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.

if there is a God she must like colour

mlc

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 16 April, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I just found this study yesterday which I had misplaced and never uploaded to Instagram. Or, maybe I thought weeks ago that it was too kitsch? Either way, I like it today.

Two nights ago the twilight hour exploded with colour. We have had a week of dark cloudy days which simply refused to open up. It has been cold too. An inversion kept frigid air close to the ground and in those circumstances it is just impossible to warm up. I went to visit some friends for a light dinner who live a little higher up in the hills. On the way up I saw smoke from chimneys hugging the trees like blue shawls. 

But two afternoons ago the colour did explode like cannons, painting the sky with fiery clouds every which way one looked. The after-burn was purple pink as seen below. 

I had been in the studio all afternoon because I had given up hope that the beach would open up and allow me to paint down there. But against all odds, it did just that, and I watched from the studio not without deep regret. Alas, "it won't be the last time", so I tried to tell myself. 

I rarely take photos of sunsets as I much prefer to paint them and besides, sunset photos are much too ubiquitous anyway. But this is a view from the studio to the East (to break one's heart) as I would have been facing if I were at the beach painting this night and the sunset is directly behind. I am struck by the similarity of these colours and those of my picture done over  month ago. 

          looking East from my studio

vaporetti confetti

jgl

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

This was the first of two pictures done the other night. I arrived a little late so I needed to set up in a hurry. A marvellous pink sky was unfolding over a cloud bank sitting on the horizon while still holding rays of the setting sun behind me. Sometimes, I really do have to catch my breath in front of such beauty. I can feel like an adolescent in love for the first time, each time. 

I made this in about ten minutes which seems absurd to me now when I write about it. But I understand the pace which hastens the fading sky to its death while I work with the urgency of an E.R. doctor.  

As if like the rest of my life, I only seem to thrive when I am pushed to capture something when my life is on the line. Years ago, when I found myself in Venice, I would often ride a vaporetto around for hours and filling up drawing books. I would sit outside in the back where the views opened up in three directions. One has no time to think, one just makes drawings. But so often in those days I was rarely happy so I would rip them into tiny pieces and throw them into the wind like confetti. 

where the Universal dwells on a ledge

Lately I have been thinking of the Universal aspect of a specific work of Art, and also conversely, the very nature of the specific in a work of Art. Without being too pedantic I am always thinking about what makes a painting work.

Being specific in a painting refers to its solid and concrete nature, both its concept and unity of form. It removes doubt, but  not without poetry. It can be of a political nature, a social or even of a moralistic affirmation. It specifies a place or time, but it can also  be  far removed and away from anyone else's curiosity or understanding. 

Not being specific in painting can also involve  personal or a self-expression that  has little or no meaning outside of the creator's own world. Often Abstract Art falls into this category as in the American Abstract Expressionist Movement which began  the 1940's. A risk of this nonspecific self-expression, in an artistic sense, (on its own terms), is to risk falling off the nihilist cliff. 

On the other hand, I can still ponder yet another kind of painting which is germaine to the previous one but it aspires to an opposite world of Art; one which appeals to the Universal. It is so much concerned with an ideal outside of oneself that it no longer resides in any specific place, but lives in a kind of nether world which only aspires to the past accomplishments of our collective culture. It cannot even be specific to enough to transmit a human emotion. Museums ar full of these kinds of work.

So to aspire to a Universality, (on its own terms) can also place a work of art in limbo by trying to please the past, and by doing so it too, is in limbo. By limbo, I mean -not here - but not there either - nowhere in fact, artistically and conceptually speaking. 

As I proceed out on the this ledge I may as well confess the I have experimented in this nether-world of self-expression and also in an aspiration to the Universal.

Below are two works from the 20th century. The artist is very famous, and his works are in every American museum. I ask the question: What sort of painting is this? And is it a search for the Universal (as in a symbolic kind which many in this movement searched for) or is it just an abstract painting from the American Expressionist School, no meaning, just a play of colour with no concern to form? Is it specific about anything? And two of the biggest questions a painting should always ask are these:

A pedestrian will ask: Does it move me?  
And a painter should always ask: Can this painting teach me anything about Painting, or about Life?

Cato seizing the thing, before he committed suicide

aic

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

This painting was done a few days ago. It had been raining for several days beforehand, and consequently I hadn't been out to the dune. The sky was stormy as the picture indicates. I only set up because I was desperate to do something, anything! Because even after just a few days of not working there I can start to feel quite wacky inside. So, I set up, but I was not convinced by the light, or lack thereof, as it was blocked up in the West behind me. I knew that any luminosity would likely remain absent.

In any event I made this somewhat quickly before a raincloud arrived and I packed up and got back to the car just as it poured. 

To be honest, I was not unhappy with it, but not unhappy either. I was happy to have gotten out into the windy ocean air in front of a rough sea full with whitecaps as far as I could see. It is a strange drawing but I saw it that way, and I didn't have time to think about it, judging from the dark clouds moving in from the South. It is strange because the upper layer of cloud is so cold in colour, the same for the middle stripe, it was a cool Prussian blue/citron mixed down to almost a pure wisp of grey. And below, the cold unruly sea full of Emerald green with a band of sunlight which kicked in but just for a moment. And after 15 minutes, it was done. 

There was something in the cloud band that bothered me so I scraped off some paint to try to resurrect any light initially there. It's better than it was. Nothing more to say. I was grateful that it came off at all. 

And this brings me to something which Cato said just over 2000 years ago. 

'Seize the thing, and the words will follow,

grasp the subject and the words will follow.'

And it makes me see, as a painter, that when we 'grasp the thing, style will follow.'

Style can never precede the 'thing seized'

any more than the horse comes before the proverbial cart.

Or

one might say:

Seize the thing, and paint will follow. And this is important because the paint rarely proceeds the 'thing', the 'thing' must usually come first.

But this is a long discussion for another night.

Manon from Nancy in Paris

pac

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 May, 2020, 30 X 25 cm

This from last week, came quickly at the end of the session. The sky wasn't quite glowing but there was still something there so I threw up another board and I painted this mostly from memory, if truth be told.

I could hardly see the colours on the palette with my glasses which are outside of my prescription by almost twenty years. There are for long distance, and when the light fades I can no longer focus very well. But, I am attached to them maybe even for sentimental reasons. I had bought them in the Marais when I had gone to Paris to visit a girlfriend years ago but she had dumped me so I decided to stay for a few days in a small hotel I liked in Montparnasse. It was wintertime, and cold and snowing all day when I stopped into the small shop where I found the glasses I would buy and still wear. The saleswoman chatted me up, I think. Her name was Manon and she was from Nancy in the East which I had driven through in 1970 on my Triumph motorcycle while making my way through Europe when I was really even more young and foolish. We talked and talked, went for a drink, then we went for dinner. Much much later I walked the frigid streets all the way to Montparnasse arriving at dawn. It was what youth does. I had a wonderful weekend with Manon of Nancy in Paris, and so when I wear these glasses I sometimes either think of Manon or Paris depending on the mood. 

The light in this small picture also feels quite frigid to me tonight. Everything about it is cold; from the emerald green sea to the pale Prussian blue with a hint of citron over the horizon, and on to the cold pink in the sky above. It is a chilly painting, and right at this moment it transports me back to the memory of a youthful Paris years ago when life seemed simpler.

une oeuvre est une oeuvre

fif

 

Tangier, Morocco 2013   

This came from a small MUJI book of drawings made with a bamboo stick and encre de Chine. Working with a small selection of bamboo sticks was as much an adventure as it was to be working in the streets again. I went to Tangiers for a week just to draw again in Morocco. It had been a few years since I had done a trip like this but it was a short one because I was going back to Australia within a few weeks. I somehow had this feeling that I may not be doing these drawing trips for much longer. Indeed, a year later, I decided to settle in Australia after a life in France.

I am never able to really see a work I've made until much later in time. In this case seven years before I looked at these drawings again. I like some of them very much. But I couldn't see something like this until enough time had passed, enough time when I cannot remember anything about it. The feeling is all mine, for sure, and the strokes which create the light could only be done by me. In fact, the great things about this drawing are all mine, but as well, so are its mistakes. 

While one often only speaks of a drawing's successful attributes, a work usually possesses 'mistakes' too. These 'flaws', of which the creator is always somehow aware, are what make a work deeply unique and original. And these are the marks which give a drawing an authenticity which could only be made by just one creator. So to resume; I think an oeuvre is an oeuvre for both its attributes and its mistakes.

Bonnard, and the possibility of tomorrow

ewd

This remarkable self-portrait was the last he made. Old, and having survived the second world war, and having lost his wife (and muse) Marthe, he is in the winter of of his life. 

I saw it in a show in New York years ago at MOMA and I was quite rattled by it, enough that I went back again to be rattled. I was still a young man at the time, and I marvelled at his ruthless and frank depiction of himself. I remember that his eyes looked like the discarded pits from an apricot. It is a haunting portrait, and reminiscent of a Rembrandt at the end of his own life. A painter just keeps refining his work like  all artists do if they survive long enough. Goya comes to mind, and Titian, who painted his last self portrait at the age of 80. And  Tolstoy comes to mind too, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I read it when I was 18, and sadly, I didn't have the imagination in youth to understand it at the time.

In this time of haunting sorrow and great social unrest it is these creators who allow me to keep faith and hope in the possibility of tomorrow.

Putting the earth to sleep

osh

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 May 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25

These Autumn twilight skies give birth to colourful postcards. I feel as if I walk the cliffs of kitsch on clear evenings like this. It's a kind of danger but I cannot do otherwise. So much orange and pink! So much melodrama! So much peplum!

I follow the scent of the sky when it begins to turn. Moreover, it's an easy path to climb once a palette has been made.

One imagines the Earth slipping into sleep and especially so, in this time of the Coronavirus. There are no more airplanes overhead so I cannot mark the hour by the flights from Sydney. 

There is a quiet to these days, and the earth surely knows it. They say that pollution has virtually disappeared in the airs over Paris, Beijing, New Delhi, and even L.A. And the Himalayas can be seen from downtown Katmandu! 

The earth is a precious friend. Maybe some of us can now see it that way despite so many hardships during this time. There're may not be many of us, but the painter in me, has always been a friend of the earth. After all, I put it to bed most nights.

Proust for tea in Tivoli Gardens

oem

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads,  4 May, 2020, oil on canvas board, 35 X 40 cm

This is a very curious picture which came to me seemingly 'zoomed up via a portal' from my early childhood. It isn't uncommon to be working on something when I taste my own 'Madeleine' of which Proust evoked so personally. It arrives through all the senses but this one came through a visual one as if relating to a pictorial memory as a young child in the act of drawing. 

Painting, at times, brings to the fore so many mysterious emotions. One suddenly stops in quiet amazement in its presence. In this small unremarkable picture it happened for me just as I was struggling with a (bad) drawing and with the fast fading light (and colour). I felt my own personal and iconic image raise up inside of me, one which may have no resemblance nor meaning to anyone else. When this happens it is always a wonderful feeling despite whether the picture succeeds or not for its very provenance is one's own precious past which still thrives deeply within. There is no conscious compass to access it. What else to say? I know that everyone who ventures out into hitherto unexplored places can re-discover it for themselves, even for the briefest of moments. Often a love affair brings it out, but that is another story, and another part of the heart. 

When I was four years old I visited Tivoli Gardens with my family who took us to Europe in the summer of '56. I have never forgotten a kind of danish pastry which I ate there, and which I have accessed ever since through my sense of taste. Even in certain Pastry shops in France my olfactory memory takes me right back to Tivoli Gardens. As I have grown older these earliest memories seem to have taken a larger place in my life, a bit like at the end of the day when the tree makes a longer shadow across the flat lawn.

And within any creative act it seems to me that so many rich memories are continually released, again and again, as if one has disturbed a large bush and dozens of butterflies scatter into the air. 

Gachet, Muguet, and the Lotus Flower

lus

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

This is from the other night. The skies have been pretty good lately. The Lotus flower opens after sunset, and it remains up there as if floating for the longest time while quietly turning from orange to a cool violet. Then it disappears upward as if watching fireworks but only in very slow motion. There are moments when I feel a small change begin, like the change of seasons I guess. But it happens when the mind begins to question certain aspects the motif. "What if?" it thinks to no one in particular.

It's the first of May and I think of Muguet being offered from one person to the next all over France today. And I always think of Dr Gachet whom Vincent painted with a small glass of Muguet on the table in front of him with his sad eyes. A marvel of the imagination.

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