo Marchutz whom I met in Aix in 1972, and because of this encounter, my life was completely altered thereafter. I feel so very lucky to have met him as a young university student. I was a lost young man with untapped creative resources locked inside but he showed me a way out of my small self and into the bigger, the generous and unlimited world of Art. It is solely because of him that I understand what I do today even if my ideas have sprouted different wings than those which carried him during his lifetime.

And yet I have been thinking lately about how it is that when innovators arrive in history, ‘schools of’ sprout up and immediately followers make rules and dictums to which the subsequent adherents must follow.

Throughout the history of Painting it has been thus. We have all been influenced by masters, teachers, and great works which have touched us. The trick, it seems to me, has been to take what we need, and leave the rest. Easy enough if one knows what we need. But rarely do we know what we need when we need it, except retroactively, when much later, do we understand, or maybe not, our choices made at the time. Life can be so tricky. 

And to find ourselves far away from our teachers, our mentors, our influences; to be out alone in the solitary studio of our own personal creativity is to transcend our teachers. 

This is a good thing too, even if we are not without questions, because otherwise we'd find ourselves in a prison full of someone else's ideas.  

In the end, to be a painter is a worthwhile activity even if I fall on my face. 

When we die, what will we have left to the world? 

Watch the sunset! I tell myself when I take it all too seriously. Or as Shakespeare said:

"Forsake the rose! and blush thyself!"

Robert E. Lee and their badass ways

I have always thought it a shame that people of every civilisation rip up their past at various points in their life by destroying  works of art which symbolise everything which they hate. 

I can certainly understand it though. I wish I could rip up bits of my own past but that is not possible. Though I live with all my ugly hateful bits from my past I am not ruled by them. They are just part of my past history, my whole life.

As a creative man, (white) I deeply regret that so many equestrian statues will be sawed off and sent to bronze foundries to be recycled into the next set of heroes who might get their own 15 minutes of fame.

I am irrelevant in these debates. The mob will rule as it always has throughout history. Wonderful things are ransacked and destroyed in the name of moral justice. The French revolution performed with surgical precision the decapitation of so many chateaux and churches which we collectively mourn, still today. And the Louvre is full of loathsome scoundrels. 

Wasn't it in San Francisco where they recently wanted to destroy a mural because it depicted George Washington and native Americans? Wasn’t it because it hurt people’s feeling causing emotional distress? In the end that saga was resolved by a compromise of sorts because the grown-ups finally showed up.

But to the point, in this case the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee is the next target. I would only ask that it not be removed but left in its place with a placard at its base which explains the historical truth behind this man who sits atop this fine looking horse of bronze. I would hope that it be used to placate this generation, and perhaps to educate future generations in order that we can all understand the context behind which this statue remains. Maybe we can become a little wiser to our histories as a whole, in all their big bad-ass ways. 

America has changed but not enough, because it has never looked at itself, warts and all. Until we do we are condemned to a mindset of stupidity and shortsightedness. As they say 'the fish rots from the top’.

colour shaded only in the Divine

As I dive deeper into musical harmony by making my way through the RealBook I see more clearly the essential relationships between Painting and Music. I also begin to familiarise myself with flatted 9ths, 5ths, suspended 4ths, etc, etc. I marvel at how chords meld into one another in the same way which colours do in a painting. They always push towards an eventual resolution. 

I have listened to so many different kinds of  music in my life, and it has formed my sensibility over time. I fell in love with opera when I arrived in France after listening to so much folk, jazz and rock and roll. France Musique, the station on the radio began to teach me everything about Classical music, filling me in with centuries of European music. And at the same time I was wandering around museums in France and Italy mostly, but also Spain and Holland, and everywhere else the longer I stayed on in this Europe of my twenties. Just the sheer volume of Painting I had looked at during these early years gave me a visual foundation which formed my conscious and unconscious sensibility for Art.  

So, over these past few years my interest with the painting surface has only grown at the same time as my priorities have narrowed. I have become fascinated with how colours interact with one another, how they bump up against each other, rubbing or caressing each other on a unified surface. This sensuality is one of those essential elements that completes a work for me. Simply put, this aspect of Painting is basically how colours work together on a unified picture plane. How do colours clash, or kiss on a Painting surface? Isn't it what helps to give a picture its subtle or dynamic vitality? A poor connection between colours means a poor connection between picture planes, and thus resulting in a weak painting. And so it is, too, with almost all musical harmony. It seems to me that it should appear effortless even if a life has been shed for it.

I put up my own pictures here as examples, they are to be judged after all (put your money where your mouth is, as they say). Here are a few from this past year except for the last two which were done at the very beginning of the series three years ago. These are apparent because I had approached this series after a long while of working in the studio and working quite differently. In these two there is more of 'me' in them, and less of 'the motif' than so much of what was to follow since then.

Though they are all of the sea and sky, mostly, they are actually about the sky. And painting the sky is essentially about painting the nothingness of air, in fact. One could maybe think to describe it as cotton candy the kind  found at country fairs but even that has substance. For in the sky there is no material substance like water in the sea nor mountains in the landscape. Nothing figurative in fact, there are no handles onto which to grab because there are no hills, no trees or branches. There are no roofs nor bricks, no ears or noses! It is the ephemeral world of pure colour. The Dutch made a whole genre out of painting the sky and clouds.

The air is a colour shaded only in the Divine; it's a luminous hue embalmed in the scent of the palest perfume of light. And yet, these elements of the picture plane must be joined and reconciled to make up the whole image. 

Like those flat 5ths and flat 9ths, and all those other alterations that smoothly transition one chord to next, that will push a melody to its final resting place, this airy, fractal edge created by brushstrokes also reunites to resolve any dissonance in the viewer's mind at the very end. 

  

"Man, you hadda be there!"

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 1 May, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

There are days when I paint as if I had taken some mushrooms but had somehow forgotten that I had. The polished sky is so clean, and yet this colourful kitsch manifests without any artifice. It is real and freely offered to us all, and it can be painted with one's own personal wand. For a painter, it is the empirical horizon line between Art and Nature.

But like the surfers say, "Man, you hadda be there!"

I like most skies though, muted ones with marbled soft greys, effervescent ones, and skies which make you really happy that you are a painter of skies. But they don't always come easily. 

There are solutions to be found. Where does the foreground begin? Where is the upper limit of the sky? Where is the horizon line today? But, weirdly, one just jumps in and hopes for the best just like the surfer. There is an art to almost everything concerning the sea after all.   

    

Naples Yellow, from Vesuvius to Sennelier

Naples Yellow comes from the Vesuvius region around the bay of Naples and was no doubt used extensively for frescoes 2000 years ago.

I do not use it for a few reasons, one of which is basically that it is a milky colour, too milky indeed! It contains a lot of titanium white premixed by any number of paint companies which sells the colour in tube. As a painter I would not accept someone else’s calculation of a paint's hue or its value. If I need to make a Naples Yellow I use Citron Yellow, cadmium yellow, and various reds to create a warm yellow tone, or hue. But it is me who creates the amount of both hue and value, because it is me who adds the titanium myself. Naples Yellow suffers like so many other colours which have been premixed to create lighter pigments. Why would I let a paint company dictate the value parameters of a painting? It is the motif which dictates the kind of colour and its hue. It cannot be the other way around!

Cézanne, apparently used only about 5 or 6 colours to make his most sumptuous works notably the version of the Jas de Bouffan in Aix.

And below, an example using a yellow made on the spot (with cadmium yellow, citron yellow,  rose madder and titanium white) to fit the appropriate needs for the hue and value of this painting. It resembles a Naples Yellow right from Sennelier! 

mac

 Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 8 May, 2020, oil on canvas board, 40 X 35 cm

Be gracious everywhere is my prayer in Darwin's world of Evolution.

fvs

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 30 May, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

While America seems to swim in turmoil at this moment I find myself in Australia and living a quiet life centred around Art, far from the chaos of this presidency which upsets so many of my panicked friends. Many years ago all of this would have certainly raised my anxiety levels enough to paralyse me. 

I have  changed though, but aged is a better description, I am old enough to realise that there is little I can do to make our society any better than to simply be a person respectful of others, and kinder, without consideration of race or religious denomination. Be gracious everywhere, is my prayer. But also I vote as Democrat. Still, even from afar, it’s hard to watch the American carnage which Trump has wrought upon us all. Thankfully, the youth of today, made up of all the courageous colours everywhere, they are out in the streets doing the work for so many of the rest of us. 

It’s gone on too long all this racism in America, but everywhere too. As a white man I’ve looked through the lens of racism in my own upbringing and watched with horror at all its subtle and pernicious shades of grey deeply ingrained inside the conditioning of my own childhood back in the 1950’s. I am not a snowflake, nor am I as white as snow, but I have examined almost every centimetre inside this emotional brainwashing of my early years in white suburbia because as they say, one can run but one cannot hide. 

To my shock, I’ve found over the years a camouflaged and nuanced form of racism in me, one that reminds me of a photo I saw on Instagram of a copperhead snake hidden in the Autumn undergrowth, faintly visible only to a sharp pair of eyes. And in my own case this conditioned racism appears to possess tiny little springs underneath that catapult it up and out at any situation deemed foreign or hostile, much like the copperhead when confronted with unfamiliarity. Flee or fight? Many white liberals like me will flee first from our own awful truth laid bare by a strict self-examination.

What is the remedy?? Perhaps time will heal us all in the next coming generations, but progress is quite slow in Darwin’s laws of Evolution for there is real important work to do, and quickly so because humility must belived not imagined.  

And so, this painting came quickly the other night, the second of two made in the session. I was about to pack up but I saw just enough out there to decide to make paint another one The warm ‘glow’ had evaporated from the sky and the dusk appeared like a stealthy thief. And yet something skeletal remained in my memory, that thingie like a bright colour that you have stared at for a long moment only to then turn away from quickly so that its complimentary colour replaces it for a moment. And this hint of colour was just enough to allow me in to improvise this small study.

In Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats wrote: 

‘Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ 

There are so many reasons why I return, again and again, to this motif at the beach. It is limitless and unbroken, so unlike my own human life. I also see an innocence, and a purity of heart in this twilight sky. The pink glow at dusk of a young child’s blush, honest and true, hence full of beauty, full of all those things in Nature unblemished by the cruelty of humankind. 

Richard Anuszkiewicz, and the organisation of beauty

These paintings by Richard Anuszkiewicz whom I have never heard of attract me. And yet I am confronted by my old suspicion of 'Colour Field' paintings. It's true that I have never really liked much from this movement which I believe began in America in the 50's. But I am sure that its roots run back into earlier times. 

Russian non-objective design work from the pre-revolution period have always intrigued me, and Mondrian, who never did except for his early landscapes, which did.

There is my own surprise at finding so much poetic feeling in these constructed paintings. They even remind me of Indian Miniatures but for the obvious difference in sizes. These pictures possess a subtle use of broken colour but when used in these designs, seem restored to their purity. And in this, the Indians also do so well.

My primary attraction must be the colour, but also the way it is used which I find so understated and quite sensuous. These are images which I would find great joy in living with. For me, they are both decorative and they are full of movement. That the artist chose this means of conveying a sense of Life is his personal choice. That is to say that it is new and original in its conception with no real precedence to it. Therefore, there was no historical influence in his choice. He wasn't a painter who fell in love with Cézanne and subsequently went on to paint under that influence. No, Richard Anuszkiewicz discovered a kind of novel genre to his credit.

The watchmaker and the violinist

dpr

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 May, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 May, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A painter is quite simply someone who cares about Painting in the same way a watchmaker cares about time pieces, or a violinist cares about violins. 

There are painters who don’t care about Painting which is problematic for Painting,  a bit like people who who don’t care about animals but keep them as pets all the same.

It’s a big world and it’s full of a multitude of human activities, most of which are extraordinary. Painting is a discreet one, like composing poetry in the sunlight wherein every mistake, every small and seemingly mundane brushstroke is placed with heroic intent for all the world to see.