Flowers

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Flowers, oil on card, 16 x 14.5 cm unavailable

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Pear, orange, paper

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Pear, orange, paper, oil on card, 13.5 x 16 cm - unavailable

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The bowl and the spoon

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The bowl and the spoon, oil on card, 12 x 12 cm  SOLD

The motifs chosen for such pictures must be readily recognizable or the picture is merely abstract, and the fun, even the humour, in interpretation* would be lost. Thus, one tends to depict things with obvious profiles: bowls, cutlery, simple houses.

All this would be obvious surely to any self-respecting Japanese.or Chinese painter. Or indeed, and cubist. But this factor means that eventually such pictures become boring, both to make and to see, and knowing this, one can understand why the cubist experiment petered out,

*Has there every been a humourous abstract painting? Is such a thing even possible? Mimetics, distortions and transformations being the stuff of humour, I somewhat doubt it.

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The neighbours' house

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The neighbours' house, oil on card, 11.5 x 14 cm  SOLD

Painted looking down from my window.

There is a great deal to be said for consciously limiting one's aesthetic resources. This forces oneself to exploit those one has to their maximum.

Gombrich, ever a source of wisdom, writes about the perils of excessive wealth on art when describing the art of Rococo France, contrasting it disfavourably with that of the more austere Dutch 16th century.

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Courtyard, Trindade; kitsch

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Courtyard, Trindade, oil on card, 14 x 17 cm -  -unavailable

A picture in a "Japanese" vernacular, via French Intimism. 

The courtyards visible from my flat have enormous potential as subjects: art as the revealing of secrets, the hidden made known. Art of this sort is the opposite of propaganda and kitsch, which deals in falsehoods. 

  Next time I will try to capture the lady responsible for the washing, though she only ever appears fleetingly to hang or remove her laundry.

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Three weeks in New York: 3. Brooklyn / Down by the river/ and Brooklyn Bridge / Green Wood Cemetery / Williamsburg

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There was first the ferry boat moving softly from the Jersey shore at dawn- the moment crystallized into my first symbol of New York.

Well, this isnt the ferryboat coming from New Jersey, More likely it's coming from Governor's Island, and it isn't dawn, but about noon. But surely any excuse justifies quoting Fitzgerald: does any writer better capture the feeling of arrival in New York? Let's have a bit more: here he is again, in The Great Gatsby:

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Green Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, a view, oil on card, 16 x 18 cm

This, above, is one of those that I feel has the necesary je ne sai quois, to make it stand out from the rest- a certain liveliness that suggests the pleasure of its making. It was indeed pleasant sitting there on the hill in the cemetery, which is extremely well maintained. One is greeted by a very friendly guide.  But the views were less dramatic than Id hoped.  And then the rain..

The picture (below) seems to me, to suffer from a certain lazy Japoinaiserie:

View of the East River from Williamsburg, Kent Street, oil on card, 18 x 15 cm  unavailable

Quite what is this factory on the other side of the East River from Williamsburg?:

View of the East River from Williamsburg, Kent Street -detail

There are fine places to eat there, and it isn't too costly. You feel at home. I did an interior and a couple of pictures of the river but only one came out well. The wind blew like hell.

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A Journey to Bolivia: part 4: La Paz; general impressions; self-criticism

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My first impressions of la Paz were one of squalor and brokenness: good painting territory, therefore, especially given its hilliness.

 I wouldn`t recommend visiting it for any other reason, however: the churches are not as interesting as in Sucre or Potosi, the museums seem reluctant to open, the city is dirty and almost all the buildings in the centre need restoration, or at least significant maintenance work.

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I am happy with this picture (below), in which i have (unconsciously) reproduced the elevated perspectives of Hiroshige. It`s fairly unusual for me to work by first delineating the pictorial components, then filling them in, a technique I usually find restrictive as it forces one to work in a series of irreversible stages.

La Paz, street with newspaper kiosk and card, oil on card, 13.5 x 16 cm unavailable

Roads, oil on card, 14 x 16 cm  unavailable

Again (above), there are definite Germanic tendencies, not least in the Gothicising flattened spacial description.

I am very happy with this picture (below). I like the extremely bright colours that Latin Americans use on their very square shop fronts, as if bright colours offer clarity amid the general mayhem.

Shops, oil on card, 13.5 x 12.5 cm   SOLD

Street stall, oil on card, 13.5 x 16 cm - unavailable

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Bolivia: general impressions

The trip was mostly exhausting. I thought it might be when I looked at my itinerary before leaving and I was right. The problem with getting to Bolivia from this part of Brazil is that flights from Brazil (even from Campo Grande to Santa Cruz) are extremely expensive. So, to save money, I flew to Campo Grande, then got a bus to the border city of Corumba then a taxi to the crossing, then past Passport control over to Quijarro then another taxi to the bus station then a bus to Santa Cruz.   So there were logistical factors that lent themselves to my tiredness.

 There was also the fact that most of the places where I stayed were high up in the Andes, and the air is very thin. I think this depleted my energies a bit. I never suffered altitude sickness like some I met, but I got a slight buzzing headache at times.

The third factor, is psychological. Bolivia is not a difficult place like Egypt, where you are mercilessly pestered by salespeople, and I never felt fear of crime as I do in Brazil at times. But it isn`t as friendly as all that. I am not saying that I didn`t meet pleasant people, but in general I had the feeling that Bolivians were circumspect, wanting to maintain a distance from foreigners. I speculate that this is related to centuries of foreign oppression, and that this oppression was especially felt by indigenous populations, and consequently that Bolivians suspicious of whites. My observations were confirmed by several other travelers.

 I also observed that in terms of other social niceties they are not especially charming and dealings with Bolivians were slow and rarely fun, with few of the courtesies, and the sense of delight in interaction, that is commonplace in Brazil, for instance. The Bolivians rarely seemed to take pleasure in serving in restaurants, where they were gloomy faced and inefficient. They did not ask where one came from or much enjoy making small talk. Taxi drivers were brusque and seemed reluctant to state their prices (though, to be fair, taxi drivers are a dependably deplorable example of human behaviour almost everywhere). In bus stations they stand in public areas, often with their children  blocking ready access to shops or corridors. Salespeople from the bus companies stand and shout out their destinations in the public areas of the bus stations making a horrible racket, and obstructing everyone else.

Blocking public space is commonplace and Bolivians do something that I haven`t seen anywhere else: they will walk down a narrow pavement, sometimes in a rank of three people and not step aside or allow the person coming in the opposite direction space to pass, so that the on-comer has to step onto the road, or squeeze against a wall. My Japanese friend confirmed this observation and said that he had discussed it with a Bolivian friend, who had responded that this occurred because Bolivians were selfish. Certainly, they do not seem to have an reluctance to arrive at the cinema a good twenty minutes after the programme has begun.

Bolivians rarely speak English, even in hostels, museums hotels and obvious touristic points. At many museums you will be compelled to suffer a guide who will frogmarch you through the galleries and force you to endure their tedious spiel, robotically delivered in battered English.

Kitsch power ballads are popular, as is Andean pipe music. These are played as often as possible, and at great volume on buses, in restaurants, cafes and bars: unfortunately. Brass bands, performing oomph-ah music, and accompanied by cheerleaders or dancers in lampshade dresses roam the streets looking for victims: this is more fun.

I suspect violence is common in Bolivian society. I watched an excellent film called, Voices of El Alto http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3425182/. A tent had been set up in the Andean town and Bolivians of various ages, though most often adolescents, came to describe life experiences. I do not know to what extent the producer edited or encouraged the participants to speak particularly of such miseries, but the proportion who spoke about domestic violence, family exclusion, rape, poverty and misery, was very striking. There are large murals on some walls painted to campaign against domestic violence.

There are also murals featuring Evo Morales, and his magnificent achievements, and I got the feeling that Bolivians are rather patriotic. I wish they had better dental care.

Food is mediocre, featuring as many different carbohydrates as possible on the same plate: potato chips, spaghetti, rice, why not throw them all together! Coffee is sometimes very good, certainly compared to Brazil (though that is truly setting the bar low, for sure). But sometimes you receive Nescafe, often sweetened, or some imitation instead of real coffee.

Other travelers offer little respite. Nerdism has triumphed.  WIFI has effectively killed normal social interaction in a many places, so that in hotel receptions, cafes or bars, foreigners now, now spend their time huddled over their little screens exchanging inanities with distant  "friends" instead of engaging with those around them.

I emphasize that these observations are general, and that I experienced exceptions. It is necessarily a mistake to come to sure generalizations following just a month in a country.

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Paintings from Bolivia: reflections, self criticism

I am a little dubious about some of the pictures I painted on this trip. But I am uncertain whether this is because of the pictures themselves, or rather simply how I feel about them. I suppose there are good, and bad as on any trip and the worst are probably not as bad as I imagine and the best not so superior. It takes time to gain the distance necessary to judge ones own work. It`s better to put them aside and see  in a month how I feel.

I attempted through the month to work more freely, to allow drawing errors, should the correction of those errors mar the freshness of brush-marks. I attempted to work as responsively as I could, without starting with too much of a clear final idea: sketching.

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