running with the fauves

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

This came at the end of a session last week. It was the third study out of four. I have been feeling a little like a wild animal which tries to be obedient so much of the time. Under certain skies, which are already so sensuous, I find myself to be a painter from previous century who desires to capture sky, to meet it with my own sensuality. A certain sky brings out a certain part of me. Each study, each day, and each session is different, even when the weather makes every day look like a copy of its predecessor. And then there is the 'me' factor because I am different each day, and present myself to the same motif in a different mood. And then I break out that obedience I run like a fauve. And thus, a painting like this arrives quickly, almost passionately after weeks of a much more sensual obedience. 

I am lucky because I like so many things that I am making these days. This was not the case for too much of my life. I was never satisfied with paintings, never satisfied with much in my life. Happily, all of that changed just a few years back. I enjoy the act of painting more than ever.

That which remains in that which passes

I enclose a recent note from my dearest friend and painter John Gasparach. It is his response to my asking about an expression which Léo often used when articulating a very particular aspect of Art's essence. I could not remember it correctly.

"Ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe"

("That which remains in that which passes")

A remark made by Gavarni (19th century French artist) whom Van Gogh admired. Van Gogh refers to and cites this phrase a number of times in his letters to Theo. Here is one example:

(from one of Vincent's letters, the following)

        

‘I think that if one has tried to follow the great masters attentively, one finds them all back at certain moments, deep in reality, I mean one will see their so-called creations in reality if one has similar eyes, a similar sentiment, as they had. And I do believe that if the critics and connoisseurs were better acquainted with nature, their judgment would be more correct than it is now, when the routine is to live among pictures, and to compare them mutually. Which of course, as one side of the question, is good in itself, but lacks a solid foundation if one begins to forget nature and looks only superficially. Can’t you understand that I am perhaps not wrong in this, and to say what I mean even more clearly, isn’t it a pity that you,   for instance, seldom or hardly ever go into those cottages or associate with those people or see that sentiment in the landscape which is painted in the pictures you like best? I do not say that you can do this in your position, just because one must look much and long at nature before one becomes convinced that the most touching things the great masters have painted still originate in life and reality itself. A basis of sound poetry which exists eternally as a fact and can be found if one digs and seeks deeply enough.

             

“Ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe”, it exists.

I would guess Leo encountered this phrase of Gavarni in Van Gogh’s Letters since it was so important to Vincent.

The School is shut, we work now with all of our students ‘on line’ since they have all returned to the United States. This has freed me up to paint everyday at Chateaunoir in the forest of pine & oak. I’ve never felt better in my life (which is a terrible thing to say given the situation of our world).

Sorry I missed your call. Try again if you can.

John

tac

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 April, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

great painters are idiots! (and they should be)

A great painting defies gravity, and it must possess a quality of surprise. And I confess that I only wish that I would rise to this idea idiocy more often in my own work but I don't.

The paintings above came from a recent article in the NYT about what artists are getting up to during this time of confinement. I have no idea what to think about them except that they are so original that they make me think of Baudelaire when he said that all original work seems ugly at first sight. These are truly original things. They certainly surprise also. Sadly I have lost his name but he lives and works in New York. 

I had originally begun this text last week before seeing these paintings but realised that they possessed that thing of which I was wanting to say.

It seems to me that most painters are already 

half crazy enough to be painters in the very first place, that confinement or not, we are out of the conventional loops. 

I find that too many paintings of our own time, but also throughout the past are simply exercises in re-affirmations of what we already know. Indeed, Painting has become far too intelligent, and it has robbed us all of that element of surprise. Contemporary Art has become so smart that it needs to be explained to us all through reams of catalogue space and big heavy books.

And yes, I throw some of my own work in with this idea, I am not perfect. But, once in a while I just want to be hit with a freight train feeling.

Claude Monet and Alice Hoschedé in Venice 1908

In October 1908 Monet and his companion Alice went to Venice for the first time on a painting trip. It was to be the first of two trips there. I have been reading the correspondance between Alice Hoschedé and her daughter back in France in Giverny. They exchanged letters each day without fail. In them Alice describes their days in Venice, the weather, the hotel food, the damp cold  or heat or Monet's mood, due to either the rain or the wind. They are charming postcards left to us from a bygone era when the world was very different in so many ways. Venice was even back then full of tourists, albeit quite well-heeled travellers compared with today. 

In this small fragment she describes being in a gondola with Monet in the lagoon at dusk when the lights are suddenly lit up everywhere to their amazement. 

She describes also sitting in the gondola while Monet worked every day on certain motifs. She had to be very still. Ha Ha... Great to imagine Monet painting some of these pictures from a gondola.

Morandi and me

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

This is a curious picture, full of a gentle feeling like when one wears Cashmere. I don't thing about other painters when out working in front of this motif. Myself, yes, I often have the previous day's pictures' still simmering in my head, but other painters? No, never. And I am glad for that. Yet in looking at it now 3 weeks later I am thinking of just how much Giorgio Morandi has infected my artistic sensibilities over these 60 years or so. He was one of the first painters I immediately responded to as a child. My father had lots of Art books and several about Morandi. And I looked with a great fascination at how his small and intimate oil paintings seemed so alive to me. My father was a painter too, but in a halfhearted sort of way. He had lots of talent but also a life which kept him from the discipline of being an artist. He did paint wonderful and life-like portraits all over his bathroom wall (with oil paint) Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Masaccio, and others. It was wild, and I was amazed that he would do such a thing. But my parents had their own bathrooms.

So, in this picture, done so far away from Bologna, I can see the quiet atmosphere of Morandi. And while his pictures of bottles, cups and jars live in a small protected and confined space, there is an inverse connection to my own, done out in the open sea and big sky. It is through the soft luminosity and sensual touch.

a submission to the painting not to the Motif

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

Bonnard once said a wonderful thing about Painting. Pierre Bonnard, along with Paul Cezanne, was a most patient painter. He worked and reworked his pictures for months and years on end until he arrived at that special depth of colour he so desired, enough that allowed him to quit the picture. Cézanne, it was said, might wait up to an hour between strokes of his brush. He once famously said, that his concentration should be so acute 'as to make my eyes bleed'.

But, Bonnard said something which spoke deeply to me when I was a student. He said, and I translate loosely from the French:

"Everyone speaks about this submission to Nature (to the Motif), but there is equally, the submission to the picture." 

I have never been too loyal to the 'Motif'. I use it only to garner enough information to make the painting. I am a sloppy expressive painter who likes all the drippy mistakes, but only as by-products in my quest to get a picture finished, never as an end itself.

So once a picture has been started it is a race to finish it before either the 'Motif' peters out, or I do. Moreover, once a picture has been started I am only ever interested in the picture itself, the canvas embodiment of my creative act.

paradise in a pandemic

In this time of pandemic people around the world are worried about everything. But most of the world population is already locked in some form of poverty or another. The Third World cannot make enough money to live in the best of times. And in the West self medication has replaced a spiritual solution. Now with the sharp loss of incomes and jobs scarce in the West, people will begin to know what the poor of the world have been going through all this time. It will not be a pretty picture.

I am living out this pandemic in a kind of paradise here on the north coast of Australia. Instead of feeling guilt about that good fortune, I practice gratitude at every opportunity I can. It is all I can do for the moment. But the economic toll whose bell never ceases, will toll for me too soon enough. 

What to do?? For the first time in my own small life I now have no Plan B except to keep painting each day both in the studio and at the beach. 

I used to be a worrier. I used to joke that when I was still in my mother's womb I asked GOD to please make me a WARRIOR for this next new life I was about to begin. He must have misunderstood me because I came out a WORRIER. But I have changed, and now I do not worry as a habit. I have too much to do before those same bells will toll for me too. In the meantime I paint.

Evening Prayer Brunswick heads, 11 April, 2020, oil on canvas board. 30 X 25 cm

Brokenness, and the hands of Theloneous Monk

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 April, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

To convey an emotion from one human to another, it seems to me, is the whole point of Art. Of course, I live in the world of Contemporary Art, an age of political science and sociological precedence in all things artistic. This is a world wherein Art has been fused into an engine fuelled by philosophy, advertising, and irony.

I am no longer an emotional man which basically means that I don't rely upon my emotions to make decisions in my life. But I used to be.

But in saying that, I am an extremely emotional painter, and in fact passionate around all things artistic. I love Elgar's Nimrod, and Brahms' Intermezzo's and I love both Monk and Jerome Kern, and in another life Tim Buckley.

I love the sensuality of oil paint, I always have, and sometimes I wonder if I should have been a pastry chef. I love all of Piero della Francesca's work. But I retreat from the overly ambitious and exuberant passion of Jackson Pollack, ditto for de Kooning and Twombly, but only after a brief seduction. Safe to say that I am uneasy around too much exuberant emotion. And yet, in all my paintings I am decidedly in favour of a sensuality and unabashed feeling. And I have always been this way in my work. 

In the painting above I realised that the fierce red cloud had been started with a stab of the brush and continued leftward because I do have a habit of working from right to left in this series. 

I liked it immediately upon making the brush stroke. That I left it thus means that I was happy with the abrupt, discordant addition it made to the painting. On another day I might have easily re-worked it to make an ordered and more symmetrical unity to the picture. Thankfully I didn't for I like the brokenness of it. It says: 

"This is a painting made from a human hand"

It's 'brokenness' cuts any pretence of the desire for a perfection which seems to hang  over a creator's life like a sword.

cri de coeur devant la mer méchante et tumultueuse

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

An interesting study from 2 weeks ago when we were covered over with crazy clouds from the South. I found the whole session incredibly difficult and was at the door of failure. To my surprise I shut it just as quickly and finished the painting. I like it very much because I had come so close to disaster. 

It is my spontaneous cri de coeur at the dark and difficult weather change in the middle of a painting.

the terrible beauty of the Coronavirus and Otto Dix

This is the Covid-19 virus clinging on to fungus in a lab magnified with a microscope I don't know how many times. The virus is all the small pink bits. It's a thing of such rare beauty, and amazingly, it follows the usual laws of colour harmony in the natural world. The hot pink colour looks a bit like Magenta or Fuchsia which compliments the warm-green of the fungus and it is perfect harmony. In paintings which succeed, warm always compliments cool, and vice-versa. When warm greens are placed next to warm reds, the picture will always have problems unless the painter is extremely clever.

In my opinion Otto Dix was one clever guy. The German painter in the middle of the 20th century, managed to break these usually iron-clad rules in a most particular fashion. He broke them by the sheer force of his originality.

His work stemmed from his wartime experiences in both WWI and WWII. I wonder if I associate the Covid-17 with him also because of the terrible beauty in his work?

for clouds form, then blossom only to die in the course of a day...

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

The skies have been magnificent since the rain ended last week. The horizon is again full of luminosity and clouds are but a small head of purple hair racing across the sea until it's eaten up by the dusk.

And now we have a lost an hour, but the horizon could not care less. Moreover, human troubles mean nothing to it, for clouds form, then blossom only to die in the course of a day. And while the pandemic rages through the world, here is a painter looking at the evening sky.

"Oh! The sun is so beautiful in the middle of the summer......"

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

"Oh! The sun is so beautiful in the middle of the summer. It beats down on your head, and I've know doubt at all that it drives you crazy. But since I am already I simply enjoy it!"

V. VanGogh in a letter to his brother from Arles

Well, I can't say that it beats down upon us more violently here in Australia than in Provence at the height of August, but the sun  sizzles here too. And, the light is somewhat similar, eucalyptus trees appear violet red, then violet blue like the plane trees in Arles. 

But it is looking out over the horizon where the Australian light really differs from the Mediterranean basin. I believe it is only due to the pollution which has infected so much of the coast line from Cassis, all the way down the Amalfi coast, down to Bari, and over to Athens. But further out, the Greek isles are forever happy, and their sunsets are free of a grey fate. 

Here is something from last week which I wasn't sure about, but I like it now. I don't want to be repetitive but I cannot underline enough the joy of working from the sea at sunset. Its possibilities are limitless.

Jumping into a painting

Evening Prayer 26 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is another example of jumping into a painting but holding only a vague visual thread in one's fragile mind. But I know that this sort of thing is extremely good for me because it breaks up my habitual way of working. I do risk however, to make some crazy images. I like this one above yet it is certainly out on the limb of uncertainty.

Below, is a Whistler, done probably in the 1890's in England. It is a beautiful example of Painting as cheerful diversion. He was a proponent of "Art for Art's sake" and caused quite a stir for his ideas. He was a man of intelligence but also of sensual and poetic invention. And this is a great example of it. 

Hands and Clouds

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

Alors, this picture can out of a very frustrated painter who could not decide how to treat the vast mess of clouds in the sky. From the start I decided to grab the smallest of ideas which raced through my mind and to run with it. But I couldn't keep up with the changes going on as twilight accelerated which forced me into an idea, or concept, about how I might find my way into it. I was on dangerous ground.

Unless one is Bonington, or one of those magnificent Flemish painters of the 18th century, a sky full of clouds can be a hairy operation for an amateur like myself. There are too many problems with it! It is a lot like the difficulty of drawing hands. Unless one is Van Dyck or Van Gogh, one must be prepared to fail. Or, one paints them like Picasso with a graphic audacity which spins the attention of the viewer away from his mangled hands like a magician distracts his audience.

And these clouds overrun the sky, and they distort the distance which create a host of problems for the painter. How to push the horizon into the painting when overhead, a cacophony of clouds run amuck like children at recess hour.

This is how I felt. My idea was to fail without shame as the Buddhists love to say when beginning many activities:

"I am already dead!" they exclaim.

And I often use that idea when faced with a wall of insecurity like before an important  tennis match I will recite it to myself.

And so the other night, I just let go as if already dead, and something wonderful happened. I had decided to proceed differently, and I found myself on thin ice yet weightless. When I had finished I was very surprised by it. And I suppose, for me, that is the whole point of both creation and participation in art; the element of surprise.

Iridescence and the possibility of Painting light

Evening Prayer Brunswick heads, 21 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This one is from the last week during when the weather blessed us with stellar skies of such iridescence for several days running. It isn't often when the luminosity goes on such steroids but when it does I am so very grateful to be there with my materials.

Sometimes I get a glimpse into what is possible in Painting. 

Paradise in Coronavirus

hbm

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

This picture came to me the other night. A vibrant light awaited me as I arrived at the small dune which I consider my small studio by the sea. And though every evening light is different, so my imagination responds to what is presented to me on each evening. For a few days in a row last week we were graced a with a strong but subtle and colourful light. I reacted with a gentle touch as if I was pushing away an amorous puppy with my foot. Here is the first one I made that night.

In this almost surreal moment of the Coronavirus I feel so very lucky to be here in such a paradise of beauty and space. That I can come down to work each evening is an added gift. 

I understand that this bubble will not last as the economic reality of a severe downturn will follow the virus. So for the moment, one day at a time, I am alive and am painting.

The anguish and delight of the Lighthouse keeper

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 19 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is from last night. The Autumnal skies are beginning to return and blossom in that  extraordinary Australian way. And, as the raging pandemic roars through Italy where people are in confinement, here, all is peachy, for the time being.

It was one of those skies, unblemished by neither a hint nor hair of cloud! It has been a long while since I have seen the horizon so polished at dusk; its strong line seemed to cut the whole world in two. I finished up in the dark and only wishing I could have continued but for the difficulty of seeing the colours on the palette. At dusk, the colours appear to intensify, even as the light dims gently into night. The sea, already a deep, inky violet bleeds into the sky. By then, stars are visible, and I have difficulty finding my way on the small path back to my car not 50 meters away. As I am usually the last soul here at this marvellous hour, I often imagine myself to be the guy who turns out the lights when I leave. I am for a small glorious moment a kind of lighthouse keeper for this immense beach.

This painting came quickly when the sky had reached its poetic apogee. I never seem to paint it as I imagine I can but a solution is always found which almost always pleases and surprises me all at once. This  narcissism of Nature is both a painter's deep anguish and deep delight.

Ominous skies, ominous times

Evening Prayer Brunswick Head, 13 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

In this time of uncertainty there is nothing better than to keep painting. This picture, as someone on Instagram noted, looks as ominous as the nightly news. But it was only because a Southerly brought in rain and big winds.

 

In Europe these new virus cases are going up everywhere. In northern Italy especially, old people are dying in Lombardy and people are terrified. They are talking of lockdowns whereby people cannot leave their homes. My old friend in Milan is petrified and my friend in East Sussex UK is upset. I guess it was inevitable that a pandemic would arrive upon the world scene. Here there are cases of this new virus popping up everywhere.

Meanwhile I will keep painting. 

sexy i-phone 7 and the cloudy horizon

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

My i-phone 7 usually makes my paintings look much sexier than they really are, but on this rare occasion it does not. I 'shoot' them on the stove top at midday when the light streams in from both sides of the kitchen and there is a no glare. It is pretty amazing that these telephone camera can be so true to colour in the right sort of diffused light. I believe the aperture is 1.8 which is pretty fast indeed, and this often creates too much light. Before I settled on the stovetop spot to shoot the paintings I used the living room with pillows circling the painting break all the light. But anyway, now the stovetop is where I shoot them, and there are bits of paint everywhere on the cast iron burners. 

So this system works great 7 out of 10 times, and with a little fiddling with the filters I  can usually bring up the warmth. But for some reason it rebels against yellow, and I lose its value too often and this picture suffers from that problem. The sky is far richer than it shows, alas,....

But I really liked the session when I painted it because I struggled after almost losing it several times.

Confession from the Old Man and the Sea

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This picture is from a few nights ago. It was the first of two that evening which I did it so quickly that I hardly remember it. If I were to make a confession, it would be to admit that it didn't even take me 10 minutes to make. Happily, it is like that sometimes. They just seem to show up with the first few brushstrokes only to finish themselves without thinking. The only conscious thought I might have had was to hear a voice inside which said: "STOP". Nothing more is needed in that small universal word. "It is done, start another one" my intuition always seems to say.

Alas, I say that, but maybe it needs an addendum which is that it really took me 45 years to make. And this is the thing about learning a craft which always surprises the creator; Only he, or she, knows what has been invested into a life of Art. 

Mushy Skies and a writer's woe

  Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 March 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25

This curious picture came out of a difficult session the other evening. It was the second painting of two, and the sky had kind of turned into MUSH by then. This can sometimes be quite interesting except though, when one has started a picture which goes  one way but suddenly, the MOTIF runs off in another direction. Writers often talk about this as when their characters get away from them. This seems to be an apt way of describing a MOTIF going rogue while in the middle of a painting.

By the time I finished I wasn't at all happy with it yet upon seeing it with distance, in a photo, my thinking has changed, most thankfully.

It is a weird painting in a way, even for me, but I do like it very much. Even better, I like that I like it.

Timeless Turner

They are few words to add to these images! But of course, I will anyway.  

Painters since Turner have tried to deal with  'unruly' Nature as best as they could while still trying to be tethered to a 'motif'. But I don't believe that any of them came as close to the sheer abstraction of this 'unruliness' of Nature as did Turner. Monet certainly came close, as did some of Morandi's landscapes. And Piet Mondrian pushed the limits of his lovely Northern Landscapes to a point of a certain Non-Objection as did some of de Staal's small studies. I am leaving out a number of other painters too. My teacher Léo Marchutz also pushed his drawings of Venice and St Victoire to the very edge of Turner's artistic stratosphere.

  

But I really just wanted to throw up some images of Turner which so drive me mad. And it poses the question, yet again, for a painter: Just what was the American Expressionist movement all about, anyway?

The Wild Side

Evening prayer Brunswick Heads, 1 March, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

A study from last week before the rains arrived and shut off the light. Since then I have been in the studio working on large paintings in a very different avenue. 

In this study however, has a certain life-likeness from which I continually try to flee. But I have almost no control over what I am going to do once I’ve set up and prepared a palette to work. My wild child wishes to go to a more visceral place, a raw zone, a place of simplicity. I find myself seeking the intuitive stab of mark-making yet to be done in front of a motif, and using Nature as eyes. It does work from time to time but it really depends upon what kind of sky is present when I arrive to work. Also, there is this mysterious 'thing', one's wild animal inside which doesn't listen at all to one's conceptual side. This is the world of the wild thing inside everyone, especially artists.

The studies below will not please anyone looking for that 'life-likeness' of which I just wrote about, but for me, they possess everything I am after on a purely emotional level, one stretching all the way back to early childhood. 

They were painted quickly, one after the other, 29 January 2020.

 Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 January, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

    Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 January 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Van Gogh and the Borinage of his soul

This is from the British National Museum, if I am not mistaken. I cannot remember exactly where  I took it but I remember seeing it with such a shock because it was not hung with other things by Van Gogh. A shock too, because I had not seen it in a very long time. 

I have always loved these early portraits and the landscapes also done in the North when he was struggling so hard to learn about Painting. They are not considered to be his best works by critics and historians but I think I like them the best. They appeal to my very taciturn insides, but as well, to my love of the Pathos in all things in Art. 

The conception of this portrait is unusual in that it seems to harken back to another time, one closer to those of a German and Flemish sensibility. Almost nun-like in her cloak or habit, the model could be a study  for one of the Potato Eaters, or possibly the wife of a miner painted in the Borinage region of Belgium when poor Vincent was up there trying to save the down-trodden people at a time when he couldn't even save himself. These portraits are straightforward, almost sculpted, and lacking in any virtuosity, painted with a quiet force as if from the hand of master carpenter than one of a painter. They are made from very simple colour harmonies, and the expressive nature found in these subjects, at this time in his life, seem to speak to all of humanity's suffering. They possess a universal appeal to most anyone who can open their hearts to them.