Tauromachie and the art of graceful death

15 November 2021

Tauromachie and the art of graceful death

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 November 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

In front of such a sky like today, I often have the habit attacking a canvas board hard and fast. It is partly from impatience but maybe also from anxiety due to the colours moving around the sky so quickly. In a certain way that edginess is a little like when I've painted portraits of people, it's their fixed gaze upon me that has me twitching and shifting  uneasily in place making me feel self-conscious. Here, I’m just painting a portrait of the sea and sky so what can go wrong?

I’m suddenly reminded of a conversation I had with a painter many years ago. He was talking about the work of Henri Michaux, who did a series of ink pictures on the theme of Tauromachie. This is a grand theme for a lot of European writers, painters and poets. Hemingway and Picasso both returned to it again and again throughout their long creative lives.  

He had just read a book by Michel Leiris about La Tauromachie, the art of bull fighting as an apt metaphor for painting a picture. The ideal death for the bull in this ‘sport’ is a quick one, and when performed correctly it is considered a great art for aficionados of the ring. The matador must get it right in the first go-round or he will lose the crowd and the bull will suffer needlessly. Its death will one ignoble, and the reputation of the matador will be sullied.

The bull fighter must insert his sword (espada) into a narrow space between the shoulders of the charging bull and directly into the racing heart of the beast. In a ‘perfect’ death, the bull will die within an instant, but if he misses, it will be a mess and he will have failed. The crowd will hate him before he will hate himself.

So my friend, who also paints quickly, described how this 'perfect death' also relates to his own process of painting when everything moves fluidly to a divine and spontaneous finish. Now, years later, I too, find myself working rapidly in front of a motif, and I again ponder the perilous goal of a 'perfect  death' hanging over me like a sword at the beach. 

A few years later, my old friend, Michael, whom I knew from both Aix and New York, took me to two bullfights, one in Nîmes and the other in Arles a year later. Like many tourists, I was both horrified and fascinated. My friend had been to many fights and he explained how everything was supposed to happen. In Nimes, when I saw the first bull come charging out and I heard the roar of the crowd, I was suddenly transfixed, and I stayed for the whole afternoon watching several fights. My discomfort was overwhelmed by my curiosity. What did I feel in front of such a spectacle of which I had heard so much about and was even prepared to reject out of bias? I still wasn’t sure how I felt after being at there for an afternoon. I had been to southern Spain a few times many years earlier and visited a few rings (empty) but I forget where, maybe Seville? More of a tourist, I was fascinated by the structures of them and the coulour of all that clay within. Because I was much younger, I didn’t yet possess the arrogance I have today around my ideas concerning the ethical treatment of animals. 

Regardless of whether we (outsiders) like it, or not, this is a grand culural tradition going back a few thousand years to a time when all forms ot violence against pretty much everything was easily accepted as a way of life. Let’s face it, humans can be pretty awful stewards of high morality. Today we still love the bloody gore of cage fighting between both men and women. But hey! Better they go at each other than at animals I think.

Anyway,  a year later I went again with my same friend. This time, we went to Arles, and when the first bull came charging out to the roar of the crowd, I found myself telling him that I would see him afterward at a cafe and I left to wander the lovely streets which Van Gogh had 

traversed just one hundred years earlier. 

As the first bull come rushing out into the noisy arena I suddenly realised that I didn’t want to see it all over again. I didn’t need to see it. I was curious the first time, but the second time around I understood in an instant that it brought me nothing more. My decision to leave was as quick, sharp, and intuitive, as that of a Matador inserting the espada into the heart of the charging beast. 

 

Maybe it’s these ancient but corroded memories of Spain or possibly the two trips to Nîmes and Arles, but I do sense a violence in this study from a few days ago. Could it also be the colour of the clay arena within the sky? Not sure, but there is something about it that evoked these old memories for me. While it’s true that this quick painting I exercise here also looks for a quick kill with one clean (or messy) truth, if there is any success or glory here at the end of the day, it is an anonymous one, solitary and bloodless.

God’s skin, hope and desire

 

27 July 2021

God’s skin, hope and desire

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 24 July 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 x 25 cm

I was looking at this picture from the other night and suddenly realised that I had finally come close to an image that fulfilled my deepest wish in this painting racket. All the same, I fear that it may only please a small portion of the world at large, but hey! Every artist secretly hopes their work will resonate with even just a few people. Is this not also a painter’s right? 

Chilly, chilly south winds arrived a few days ago. I had a few really delicious sessions this past week, and increasingly I feel like I’m getting somewhere new. Many of these skies are so delicate that I often treat them with lightly scrubbed washes to ensure their luminosity. It’s something of a throwback to my early days when I was under the spell of Cezanne. But recently, I see that I am ‘lathering them up’ like a barber might do for his clients. I’m using more paint at the same moment, and it’s introducing something new to my understanding of light. 

Now, I admit, as a habit, I will sometimes leave just a fragment, a scintilla of virgin white on the canvas board to indicate the brightest part of the ‘picture light’ as a whole. This is a nod again to Cezanne. It completes one half of that notion that came out of the Renaiassance in Italy known as Chiaroscuro. Despite it’s rather ancient connotation, it still aptly defines what drawing is, but not necessarily all the ways it can work.

Isn’t it curious how Cezanne can be found in the same breath as this old idea from the sometime sombre Renaissance? When one thinks of him, one thinks of such radiance and so unlike the light that came up as if out of the crypt of a black ground in a 15th century studio. My habit of leaving the palest of spaces to highlight the brightest spot in a picture isn’t just an empty nod to Cezanne, but an ingrained habit that I would be hard pressed to give up, it’s an intuitively practical habit for me now after so many years. So lately, when I say that I’m using more paint it implies a subtly different way of designing the light in a painting because I’m actually now starting with the light of the picture ‘chiaro’, in great contrast to many years ago when in the landscape I habitually began with the dark accents, the ‘scuro’. It’s the light of the sea, so radically different than a landscape painted in the interior that has changed my approach to a picture. Today, I’m able to come in with thick creamy brushstrokes of pale light at the very start of a painting and still find my way into the drawing in great contrast to Cezanne. 

I remember a famous story about, (who else today, but Cezanne). Apparently, when he was painting still lives, (apples, and pears?) but maybe also portraits too, he would place a black top hat on one side of the sitter and a white glove on the other. He worked excruciatingly slow, so slowly, he claimed his eyes would ‘bleed between brushstrokes’. The purpose of the top hat and the white glove on either side was to remind him of the extreme limits of black to white in Nature, night to light, hence, chiaroscuro.  

This picture here, was the last of three studies from several days ago and as I said previously, I feel that it embodies that ephemeral, flat quality I’ve been after here in this series all along yet strangely, at the begining of this series, how I could I even know that? That evening was much like many others except that at the end of the session these planes of colour had flattened out serenely in an orderly fashion just the way I like. Although it’s rare that any sky conforms to my wishes this phenomenon manifests not so infrequently here at the beach. This peachy pink sky reminds me of a French market on Saturday mornings when apricots and peaches, pears, and plums, all exhibit a textural colour so close to what I was loading up on my paintbrush for this picture. 

Again, looking at this delicate sky from a few nights ago, also makes me think of a small anecdote from a book entitled, The Memory of Fire Trilogy, by the historian, poet, and Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. He wrote that when the Conquistadors arrived in Central and South America, they had naturally brought the bible with them and had tried to convert the local people living there. When they showed it some of the local Indigenous tribes there was general astonishment. When they caressed the thin pale paper while holding it up to the sun, they declared to their conquerors that it was the ‘skin of god’. 

Though it came to me many years before my obsession began with this sky here in Oceania, I’ve never forgotten this description. It must have been in the back of my mind all these years. But it was even rarer for me to approach this metaphor until a picture like this had come up in a session and depicted such fragile, delicate light, as if I’m painting a butterfly’s wing.

Finding the Renaissance term of chiaroscuro in this small modernist painting is likely to be a bit of work, but I assure you, don’t be fooled by the pale apricot hues, for the light in this sky is tethered firmly in place by the deep dark sea below.

A world of crows

9 September 2021

A world of crows

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 6 September 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Clear and windy today, a cold front moved in from the south and seeped into the house early this morning. But what a great bloom the other night at the beach! I made three studies, all interesting, but this is the one this one I like best. It’s a little sloppy and there are even some tiny flecks of white from my brush which had caught the spray from the wind. I only realised it the next morning when taking the paintings from the boot of the car. Too late to do anything about it now, but actually I don’t mind, it gives the study a raw and carefree feeling which I kind of like. Yes, I’m a slightly sloppy guy for sure, especially when it comes to painting. But honestly, I really hate anything too precious in art except for a few things like Piero della Francesca, who is quite perfect in a godly way. 

But I like this study because of its extreme simplicity. There isn’t a hint of any desire for verisimilitude in it. I try so hard to bring oxygen to these things, but even more, to bring life to images that border upon Non-Objective painting. This study, like graffiti on a stop sign, seems to casually say; “take me or leave me, I don’t care either way”. But if there is integrity hidden beneath this gentle irreverence, then hopefully there might also be an allegiance to the truth of the motif.

Nature can appear so banal at times that we can too often take it for granted, both its beauty but also its perils. Personally, I think one needs to live with a vivid imagination to fully experience both sides. In fact, I need to be slapped in the face with the raw power of it from time to time. I’m not a rock climber but I’m fascinated by those who explore their own boundaries and take risks to feel life more intensely. 

But these boundaries come in all shapes and sizes, from silent tea ceremonies in lush bamboo forests to climbing Mount Everest. Many still go further by leaping from tall cliffs with winged suits to soar through valleys. In my day I thermalled with eagles in wispy clouds in a hanglider. But at the other extreme, I now just paint on my dune at the beach in front of towering cumulo-nimbus clouds. 

Of course one needs time for all these activities, something many people lack in a busy life of work and family. But I think for many of us, our curiosity can just naturally wane with age. I mean, it can be really exhausting being excited all the time. Taking care of children reveals that to us. At the same time, they also show us how amazing are all the small details of life which we can easily overlook. Kids have the habit of wonder, how did we lose that?  

This makes me think of a podcast, from where, I forget, but it was a casual interview between a journalist and the Irish writer John Banville at his home in Dublin. They were both into the whisky and the talk was freewheeling. At one point loud crows outside the window are heard and the journalist remarks, “Imagine a world without crows”, to which, after a long pause, Banville replies; “Imagine a world with crows!” 

A marvelous observation which only an astute and imaginative mind would come up with. But I understood from this exchange that he is also someone close to nature. I was so taken by it that I immediately went online to order one of his novels.

This is the way that a supremely sensitive soul approaches nature, but certainly anything artistic too. It’s what I hope to see in the sea and sky each evening when I arrive at my little dune in the late afternoon. Can I open myself wide enough each evening and be ready for when the sky offers herself up to me like a virgin bride? 

I do think poets, painters and musicians are actively forced to push themselves outside of conventional ways of seeing and hearing nature. The danger is that we can become so inured to the sights and sounds of it that we barely even hear it or see it for what it is. Like auto-correct on my i-phone, I have to push back incessantly against its insistent formula in order to say what I  really mean to say in these pictures and paragraphs.

In this painting, the ultra simple design might be a visual leap of imagination for viewers, perhaps more so than for other pictures in this series. Like John Banville’s remark about the crows outside his window, a painter might ask a viewer to imagine the sea at dusk as just a few parallel stripes of colour.

  

Mantegna’s cap

30 March 2021

Mantegna’s cap

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 March 2021 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This was the first of three pictures from the other night. It is unusually austere but sensual, and it reminds me today of Montegna’s magnificent Portrait of a Young Man, in Napoli at the Capodimonti museum. I agree with everyone who believes that he was one of the greatest painters of the Rennnaisance. His portrait is very small, maybe only around 25 X 15 cms tall and its seen in profile. He wears a rose-coloured cap virtually identical to this pink sky, hence my association. I can often fall in love with certain paintings but this intimate portrait by Andrea Mantegna, I place in a special drawer in my memory. How does one fall in love with a work of art? It’s easy for some of us. I mean it’s certainly as easy as falling in love with another person and certainly less problematic too. But the feeling is the same if you are a painter, because you are pierced right through the corps of who you are. A great work of art is the top-of-the tree, as Australians here would say, and it will always grow taller for you, and neither will it will let you down or deceive you, nor even talk back. Whether it be an opera aria, a film, a book, a picture, or a small Mayan figurine, the love of an artwork can be a perfect and everlasting union. But obviously it’s not for everyone. Some people love their cars to death, polishing them each weekend while others worship their dogs and cats more than even their spouses. It’s a deeply personal thing and that’s the way it should be. Isn’t that what is so wonderful about an object of beauty? And like a girlfriend or boyfriend, our love interests come in all shapes and sizes, with or without tattoos. It’s only our imagination that creates such attraction, this lust, or affection, or both. It’s a true democracy of feeling and we’re all free to love what and who we love unless we’re in Putain’s Russia. But even better, we can make of it all what we wish. It’s like a giant food hub like those one sees in Singapore where our choices are almost limitless and where the varieties on offer can make one horny or more hungry by just having a peek.

So, that said, I house an enormous affection for this small study of mine from the other evening. I think it’s actually my very, very favorite painting out of several thousand done from the beach here. In fact, because I’m not the jealous type, if it had been painted by someone else, it would still not dim my infatuation for it, not even a bit. That it was painted by anyone anywhere, and that it exists somewhere out in the world is already an extraordinary thing. Why? Who knows? Let’s just say that it rings my doorbell. And yes, I fell in love with it. But it’s not a possessive love that makes one uptight and full of carnel desire. It’s a spiritual one, like how one can feel for their very closest friend on earth or maybe even their parents whom they cherish.

As a painter, I sometimes traverse culural time zones in a flash with the ease of a child’s flexible imagination. I flit about easily between pictorial things and intemporal places. It’s all in my head of course because all these artefacts from so many periods of history are long gone: pre-Columbian, Cycladic, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Africana and Asian art Everything in my time-bending cultural mind is completely fluid as the painter I seem to be in this 21st century. It’s sometimes confusing because it asks me what it means to be authentic. That’s always a great question to ask one’s self in every circumstance in life. Outside of a therapists office, how often do any of us contemplate our histories, both personal and collective? We sit upon a treasure trove of riches going back 10,000 years or longer, and yet we don’t seem to use it as either artists or philosophy students. Why not?

Lucky for me, this humble motif at the beach seems to be my own private philosophy tutor. By day it’s just another humdrum-looking tropical beach but by early evening it’s transformed into something beautiful, like watching a woman dress for a night out, it’s magnificent thing to behold. And just like a person whose life is enhanced by a partner, I too, can be transformed by this motif at dusk, and it completes my own sense of well-being, 

I admit that it’s such a small picture to get all worked up about, but then I think it must be not unlike how any engineer might feel when the project he or she has worked on has left the hanger and now flies overhead transporting millions of passengers to far off places around the globe. Is it pride one feels, or love? Or both? Does it matter what it’s called? Isn’t it that sensation that arises in a person who has discovered both of these feelings all wrapped up in a bundle like they’re a proud parent? Painters too, can feel like parents sometimes. 

So yes, I really do have an emotional connection with this picture for some curious reason and it may even seem odd to hold such feelings for an art work but I would add that it’s not just a picture or the motif, but more specifically it’s a space in which an artist has fallen in love. It has meaning. I’m reminded of one of my very favorite films from the 1990’s called The Object of Beauty wherein a poor deaf maid working in luxurious London hotel steals a small Henry Moore statuette from a room. When asked at the end of the film why she had taken it, she replied to the police through a translator that it had spoken to her. And that, is what Art is all about for many of us.

I’ve spoken of my emotional attachment to this small picture, but now critically speaking, I’ll address why I think it works. As a painting it’s as inventive and concise as any painting I’ve ever admired anywhere. Though I may come off as pretentious, this small thing is itself quite unpretentious. I daresay that a young child with talent could very easily have come up with such an image because it’s simple idea has been reduced down to just a few stripes of colour. They are however ones that correlate to nature via the motif at the beach. My only regret with it is that I cannot seem to ‘scale it up’ to a larger format successfully in the studio. I cannot seem to get close to the same spontaneity of it but I hope in the near future that will change for me.

Donor class

16 February 2021

Donor class

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

“My god! what are you doing with all these paintings?” A friend on Facetime exclaimed upon seeing hundreds of paintings lined up like old vinyls in the bookshelves of my living room. 

“Well,... I do sell them when I can,...though lately it’s been slow.” I replied quietly. 

I tried to explain that for me, the most important thing is to keep painting no matter what else is going on in life, sales or no sales, in or outside of this tragic world (but to be honest, little has been actually going on in my life inside).

“It keeps me focused and alive, but it also anchors me.” I added.

What I didn’t go into was that it was really keeping my hopes alive that despite everything, from my low bank account to my empty love life, there still existed open possibilities for the tomorrows to come, for as any painter knows, hope, is the Holy Graal in this stoic art racket. But all this was too complicated to get into so I shut up and pushed the subject back to her.

The reality though, is that despite this digital world of quick solutions, Painting is still a vocation, and it’s crafted over many centuries, it’s an alloy of patience and dedication that, let’s be frank, is seen by most civilians as a slow, indulgent and pretty foolhardy activity. So, sadly, like other artists, I may end up with thousands of small unwanted pictures. 

Regardless, this picture from a few days ago was the first of two done from a hazy sky. I had not appreciated it until I looked at it the other morning. It’s a deceptively simple picture at first glance, and it might even appear terribly plain, but I see in this restraint a discreet truth about the sea and sky. But I’m also a real sucker for those wide and gentle stripes as if loosely decorated by a tipsy pastry chef. In fact, it’s a picture made up of just five simple sensual colours; a deep Ultramarine Blue, a warm Cadmium Yellow, a silky soft pink and a muted lime green. High overhead, a thick band of washed out Prussian Blue snugly holds everything in place. An sky as lovely as this makes me wonder if such plain celestial grace could ever be as stellar as a dazzling woman wearing such a seriously pink scarf?

Sometimes I really think I should have been a wedding cake designer. I have this thing about pastel colours that gently collide into one another and where paint slithers over itself in esculent carefree pleasure. In this study there is this delectable something about bleached peach when colluding with lemon yellow, then lightly pasted over a wafer thin sky. Above these bands is the palest of blue which arcs high up and over my head. Anyone who spends time at the beach, they’ll all tell you, it really does feel like this, I promise.

The flat sea below has crackles in the paint which whisper of old patinas, but this is actually caused by small occasional incidents during transport which I don’t seem to be able to discourage. This effect may evoke the past but it’s really over the horizon line, where infinity blurs into the hazy future. This is a very small picture with large ambitions, it’s a mouse that roars, and I like it.

So funny enough, all this talk of so many pictures lined up in my bookshelves with no place to go, reminded me of an article in the NYT I recently read. It was about a Canadian fellow who had been such a prolific sperm donor that he had surreptitiously ‘fathered’ hundreds of now grown up children. A few years back, when laws opened up which had previously restricted access to old adoption files, many of his grown children tracked him down. Within a year, this guy found himself with a huge ‘family’ and he eventually developed relationships with almost all who had reached out to him. They have even organised family reunions to further develop their sibling relations. 

When I read it I thought to myself; “Holy cow! what a lucky fellow!...” and though I’m sure that Alexander the Great father thousands of children in ancient times, what a weird thing is this modern age. Indeed, there is so much life with so little responsibility, an instant family tree!” It’s like 300 BC but without all the violence involved. I suddenly found myself envious.

Then, today, out of the blue, a curious notion came to me, clearly a nutty one, but germain all the same. I suddenly imagined that by turning out so many small studies over the past few years, sometimes as many as three or four a day, I could perhaps see myself as a kind of ‘cultural sperm donor’, like one spreading my wares equally to large and small walls in vacant homes all the world over. 

Perhaps like this happy fellow who wanked out so many infants to grateful mothers everywhere, I, too, I’d be just churning out thousands of small images, spreading them with equal success out into the world and onto barren walls everyone. Furthermore, I reasoned, as would Walter Mitty; was I not also doing all those empty walls around the globe a great service?

Realistically, I mentally noted, that out of so many small studies, how many would actually survive the perilous journey to a happily furnished home? Some, I hoped at least, would be fortunate enough to live long healthy lives. But others, I presumed might be deemed unworthy and die young. Might others be smothered by debris in the back room of some third rate Antique Shop in Paddington?

But would not the luckiest of my small pictures shine in large and happy homes? And mightn’t they all be full of light and framed with good taste? Alas, others might end up in unhappy homes and hidden away on sad and dingy walls in somber hallways and spaced poorly between cornices. Worse yet, others might be held captive and hung on dreary wallpaper in ugly homes with a loathsome family.

Though others I hoped, might thrive in small homes, much loved and looked after, in spite of deaths and divorces. But others indeed, may well spend the rest of their lives entangled in cobwebs in stuffy attics and dark cellars. But, sadly still, others will go up in flames. Even worse for the painter, the last few may well be forgotten but found one day hanging tragically from the end of a long rope somewhere in East Anglia.

But a  few others, for whatever reason, I presumed might also still find themselves caught in the middle of legal haggling in Estate disputes and argued over within shabby bare walls of Probate Courts both here and abroad. But I’m sure, as I reasoned further, that there will certainly be a few weaker ones that will be loved for sentiment only. They will be accepted and adored despite all their flaws and perhaps even for all the wrong reasons. But hey! 

But lastly, and with hope and grace for the poor painter, there may still be others out there who are cherished and admired with distant appreciation for all the right reasons by a critical and reverent set of eyes.