Morocco in the shade of Delacroix 25 years on

Now obviously, whoever made these drawings was certainly under the deep spell of Delacroix and it's true, I was fascinated by him and his own voyages to northern Africa.

I went to Morocco the first time to visit my roommate  from university in Aix-en-Provence. It was 1974, a year later, and Michael had joined the Peace Corps with another fellow named Ray. They were stationed in the small town of Midelt in the middle of the country just south of the Atlas mountains where they taught English to uninterested kids. Poor guys, they felt marooned there.

I took the boat with a girlfriend from Marseille to Tangier arriving two days later (which was a long trip, and a long story) but we did arrive in Midelt in the early Spring, maybe Spring break, March, probably.

One thing I remember about the bus ride over the Atlas mountains was Sharon and myself, snuggled and shivering under a thin sleeping bag surrounded by a busload of men wearing djellabas and smelling of goats. They couldn't keep their eyes off of blonde Sharon.

We stayed in Midelt for a few weeks before visiting Fez and Meknes which is what most tourists do in Morocco. We were taken care of by Fatima, the housekeeper of whom I made several watercolours. The food was good but greasy and meaty with few greens anywhere. 

I had brought with me a pack of sepia-red pastels and blocs of plain newsprint. I had no idea what I would do but just jumped into the exotic street scenes everywhere. So many wonderful and amusing anecdotes filled the memory banks of my youth. Now so many years later the memory vaults have been raided  and depleted by age, alas.

Anyone who has been to Morocco knows that wherever one goes, they are followed, mostly by kids, but lots of the other usual suspects. This fact must be accepted.  And because I was also drawing everywhere I went, I was followed by an even bigger circus of misfits. Being an oddball anyway, I was kind of used to it but eventually I was picked up by the local police who didn't know what to do with me with all this drawing business. I was let go after a bit but sternly warned not to draw people! 

My amblings around town with a small backpack of drawing materials led me to meet lots of lovely old men who invited me for tea and let me draw from the protection of their shops. They kept an eye out for the police. My French at that time was OK but somewhat simple. I had been working on it so I could get around and I loved these interactions. My father had taught me to always ask for directions. It was the best way to meet locals and learn a language.

So, these are but a few things which I still possess from that first trip there under the shadow of Delacroix. To be fair, they are far more abbreviated and abstract than anything I have seen of his but that had to do with my own inability to 'make a drawing', certainly as good as his. I was making quick sketches almost in passing. It suited my anxious and impatient nature and became a habit for life.

I was also heavily influenced by Japanese ink drawings at the time and this came out years later. So spontaneity was my first interest whilst working 'out in nature and using a motif'. My teacher in Aix, Léo Marchutz whom I had met two years earlier had also stressed the importance of looking into nature to find a motif from which to work. And everything I seemed to read about at that time concerned this idea of 'seizing the motif' in one's memory. Of course I was also reading Van Gogh's letters at the time which were also very influential.

So this trip and the drawings which came out of it was my first real experience of going off to an unfamiliar place and trying to work from it. Subsequently, I made many other trips to Morocco, much later where I made boatloads of drawings whilst sitting in cafes and sitting in shops. Obviously, Morocco is full of colonial styled cafes with second floor terraces which came in handy to draw from. This was also helpful in colonial Vietnam where I could also see everything at once below in the crowded markets.

Below are a few drawings from Morocco done during several trips to Marrakesh and Essaouira in the 2000's 25 years later for which the same hand was responsible. And that is what I like, that there is the same sensual quality of the handiwork and focus on the luminosity of the page. The great difference of 25 years is also in the fact that the early ones are decidedly 19th and 20th century whereas the late ones are definitely something else though they don't please everyone.

l'air de rien #175 (La Piscine!) Kanawaza Contemporary Museum of Art,

The ghosts of Nathalie Goldberg and Gustave Flaubert on the beach near Byron Bay at dusk

                                                                             WPH

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 22 January, 2012, oil on canvas board, 25 x 20 cm

A mushy sky greeted me last week, and with a certain hesitation I made several small studies. There was little wind and I had to bring out the bug spray but once I had made the palette of the usual suspects I began to feel more comfortable. 

What always amazes me is that in spite of that initial fear and hesitation of how to begin, the hand begins to move with abandon in those first brushstrokes. 

I am always in awe of great writing so I read a lot of books about 'how to write'. Of course, they are never titled as such but that is basically what they are. Writers, unlike painters on the whole, love to talk about how they write. Painters seem secretive and jealous, almost psychotically paranoid that some inferior art student will steal their style. Mais enfin!

I have read many books on writing by lots of different authors; Annie Dillard (whom I have actually never read), Jim Salter, (of whom I have read everything), Anne Lamott, Stephen King, who wrote a brilliant book about how to write (ditto for Annie Dillard as I have never read his books either) Stanley Fish, who wrote How to Write a Sentence, etc, etc..

Happily there probably aren't a lot of books written by bad writers, unlike in the Painting World which is full of people who paint badly yet when they do try to teach others how they might paint well, can't.

So I come to Nathalie Goldberg who wrote a few books about how to learn to write, one being Writing down the Bones which I liked very much and read more than once. She is an avid proponent, like many, who meets with writing buddies in cafes and other spots to write for a specific time limit. It's about discipline and camaraderie. I know a few people who do it because it is an integral part of a Creative Writing degree everywhere now. Somehow it seems very modern to me, a program suited to our age of rapid-fire communication; cell phones, twitter, zoom, etc, etc.. 

(I suddenly imagine Flaubert writing longhand in his small town of Croisset, Normandy, living by the timetable of La Post Française for connection to the outside world)

In her book Writing Down the Bones she describes just how important it is to keep the hand moving, always moving to keep the mind from hesitation. "Don't stop the movement" she implores her student authors. At least this is what I understood from her, and it has helped me in own Painting enormously because when I feel a hesitation in Painting I remember this advice from Nathalie Goldberg. Of course, it helps that I am chasing the last light of the colourful day instead of working feverishly in a cafe. 

"...there is no time for dillley-dalleying young man!" as an old Irish governess of mine used to always say.

In the end though I was happy with what came out of this session. A hazy sky is a beautiful sky for me, but it is a tricky sky, and needs a leap of poetic speed.

morning in Tokyo, evening in Grenoble

Lydia Davis, the magnificent COWS next-door

 

Lydia Davis is not for everyone as I found out a few times over the years when I discovered her, and expressing my admiration by raving to several friends whom I knew to be quite literary. Two of them hated her, one had only read her translation works, and the other didn't know her at all. Enfin!

No matter, I am crazy for her and have read several of her books. I discovered this one online which I liked so much I immediately offered it to a friend who had given me a celebrated book about Animals Something written by an Australian woman living in New York whose title I have forgot. But, I couldn't get into it at all despite its huge worldly success. And I had to pick up another copy of THE COWS again which is OK because I like to support artists of all stripes.

Anyway, this small paperback seems part eccentric bovine research paper, part Zen Japanese poet, but certainly the work of an observant writer (and American poet) who cares deeply for theses creatures and possesses the curiosity necessary to record their lives from a visual perspective while at her kitchen window. 

Lydia Davis  in Paris in 1973

Léo Ferré Avec le Temps at the Belvédère in Dieulefit

before and after, the altered, and unaltered cosmetics of beauty

 

JLF

Above, and below are two sets of photos of two pictures done two weeks ago. I had been happy about them, and feeling so confident that I carelessly didn't secure them back onto my easel well enough for transport when packing up so they slipped off and fell into the bushes, sort of. 

After dropping these two (there was a third which was not damaged) I resolved in my head to take them home, let them dry, and repair them cosmetically at a later date. No drama!

                                      SJL
      

So I brought them back a few nights later when the evening light was similar. I started and finished two new ones but afterwards when the palette was rich with all the right colours slurping over it I put these two up one after the other and fixed them cosmetically.

I hesitate to 'touch up' paintings. When I take them off the easel they are generally finished and to my liking. Messy and slurpy they are sometimes, but no bother for me as this is my 'style', if I have a style at all.

And though one needs to be attentive to not disturb the overall light of a picture these were fairly easy. The one below needed an entirely new sky which really does change the painting completely. But I was not loyal to the originals, I just wanted to see if I could bring them back to any life.

And about the same period that I was doing cosmetic surgery on my paintings a most curious thing happened at the White House where Kayleigh Mcenany did her final press conference without any make-up, and it caused quite a stir. 

In Trump world, women are pressured 'to look good' for men. Trump is chauvinist (among a number of other less flattering adjectives) and he liked how Roger Ailes at Fox had turned all the newsreaders into blonde bimbos. But Ailes had simply lifted the formula from Madison Avenue way back in the time of Cleopatra.

I cannot imagine just what this pressure is for women of all ages to have to 'face' the world (and cameras) painted with layers of pigment. As a man, I have never had to think of such a thing.

Kayleigh, obviously an attractive American beauty, (physically speaking), certainly had a make-up girl on call 24/7 but who had evidently ditched the White House before Kayleigh came out to do what must have been her worst, most mendacious speech before disappearing, maybe forever, though probably not. 

But how different is the photo below the first one! I was so struck by it that I made a screen shot at the time. It seems to reveal her inner dysfunction like in an episode of the Twilight Zone.

I sympathise now more than ever with all the poor women who have to live in this world of men defined by FOX's Camera-Ready Beauty school for success. And all those stilettos! 

Full disclosure, though I like a woman wearing a hint of Cleopatra black eye-liner I have always avoided women wearing this kind of pancake make-up which many men like in fact.

Addendum, I am such an idealist that I actually imagined that Kaleigh Mcenany, who many said had been in tears for a week after the storming of the Capitol, simply gave up on Trump. That was it. She had watched him gleefully in front of his TV enjoying the scene and refusing entrities to call out the National Guard to stop it. The penny dropped, and her Christianity revolted even after all that time of devotion to the King Fink. But maybe I give her to much credit, so my friends tell me.

A ballet for Monet in the Orangerie in Paris, November 2018

À l’Orangerie from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.

the transvestite ball at dusk

 

RNP

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 January, 2021, oil on canvas board,25 X 25 cm

This small study came at the tail end of a session of three pictures the other night. The first two, slightly bigger were OK but it was this one which excited me. I had been ready to pack up when I saw a fleeting image  for this small painting while watching the last of the light over the horizon. I grabbed a small board and made this. It's not that it is even so good but that I really saw some new colour nuances which I wanted to explore. 

Weird things happen at dusk. Colours switch around and can fool you easily. You might be preparing a colour on the palette when suddenly you look back up at the motif and see that it's a different colour altogether. Then you prepare something anew only to see another colour has replaced the first one.

"....that is not this, that is this, that is that...."

Everything is a dance of peachy purple, poppy red yellow, pale yellow grey, everything swirling around in the after-burn of the twilight sky like it's a chorus line of French gals doing the Can-Can on the stage above. I am in the front row looking up, and suddenly, I envision a mad transvestite ball where dancing couples are waltzing above me in a great big hall.

Watching them, I know they are the opposites of what they are, yet when I blink, I see that they are more like they are really not than how they really are. Pretty confusing stuff, and then I am reminded of New York.

I have been to a few drag bars there many years ago, and it's pretty confounding. We both watched spellbound at the nocturnal scene. My friend who took me a few times always advised,

"watch their hands, it's the only tell".

Once, a magnificent black 'woman' in a gold gown stepped out onto a small stage at one point and belted out a lip-synced version of Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger. She brought the house down and blew our minds. I think we were on mushrooms.

And this too, is the mysterious world of Painting where things are fluid, ever transforming themselves, and are never quite what they seem. And when they seem what they are, it isn't always for long.

Rodin's home in Paris

l'air de rien #199 (musée Rodin, Hôtel Biron) from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.

dragons and live serpents crawling upon walls

I don’t want to make boring paintings which hug a wall, attaching to it like a stuffed elk head in a hunting lodge. 

I don't always like to paint anecdotal pictures either but I admit that these two are anecdotal in a weird sort of way though it may seem obscure to many, even myself.

I am not looking for reassurance when I paint, nor do I look for that when viewing pictures either in my home or elsewhere. To seek confirmation, to pursue a verification of my own ideas seems to be a misuse of the moment. And to see Art as a relic, something old, something dead in a glass case in a museum is also a misuse of time. But I can understand why so many people do when looking at Art. Museums are full of things both dead and alive, and too, its visitors are both dead and alive. In the end, it usually comes down to how much imagination we bring to the experience.

A relic of the past is an affirmation that life was, and to some degree is still today somewhat recognisable (even if young people all have tattoos). We want the familiar but to want this familiar is too often to simply want the same, same old. And the same old in Art is boring and dishonest.

After Matisse, why would anyone desire to paint in the manner of  Rembrandt? What is the point? But don't get me wrong I love the OLD too, I love Chardin because I like the OLD but well painted and truthful OLD.  

Ultimately though, I want the NEW, but I don't want the NEW to be badly painted. Museums are too full of bad paintings. I want the NEW to be a grandsons of Monet,  Cezanne, or Morandi even. Is that asking too much?

I want to paint pictures which cling to the walls of my home, creeping around like dragons and serpents with smokey breath. I need to be shaken up. I want paintings to force me to gently tippy-toe around them naked, or in underwear on the way to the kitchen looking for a sweet during the night. I want to risk being bitten otherwise none of it is very interesting. But at the same time I do want to make pictures which will please me to live with in my solitary castle.

Enfin, I want to be eternally surprised. I need for paintings to ask me questions instead of always throwing answers at me with a clunky heavy certitude. 

Why can't artists learn to ask questions to which most answers seem reasonably incomprehensible?

The angry paintbrush and hint of hope that almost got away

                                                                                SFS

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 28 January 2021, oil on canvas board, 29 X 22 cm

A rather gloomy-looking sky engulfed me last week as I set up for a session. I wasn't looking forward to it. It's been raining so much these past weeks that I haven't been able to find a convenient sky to work from. 

Quickly, this study was on its way to failure but remarkably, just when I was just about to chuck it in and paint over it, smearing and smudging and swearing, I suddenly found my way in to it with a hint of hope. I had nothing to lose, something so easily forgotten or ignored in these dark moments. Also I knew it would put me in a bad mood for the entire drive home. But once there, I knew I would make a cup of tea, sit at the piano, and within no time at all, I'd again be my usual optimistic self. HaHa.

In any event, I managed to re-arrange the entire drawing for this graphic idea and then thought to myself: well, not great, not even good perhaps, but at least I didn’t destroy it. 

It began raining by the time I had finished it and had packed up and was into my car for the short drive home in the rain. It rained for several days afterward and I forgot to remove it from the boot of the car which I would normally do on the following morning. But when I did retrieve it days later, I was pleasantly surprised with it. I put in a frame and I thought,,,, hmm, I rather like the ugly abstraction in it. It's weird, and I see three trolls in the clouds above.

So that is a small sketch of the angry paintbrush and a hint of hope that almost got away.

Evening Prayers, iterations at dusk

                                                                                     WIJ

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

                                                                                     HMC

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

                                                                                     HMW

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

These three recent studies were done on the 26th December, 2020 at Brunswick Heads, N.S.W. They were painted in quick succession starting with the top study, the middle one, then the last.

It isn't rare that I make 3, or even 4 studies, one after the other. A few times I have made 5 and 6, albeit quicker than usual. But generally I make 2 or 3 on most days weather permitting. 

As I paint facing the sea on the east coast, I can only work when the setting sun is behind me unobstructed, in the west. Without it there is little, if any luminosity in the sky, but in the east, in front of me anything goes because I know that with, or without clouds, the sky will be lit up with colour. Of course, one could paint under cloud-cover, rain even, but for this motif to function I need this geographical set-up. 

I am open to all sorts of light. When working in a lush landscape I often prefer a pale, soft grey cashmere sky though it really depends upon the colours in the landscape. Sometimes when working in a forest, one needs the strong sun to pierce the canopy, pasting red rubies on the oak trees in the late afternoon. But there are no rules, thankfully, and this is what makes the Painting experience so unique. It is deeply personal.

So these pictures came one after the other, and all that was required of me was to follow the colours as they descended down through the chromatic steps until reaching a dark dusk. I rarely stay longer because after the 'spectacular bloom', the local colours recompose before the evening catches hold and the Prussian blue sky and the deep azure sea return to the colours of the boring tropical scenery of postcards. 

And anyway, few painters have descended into the realm of darkness, though Whistler quickly comes to mind. He worked in London where the foggy rain has been know to eat up small dogs with opacity. This is difficult Painting.

Stefan Zweig looks up at Montaigne's tower window for light

 

Two exceptional writers are conjoined in this small book on Montaigne which Zweig never completely finished before he committed suicide in 1942. 

Both humanists who loved books and whose curiosity led them to investigate life through what they found out about in reality, empirically through themselves. 

Separated by several centuries they both died within a year of one another at the ages of 59 (Montaigne) and (Zweig) 60 years of age.

'For him books are not like men who impose themselves and burden him with their chatter, and of whom is hard to be rid. When you don't call for them they stay put; you can just pick up this one or that, according to your whim: (Zweig)

"Books are my kingdom. And here I seek to reign an absolute lord." (Montaigne)

Books offer him their opinion and he respond with his own. They express their thoughts, and to him arouse further thoughts.  They do not disturb him when he is silent; They only speak when he questions them. Here is his realm. They await his delectation.' (Zweig)

I confess that for the past 6 months I have been struggling through Les Essaies in the original old French, but only because of the old French. It feels like I am a soldier reading my way through a mine field on my belly, and like a good soldier, I persist. 

Zweig is a wonderful writer, so readable, and so clever. I am making my way through all his small novels and short stories. I can highly recommend his The World of Yesterday, a memoir of his flight from Austria before Hitler took over.

Ian Fairweather, the invisible artist of Shalimar and the Drunken Buddha

 

The Drunken Buddha, circa 1960, polymer oil based house paint, (approx) 140 X 100 cm

For anyone unfamiliar with Ian Fairweather's work, he was born in Britain in 1891, and after many peregrinations throughout Asia he ended up in Brisbane Australia. It's a stone's throw from where I am currently settled. I will not say too much about him, but Google will inform anyone interested in this extraordinary painter. 

For an 'abstract' painter, I find him infinitely more interesting than the infamous Jackson Pollack who is still considered the reference for 'Abstraction Expressionist Painting', at least in America. Fairweather's outline follows a similar path to Pollack's. They both worked from Nature early on in their careers but eventually subject matter became personalised, increasingly.

I like these two paintings so very much. That is to say, they speak to me in a familiar yet foreign language, one which I do speak but might not completely understand due to a regional dialect which is a little confounding..

It is a shame that Fairweather is not better know outside of Australia. That is a problem with being so far from the Art capitals in America and Europe. At least it certainly was in the 50's when Australia was indeed a cultural backwater. Perhaps that may have changed enough today so that someone of Fairweather's stature might achieve a greater recognition, at least beyond the beaches. Not sure about that, myself, Australia is still very parochial in many ways.

But Fairweather would not have become the painter he became if he had not lived his last years in the isolated Queensland of the 50's and 60's, when Australia was a very different country than today. 

Shalimar, 1962, polymer oil-based house paint, (approx) 250 X 150 cm

2020, somewhere else, confetti flies

 

This was posted exactly 10 years ago, and so I thought it appropriate to re-post again. It was made near the very beginning of this Blog which over the years has miraculously survived somehow.

It was also at a period when I was writing Haiku like a mad monk. I was alive to everything, all interactions, large and small, each day, and into the evening while I slept. Everything had a meaning,  connected by a spider web of  ideas and relationships both real and unreal. I was like a creature on the hunt for poetic protein, prowling the visual world through the muck of mundane and into the sublime.

My mind was a large bedroom into which butterflies flooded in and out all day long through the tall French windows. I wish I could find my way back into that space again. Maybe soon... maybe next year, maybe tomorrow.

'the greater the doubt, the greater the artist', maybe, hopefully

SdB

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 December, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I was speaking to an old friend yesterday, a long conversation via Messenger which has now become my go-to mode of communication.

She has been at work as an artist for about 40 years. In my mind she has always been a tireless worker, always at it, day and night, and yet a rich successful career has eluded her. 

"...you know Christopher, I have been working for 40 years now and it seems to me that I still don't know what I am doing!"

I laughed because I had heard this from her many times before. I told her that artists, writers, musicians, etc, etc, who cannot admit this sort of thing are probably not very good at all. An artist who never questions him/herself, who knows nothing of the gnawing doubt deep inside one's skin would surely make very insipid Art. But to work through it all is the key to a happy daily routine, in most cases, anyway. Moreover, Art doesn't generally come out of technical schools, it comes out of recess period between classes.

I often think this to myself:

'the greater the doubt, the greater the artist'.

But then, I quickly think that maybe this is dangerous ground, I should not be making such broad pronouncements. But I have read of great painters who have claimed that in their twilight years they have only  just begun to understand Painting even as their teeth and hair are falling out. Delacroix comes to mind.

Doubt can be a healthy thing in all things, even brain surgeons have loads of it except when they are deep at work inside the brain of human cosmos. The thing for me is that when I am working doubt usually disappears, and this is always the proof that the routine is everything.

Halloween, tricks or treats of painting

                                                                                diA

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

A magnificent sky for Halloween almost two months ago which I struggled with like a fisherman with a tough catch. I lost it several times but reeled it back in each time to my surprise. 

It was a strange light 

Leica magic and the Trump escalator

 

I recently met a guy from Melbourne, who with his wife,  spent his holiday in America a few years back. They were in New York the week that Trump rode down the now infamous escalator ride at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President. He and his wife  had been shopping in midtown, when on a whim they popped into Trump Tower.

Just a few minutes in the lobby of Trump Tower this great-looking couple were quickly approached by a woman who asked them if they wanted to make a few bucks, $50, to be precise for an hour's work. They agreed immediately, and were taken to the second floor landing, then into a large empty retail space hidden from view with brown paper over the windows. There were about a hundred other people there waiting around, some lucky to have chairs. They had no idea what was going on. At a small table another woman, a bright blonde, sized them up quickly and handed them two tee shirts from large boxes behind. 

"...these are all a little bigger, just put them over your shirts"

She said. The white tee shirts emblazoned with 'TRUMP Make America Great Again' written in red. They had only a faint clue who he was as a reality television star. 

A big muscular guy in a black suit handed them both a $50 note from a roll in his pocket and told them told them to go over by the wall and indicated to the other side of the room where they were to wait before being called.

After about an hour of waiting around uncomfortably  the bright blonde moved to the center of the room threw up her hand and yelled out for everyone to listen up. She then explained was expected of all of them, and in a few moments they were all trotted out 'to mingle'.

Some people were given signs with 'Trump for President!' scrawled with different coloured magic markers. Others, wearing tee-shirts, were instructed to go down to the lobby, the rest were told to stay on the first floor to cheer as Trump rode down the escalator. The couple were given a place (as were others along the balustrade, on the landing.)  

They had been instructed to cheer, clap and shout loudly as rode downwards.

"Trump! Trump! Trump!"  

The guy told me it was funny but also really weird because Trump was in fact, really weird. He went right by them without looking, focussed on the lobby below, then began waving casually to nothing in particular, just space. It was a ragtag-looking crowd as if they were all extras (they were) from some old Italian B film where the actors were yelling out their lines not in sync with the film.

And so that was it. It went by "like a dream" he kept saying. Ivanka introduced her father, then Trump gave his speech. 

About an hour later, they were in front of painting by Jackson Pollock at MOMA and still laughing about the whole thing. Lucky them, I thought. A story for their grandkids. And, they kept the tee-shirts as souvenirs.

scattered rose petals after a storm

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 April, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is an old painting from April 2020 which I just saw on my cluttered desktop but suddenly 'saw again' which is a very nice thing for a painter. It means that the painting still lives, it still succeeds, at least for me anyway. And I am the most important person to please in this small cottage of a life I live. But hey! It's a great cottage.

It's not a picture that will knock your socks off but it is a decent replication of my session on that small dune up here on the North Coast of New South Wales in Australia. It is what I saw and felt, even without knowing what I saw or how I felt, but it's the painting afterward which tells me what I was seeing and feeling.

This is the marvellous thing about Painting from a motif over and over again. Perhaps like an actor on stage doing his/her 986th performance, the character has developed a life of its own even beyond the actor. As I wrote recently about Keith Jarrett; he said that he had no idea what he was going to play before he went on stage to perform solo, in Cologne, Paris, Antibes, etc, etc,,, When one listens to those recordings it is confounding to understand this.

But a painting, perhaps like a recording, is after, all a souvenir of 'an event', an experience empirically lived. This is something that has become clearer to me in recent years. On a simple level it is about making a picture which if good enough, can outlive its creator. On a deeper level it is not about that at all. It is really about  having the painting experience in front of an ever-changing Nature which the painter is simply graced to witness, and work from.

In my own case, I work lightning fast, partly because I am anxious by nature, but also because 'my motif' is the 'hour of the wolf', the twitching hour of dusk between day and night. It is when the colours are at their zenith which suits my nature.

I don't pretend that these pictures are great, high points of the zeitgeist today, but they are 'souvenirs' of a moment when I lived and worked there in front of the sea and the sky during a painting session. It isn't much in the grand scheme of things but it is a painter's work. I have learned from so many different types of craftsman  about this, not just painters, writers, and musicians.

This is just my small story, but like all stories, it leaves its own colourful traces like scattered rose petals after a storm.