Divine arrogance, Vive les artistes!

                    

                       

Titian, Portrait of Pope Paul III, 1543, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli 

There is a wonderful anecdote about Titian that I've always loved. During one of his sessions while he was painting Pope Paul III, he dropped one of his brushes, then he apparently waited until the Pope got out of his chair to pick it up before continuing his work. 

The humility of the Pope is astounding, but the arrogance of the painter is divine. 

Chutzpa! As we say in New York, but then this was a period in history when Court painters were kings in their own right, their currency was their talent. But I suppose that today's contemporary art stars also garner the same status if not the same currency, because status these days is rather cheap.

I once spent two weeks on Capri back in the 1980's while on a painting trip. I found a funky sort of Art Deco hotel overlooking the port where the ferries come in an unfashionable area. It was inexpensive in those days and also quite simple and unpretentious, and I loved it. This was long before Instagram had arrived and declared that stars had been there since before Christ.

The Capodimonte in Napoli, which I discovered on that trip, is a magnificent museum and it houses some of the best of European Painting. 

I would take the ferry into Napoli about every other day or so when I wasn't painting on the other side of the island. This was a great solution for visiting both Capri and Napoli, but also far less stressful than staying in Napoli with a VW. 

I would take the hour long trip across this infamous bay and alight at the port, ready to be a tourist. I prowled around the city and also I went to the Capodimonti several times during that trip, my only one time in Napoli. On one of the top floors one walks into a large room where, I think, I counted about a dozen Titians around all the walls. I was spellbound. 

Among so much beauty there, is also one of my favourite things of all time too, a full length portrait of his daughter Lavinia, whom he used as a model for so many of his larger thematic pictures. It's a real gem, and this small detail of her head, survived decades by living on the inside cover of my small Filofax address book before the arrival of i-cloud. Now, her beatific expression is affixed to one of my tall white IKEA kitchen cabinets along with other relics of my possessive past that randomly decorate my kitchen.

But like so many other jewels hanging on those walls is also one in particular that lives on my computer desktop, a small portrait in profile by one of the greatest Humanist portrait painters of all time, Andrea Mantegna. I cannot resist displaying it here. It's as modern as Matisse but I've already written about these two painters together in the same spirit a few year's back. 

So what the heck, here are a few other things by Mantegna because in this crazy digital world, we need more depictions of real Humanism. I really love these things. They are the best of the best.

And speaking of artists, and the reverence  which they commanded in the cultured life of a great country like France for instance, where painters, writers, musicians and other notables in the sciences, were revered and celebrated enough to grace their bank notes back in the day of the French Franc.

Before the Euro arrived in 2002, Delacroix appeared on the 100 Franc note throughout the 1980's before Cezanne replaced him on the last one before the Euro. Both the writer, Saint-Exupéry and the painter, Quentin de la Tour appeared on the 50 Franc note but I forget when. Debussy on the 20 Franc note, Berlioz on the infamous 10 France note which I remember well, all these were lost to the Euro, alas! 

But on a reassuring note (no pun intended), shoppers are encouraged to caress the beautiful face of Giacometti that graces the 100 Swiss Franc note that came out in 2019.

Vive les artistes!

a safe dry place

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2018, oil on canvas board, 30 X 30 cm 

I had actually thrown this out into a pile of paintings outside my studio to be torched months ago when I suddenly saw it a few days ago wrinkled a bit and looking the worse for wear. After looking at it briefly, I thought, «Yes, this past week, this is how I’ve felt trying to paint here, so protected, and far from the suffering people everywhere else in the world». So I took this photo and brought the painting inside for keeps.

I'm glad I did. Sometimes I cannot "see" anything in a work, I just see the failure in it. Now, I don't pass this off as anything of great value, but I do see something of which perhaps I had not intended at the time. And this is always a personal thing for any creative person and his/her work. As I often say in these pages; it's Time, the ultimate arbitrator. 

So this scrap of a picture, somewhat mildewed but otherwise intact, will find a safe, dry place inside my studio like it's a stray cat from the cruel hard world outside.

Paintings speaking softly

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The other night was one of those perfect painting evenings! The Bloom seemed to go on and on for ages perhaps due to a bit of humidity on the sea surface that blurred the feathered colours that scintillated like when stars shimmer, changing colours against a polished black, moonless sky. I made six studies, four small ones and two larger ones. This one above was one of two larger ones done after the others. 

There was delicacy this night as if I were a watching a young Russian girl dancing to Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, that thematic, sensual melody winding its way from my palette, up into the clouds like in a Walt Disney cartoon. Whewww.

Anyway, as we say in the Bronx, you hadda be there!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 14 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

There are certain evenings like this when I have felt that all the anguish of painting pictures in this difficult world, one too full of life and death problems for so many unfortunate souls everywhere, can suddenly dissolve in a second, from time to time. Honestly, this past week has shone a spotlight on the inhumanity of humanity. I don't know anyone who hasn't witnessed a profound emotional response or an opinionated debate, either at home or in the media. As far as I can attest, there are just too many loudmouths with mics in basements all over the world. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, above, and on earth, unknown to the miseries of so many people, there are lots of painters who still attempt to capture an essence of humanity, coaxing it gently, sometimes with great difficulty from the earth, as if soothing a distressed infant. 

I will not add anything more, I'll let the pictures speak quietly, as often paintings do.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 14 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Like a snail, leaving a trace

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here are two of four studies made one night over a week ago. It was a good night, sometimes they just roll in on their own. 

Because they are small they might seem somewhat insignificant but it's what I'm doing in this period, so I don't over-think it, I just roll dice each night in front of the motif. What will they bring? Will I win or lose like on the craps table in Vegas? 

Actually, there is no losing in this creative business since I've wised up enough to learn from every picture, and  each failure.

I like these studies more than the other two which I don't include here. I particularly like them because I feel there is a sense of place and time during that unique moment when I alone experienced their fabrication. They are proof of my existence, both physical and spiritual from that space in time. On even my best days I would be hard pressed to show evidence that I existed, but a painted image is surely proof. 

Elevated slightly up on the dunes I see everything going on. I see the last stragglers of the day who walk the beach and at that hour too, are the bathers who arrive to peel off their clothes and run down to the water's edge jumping into the sea with, or without bathing suits. These days I'm distracted by whales that breach, splashing just offshore and close enough for dogs and kids to see. I'm like the good king who looks out with benevolence upon all living things, animate and otherwise.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 October 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

And those who share this stretch of the beach might see the same sky or perhaps even feel the same way about it, but they won't express it the way I can. Though we may share the same exhilaration at this twilight hour, it is only me who will affix it onto permanence with a cheap canvas board from China that I buy by the box loads. And yet we all share in that moment the weathering sky of our own mortality on this day.

I guess what I'm trying to express is that I'm increasingly attentive to the painting session as a specific moment as well as a specific place. 

In my mind I know I can be quite critical of too many paintings (and painters) these days because I feel that in them I don’t connect with that specific moment in place and time, so consequently, I am nowhere. If I can offer anything to anyone, it’s a specific poetry that’s tied to a place and time.

Yes, I too, wish to make pictures that embody a universal aspect of Painting, something that expresses a world bigger than myself, but I've come to understand that the Universal can only manifest itself if it rises up naturally from a specific work of art. 

I wish for a pictures to leave traces of where, and when they were born. If a painter is lucky enough to be original, this will express itself through the picture because like the snail, a painting should leave a trace.

Paying attention at dusk

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 20 September 2023 oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 20 September 2023 oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 20 September 2023 oil on canvas board, 25 X 20 cm

I've just picked up a thoughtful book entitled Everyday Zen, by Charlotte Jocko Beck, one that I've read so many times it looks like my dog's play toy, if I were to have a dog that is. Dog-eared, and so full of ink markings that it's still lucky to be alive but needless to say, it's a fave of mine. I normally read a page or two a day. There is enough wisdom in a paragraph to fuel a Tesla to Brisbane and back again. 

She tells the story of being a piano student at Oberlin College.

She walked into her first class with a distinguished teacher who taught with two pianos. "He didn't even say hello, he just sat down at his piano and played five notes, and then he said, 'you do it'. I was supposed to play it just the way he played it. I played it- and he said 'No'. He played it again, and I played it again. Again, he said 'No'. Well, we had an hour of that, and each time he said 'No'.

Now, in the next three months I played about three measures, perhaps a half a minute of music. Now, I had thought I was pretty good: I'd played soloist with little symphony orchestras and yet we did this for three months, and I cried most of those three months. He had all the marks of a real teacher, that tremendous drive and determination to make the student see. And at the end of threes months, one day, he said, 'Good'. What had happened? Finally, I had learned to listen. And as he said, 'if you can hear it, you can play it'. 

She had been playing piano for years but she had not learned how to pay attention, as she writes it.

It's a wonderful anecdote, and an apt one for the art of Painting. I don't think I ever really paid attention until I got into this series at Brunswick Heads. Like a few single notes played on a grand piano, strokes well-placed on a painting reveal how well, or poorly, one is paying attention. I can feel this sensation with each picture but most of the time in each small picture I'm not always paying complete attention. Whatever attention I do possess is too often distracted by small thoughts, thoughts centred on what I'm trying to do, but thoughts all the same, just tangential thoughts. It can 'seem' like I'm paying complete attention because I'm  thinking about certain difficult places in the work but I'm still thinking. Alas. 

But in all this I do know now that when I'm plugged into something, I'm absent and this is the place. It can happen in everything we do intimately, from sex to tennis and back to painting.

But anyway, here are three small studies from last week where I arrived early when the sky hadn't yet 'turned'. The first one usually begins with a gentle Naples Yellow that lingers around before it goes Pink and then to a variety of warm Roses. It's a terrible cliché but these colours always reminds me of different flowers appearing one after the other as they define the 'bloom'. If you need to know what this is, ask any beachcomber to describe it for you. 

The second and third ones (follow in order) announce the Kaleidoscopic development which makes Twilight so extraordinary on every beach around the world, as every beachcomber knows.

right and wrong, ideas and sensations

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 16 September 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

From a few nights ago came these two studies. The top one feels OK to me but the one below is decidedly wrong for a reason that confuses me. I will try to explain. 

First though, the top one seems to work, if by that, it conveys a sense of truth to nature without being cloying or sentimental (both which I hate) But it has light which I like, and also that favourite feeling of what the Zen Buddhists call 'suchness', a natural kind of spontaneous but holistic perfection of the moment. (Ohhhh, naturally my own understanding) and yet, it's somewhat on the money because I love works of art that exhibit a freshness that feels as if it were created by the wave of a magic wand. This is personal, just my own preference, but I do appreciate laboriously created pieces too, if they work as a unity, no matter how abstracted. 

These are souvenirs of a place, after all. They don't pretend to be 'great works of art', just records of a specific moment. And if they succeed in living for a moment when completed despite their haste, they have a good chance of living on forever like a Haiku by Basho or Issa, two of my faves. What do they say? "Nothing Special".

And although this second study below began with an earnest idea to explore the same thing as the first one, it quickly lost its way like a guy who ate too much for lunch. 

"Trop gourmand", as the French would politely observe. 

I'm not sure where it when wrong but there are just too many elements, and while painting it, I watched my heart sink. 

"It had so much possibility!" 

I thought to myself, because after all, the first one had come out so well.

But now that I spend time looking at it, I wonder if the simple solution isn't just to paint out the cool Emerald Green stripe that runs along the base of the picture plane that indicates the foreground? 

Yes, I'm pretty sure that’s what is needed because actually, I had thrown it in at the very end of the session due to me ‘getting an idea’. That was my error. Like my Haiku heroes, I generally try to avoid ideas or concepts in these quick studies while relying instead upon my senses.

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 16 September 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

collateral estoppal

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 September 2023, 30 X 25 cm

Here are two studies from a few nights ago. They are not without interest, but kind of just OK. Truthfully, I was just super happy to get out to mix a palette and throw some paint around on the dunes. Having recently been sidelined from COVID for so many weeks I feel like a tourist back visiting a new city where I'm familiar with the country but just not this part of it. I'm a tourist nonetheless. The palette also is familiar, the colours too, but it's the resulting work that curiously feels 'too familiar' to me as I am revisiting a problem which I have already solved, I think, I want something different in the work.

Collateral Estoppal is such a funky bit of language, as many legal terms can be. But it's the 'mots de jour' from last week's drama in Trump's continuing soap opera.

    Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 September 2023, 30 X 25 cm

Common Estoppal is a doctrine that prevents a person from re-litigating an issue once a court has decided an issue of fact or law necessary to its judgment,.. that decision preclude[s] re-litigation of the issue in a suit on a different cause of action involving a party to the first case.

Hummmn... Well, I confess that I was so enchanted by the sound of this bit of legalese as it rolled off the tongue of a celebrated journalist at MSNBC that I knew I had to use it somewhere. 

So, I could say that my desire in Painting is not to 're-litigate' an established 'factual' way of working, as per, when I set out to work today. My desire is for something new, yes, but how to get there??

Hence the third image below which is a reconfigured Evening Prayer from sometime last year I think. It was a simple image formed by three wide stripes of colour indicating the sea and the sky. I was playing around with it on my phone and I digitally added the middle portion of pink which I instantly liked. It spoke to me. 

So now I'm now actively pursuing this simplicity in my large square canvas's in the studio on the same theme or subject matter. A technical problem has maybe been solved. How Do I print such a large swath of colour without losing the luminosity underneath? This is never a problem with the small studies done on the dunes because of the size and speed. But the larger ones in the studio have plagued me with both nightmares and failure.

I will continue to go out to the beach because I love doing it but at the same time it does provide new ideas. Yet I do believe that I need to find a new avenue in order not to return to 're-litigate' an established procedural fact. 

The darkroom

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 September, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Last night I was ruminating about a recent remark regarding my 'obsessive' (her word, not mine) need to paint the twilight sky. Without much thought I quickly replied that if I didn't do it, nobody else would. The simplicity of my answer even surprised me. It was a distinctly Occam's Razor kind of retort, but its true, isn't it?

I was thinking about this last night because it had been floating around my unconscious ever since. Indeed my mind sometimes feels like the space a bit above earth, the layer littered with all sorts of metallic and rubbery old things, new things too, the spacey garbage, and all sorts of broken communication systems that still hurl through the blackness at 7 meters a second.

This is from the other night when I returned to the scene of the crime after an almost seven week hiatus due to COVID which I have already recounted in these lost pages. I made two, but I really thought the first one was so boring that I don't know if I will have the courage to put up the second one until I get to the end of this post. (?) But in this one, I thought maybe it's so so, no so great, but OK. But the really great thing is that I didn't expect anything from the other night. I went out without expectations, and this is progress. I exercised my favourite slogan from the Zen wise guys in the East who always said: 

"I'm already dead, so what's the problem?"

I often say this to my French tennis partner who is always better than me and always takes the sets no matter what my lead. 

I say it's progress because I had no expectations of myself. It was just like Let It Be, as they sang.

Besides I think expectations are for youth, the older one gets the less expectations one has, mostly.

What I really wanted to say is a bit complicated but I'll give it a go. 

In every every stage of progress in my Painting, (or anything in fact), I've always seen a solution (i.e. a painting) from the present moment. And this is normal, it's how most people operate. But I can also see that this perception of where I am at in this particular moment of time, to be set in concrete, unyielding and forever. In other words, I cannot seem to imagine that in a few month's time my perception will be newer, different, a more evolved version of what I perceive today. I cannot envision my future work with a different, more evolved understanding. It's difficult to articulate. 

For example, a friend with a back ailment called me the other night and I asked her how it felt today over the last few weeks. She had been sharing about it to me for six months and I had been trying to coach her into a mindset that her pain would ease and improve in time. She admitted it was a little better, so I said (from my own experience with a back issues) that unless it’s s a chronic issue, our bodies usually improve even despite all our thinking to the contrary. The body can also evolve on its own path through aging. 

So too, in painting, in the same light it’s easy for me to see problems or inabilities, way down the line in the studio from today's perspective, and in fact, like the human body, it too will be different, better even. In other words, since childhood, I have been wired into a  perspective about my future set in concrete from today's perspective.  

Phewww.. 

And being a painter forces me to see the same motif in a different way each time I go out to work as long as I don't I fall into working from a concept. This is always dangerous place for an artist of any kind. 

In my own life I have seen how concepts (ingrained choices, voluntary or involuntary)  have left me stuck in holding patterns like the proverbial tire being stuck in mud, spinning, but going nowhere, only just deeper.

What if I lived my life without concepts? What would it truly be like? 

Like many, I've read about those wise guys from in the East who tended their gardens moment after moment, trimming one plant at a time, all the while Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, famously nibbled on a precious cookie that his mother (in his precious childhood memory), gave him to him after a trip to the market each week. He prolonged his bliss of small bites between the clouds passing overhead and the wind nudged the palm fronds around him.

He shows the way to be in the moment, whatever it is, eating a cookie or painting a picture.

At my age now, all the concepts (like expectations) that have hung in my sky like cloud castles seem to be collapsing. I am living my life today with full acceptance of all the horse shit on the road that was I've navigated in order to to get me here to this present moment.

I used to try 'to force my life' to resemble the template, this photo I had created long ago in the darkroom of my childhood. It was really impossible and bent me out of shape. No wonder I used to have back problems.

But bit by bit, with age, it diminishes, and the present takes over just like watching a negative transform into a photograph after bathing it a short while in the solution of the darkroom. 

What is the solution? What is that thing that transforms the negative into a positive?

So now, after all this talk, I've finally decided to share this painting from the other night.

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 September, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Léo and Aix

Here is a small piece I wrote for the Léo Marchutz School in Aix-en-Provence which had asked me to participate in their monthly series. Included at the end is a selection of paintings from 1973 - 2023 to compliment the text.  

 

Léo Marchutz and my arrival in France 

I was unusually fortunate to meet my teacher Léo Marchutz when I arrived at the IAU during my third year of University in 1972. This was an event that changed my life.

 

Léo was teaching painting to students at the American Institute once or twice a week. I began attending his classes and soon enough it became a kind of personal apprenticeship, more 19th, than 20th century style than what I had been used to at art school. After my first year in Aix I made the decision not to return to finish my art degree in America but to stay and study with Léo. 

After all the contempt I felt for art school, which I eventually fled after two years in order to get to France, here in front of me was an artist who was guiding me into painting through the history of art. I was young with a whole life in front of me and like all great events in one's life, they arrive as improbable surprises. I took a small apartment in the Châteaunoir then France became my home. 

By this time I was seeing Leo every day. I would arrive for tea with Barbara, his wife, then Léo would usher me into his studio where he showed me what he was working on. Sometimes I showed him what I had been doing but mostly I asked questions and he responded, this became the model for our relationship. This amazing chapter of my life lasted until his death in 1976.

Though I cannot imagine that Leo would like some of my work today, I owe him everything. I only speak for myself, but I think one’s teacher, like one’s parent, needs to be left behind, loved and never forgotten, but no longer in the studio. One has learned everything one needs to learn and one must cut one’s own way into the world of painting. Unlike so many teachers, it was never all about him, he simply pointed his students back to the masters. Léo was the beacon, not the statue.

I am still a fan of the Léo Marchutz School in whatever iteration. I went to the first one when Billy, Sam and Leo had decided to make a go of it away from the IAU. Amos Booth and Francois de Asis were also instrumental but they remained behind the scenes. I met John that year (1974) and some time later Alan turned up. Remarkably, through all its forms, the Marchutz experience has survived. This is almost completely due to John and Alan who have ridden out so many storms over the past few decades to keep it going sometimes against great odds. They slowly transformed the early somewhat improvised format which Billy, Sam and Leo had begun, tweaking it a little here and there, to satisfy an upgrade to the University system that demanded a coherent academic curriculum. But they are not the only ones, there is a whole crew who has come and gone over the years and I imagine they are also still as much a part of this family as I have been. 

Australia, and some improvised notes on both my studio work and the series Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads.

Today, I live in Australia where I came about ten years ago to the North Coast of New South Wales. It’s a sleepy town full of surfers, hippies, new agers, and the odd film star. 

For the past six years I have been making studies at the beach at dusk. They represent a visual diary of my evening sessions entitled 'Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads’.

Many years ago I had seen the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto who spent years traveling around the world making large black and white studies of the horizon line almost cutting the image in half. He used an 8 X 10 camera often with long exposures during all kinds of weather and in all seasons. I was deeply moved by these things.

And although prior to seeing his series, I had never been fond of black and white photography, but in his case, I was taken aback by these painterly nuances in black, white, and a multitude of greys. 

Though his images were the inspiration for my own series, I wished only to explore this horizon line in colour using oil paints. Painting at dusk provided me with the colour I desired. While his photos were created using a long exposure, my pictures on the other hand, are made with lightning speed. 

I call it a series now, but when I began, I had no idea that it would become such a project. I simply wanted to get back outdoors again to have some fun and mix colours in the sunlight. I had been working in the studio for many years where the creative process is different. But I needed to change things up so I began going out to the beach towards dusk and making these small studies. Today, I now practice two Painting forms simultaneously, one complementing the other, one in the studio, the other, in front of the motif outdoors. They both bring great satisfaction to me and speak to different corners of my curiosity.

Although in this exploration at the beach I had not initially foreseen it to be a 'site specific’ series, one which generally means that the artist alters the site in question, but in the end however, it turned into one by means of repetition.  And unlike most artistic 'site' projects, in this case, the work proceeded the idea, not the other way around. And though I haven’t altered the site, it is I who has been altered by it. 

Throughout this time my work process has varied considerably. At certain moments I appear to be more concerned with the graphic unity of the surface while at others I am simply seduced by the sensual nature of the oil paint. But always, I am looking at colour’s ability to simultaneously push and pull the drawing of the image both forward and backwards into the surface of the picture plane but never am I interested in this approach solely for its own sake. Because the motif is so inherently abstract, being just the sea and sky (for I never use the beach as a traditional means to illustrate a traditional foreground), I use colour as the principal vehicle with which to push the foreground backwards into the painting while at the same time bringing the background forward up to the surface. This is for me one of the greatest lessons from Cezanne, who in the 19th century, single-handily ushered us into the era of truly Modern Painting by demolishing perspective and breaking down distance, for better and alas, worse. Matisse, whose work I came to love, went even further down this path eventually turning the Painting world upside down.  

During these years I’ve made lots of studies, and after much failure, I’ve learned a great deal too while also growing into the ‘motif’. I’m always looking for the pictorial resolution for them because each picture has its own illusive logic. I’m interested in the unity of the whole surface, the formal integrity of each painting, the drawing and colour being at its essence. But consequently, these studies might appear scruffy, sloppy and unfinished because I'm certainly more Expressionist than Impressionist. But personally, I like all these spontaneous and accidental elements in my own work, and in others too. It’s a matter of taste. 

As each picture can be so different from one day to the next, I too, am quite different. Somedays I'm joyful, sometimes not, maybe tired and a little grumpy, with a mind full of problems, real or imagined, but because I go out there as a habit to work, Nature has always opened up to me regardless of my state of mind, and as a result, I am always changed by the painting process, and it’s for this reason, more than any others, why I still go out there to work. As my friend, Francois de Asis has always assured me, “When one paints, one lives better”. 

I realised that I needed to work on a small scale in order to capture so much change, so quickly at this twilight hour. So thus, I settled on two small convenient board sizes. Working small, as all landscape painters know, keeps the process simple and within reach. There is also a special kind of beauty in a small oil painting.

These studies also opened me up again to exploring the expansive myriad of grey tones that cycle through the colour wheel while lighting up a whole variety of nuances at the dusk hour. And what surprises me when I take a few steps backward to view the oeuvre as a whole, it's that most of the paintings, though they obviously share my fingerprints, they all appear to manifestly look so vastly different from one to the other. But then, weather can dictate so much of this.  

I have enclosed a selection of work that will hopefully reveal who I am as a painter starting with a few early things, up to the beach paintings (in chronological order), then some of the large non-objection paintings done in the studio. These latter things perhaps deserve an explanation but I would need much more space here than has been allotted to me.  

I’ve never been crazy about American Expressionism though for many years I’ve earnestly tried hard to be. But because I'm a romantic, I've always dreamt of a way I could possibly marry Expressionism to Nature. I wish I could re-phrase this by saying that I desired to reunite them back together again, but the truth is that American Expressionism was never attached to Nature to begin with. 

Somehow, the American Expressionists missed the boat when they lost sight of the light. Not all, some of the time, but many of them, all the time. A shame, it’s a shame because in their quixotic crusade to make something completely new in American painting, the essence of Chiaroscuro was lost. (And anyway, their ‘abstraction’ couldn’t hold a candle to Turner’s late watercolours which had already achieved this in Britain more than a century earlier). 

They broke down painting without possessing the means to rebuild it anew. Maybe this is some kind of American 'thing' because we seem to do this all over the place, all of the time. Who knows, but again, it's a shame because by trying to paint quickly and spontaneously, they were really onto something important. And breaking things down can be a good thing too if one knows how to replace them with something better, however different. 

Many of my Evening Prayers have been moving towards a flat and graphic disposition. I like that. When I compress the motif down to just a few horizontal stripes of subtle colour that feel true to Nature, a small bell rings inside me. This is weird, but good. Personally, it's where my compass always wants to point, a place where I feel good inside.

I bring all this back to my own desire to see the motif as if for the very first time, each time, wave after wave, and day after day. This means approaching the motif quickly, seizing it, and subduing it with experience and craft. By working this way I’m able to avoid a sentimental view of Nature, something I deplore in painting. This isn’t a recipe for everyone, it a way I discovered for myself because I am an anxious person, and in this series, I need a colourful frenzy at the end of the day to find peace. 

But again, it was Léo, who found a way into the motif through his own very abstract means of drawing and who subsequently passed it on to us all. In this, Léo was also a sign post.

 

In summary, I had originally imagined that this project was about colour but to my surprise, I discovered it was really about light, without which, there can be no real colour. And because the drawing is fairly easy, without complications, I could really focus on colour. So now, when I get out there to paint it feels a little like I’m getting into a Google self-driving car because I have so few concerns about anything else except to enjoy the ride. After all, I'm just seeing, and mixing colour. 

1973, The very earliest copy I made after Michelangelo under the watchful gaze of Léo, whose enduring patience allowed me to move through my 'technique’ period somewhat quickly.

Prometheus, Prince Street 1982, oil on canvas, 45 X 45 cm

San Giorgio 1986 oil on canvas board 30 X 23 cm

Châteaunoir 1992 oil on canvas board, (5 figure)

Evening Prayer 27 June 2017 oil on canvas board 25 X 20 cm

Evening Prayer 30 January 2018 oil on canvas board 25 X 20 cm

 Evening Prayer 30 January 2018 oil on canvas board 25 X 20 cm

   Evening Prayer 20 May 2018 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

 Evening Prayer 23 December 2019 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer 21 February 2021 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

  Evening Prayer 11 June 2020 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

   

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

  Evening Prayer 2 April 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

  Evening Prayer 28 March 2021 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

Evening Prayer 13 June 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

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

Evening Prayer 25 June 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

  Evening Prayer 16 June 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

  Evening Prayer 8 July 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

  Evening Prayer 28 July 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

  Evening Prayer 28 August 2022 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

   Evening Prayer 25 May 2023 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

   Evening Prayer 23 June 2023 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm 

Evening Prayer 12 July 2023 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

    Evening Prayer 21 July 2023 oil on canvas board 30 X 25 cm

        Pacific, Myocum, 2002 oil on plywood 220 X 120cm

   Nothing Special, Dieulefit, 2010 oil on canvas 150 X 150 cm

        B.O.A.C. Myocum, 2020 oil on canvas 150 X 150 cm

             Pan Am 2022 oil on plywood 220 X 120 cm