Painting in the woods

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Painting in the woods

I reckon most of these were painted in the afternoon. I didn't plan it that way, it is just how it happens because of my schedule and because it is somehow easier to go painting after lunch.

It`s not a long drive- up the motorway then curving swiftly inland and down that a winding unpaved road from Vargem Grande to Rio Vermelho. 

It takes just over half an hour, but it`s long enough to satisfy that need for a sense of transition between one place and other which is both a need for a ritual and also a process that allows me to arrive in a different state of mind before working. The journey is a transition to my work. The ritual is a way of possessing the work and the place, slowly pulling thoughts together. While I'm driving my mood often changes from annoyance or despair to a more constructive emotion. 

But I rarely leave the location much happier except for the feeling that I have at least tried, because so much of the work misses the mark. But that's the game, to fail and continue. The process of mixing colours is very enjoyable and a compensation for failure. I try to experiment with one thing or another each session- a new colour mixture or format or place or composition. That way even if the work is a failure at least I have learnt something.

I usually work in or at the edges of an area of planted pines which are close into the forest entry. The spacing of the trees is fairly regular and this contributes to the calm. The orderliness of the space is very gratifying as are the limited colours -russets, pinks and emerald greens. The slender trunks rise beautifully and they are not so closely packed to be indistinguishable. Their spacing varies here and there as does their maturity. Here and there a tree has fallen, as if to make some declaration. 

Excessive order is not gratifying, but sterile. In these woods there are also undulations of the land, occasional clearings and paths. But it is peaceful indeed especially in contrast to the natural forest which is much more anarchic and jungly.

Nobody bothers me much when I am working, which is a real plus, though there are some idiots who drive motorbikes through the woods to get to the sea that lies on the other side. There are also people who talk very loudly and their voices echo unpleasantly. And there are dogs which bark and this is not nice at all. I want to immerse myself in the woods, like a character in Hamsun. I need to be alone to follow my thoughts.

Basically this is as happy as I get in life. To paraphrase Matthew Parris (as I can't remember the original quote or where to find it)  a positive aspect of aging, and a compensation for the loss of energy or the sense of failure that any imaginative or normally ambitious person is likely to feel, is that one knows oneself and the world better and thus knows what works for one and what doesn't. Of course, that might lead to a lifeless conservatism in taste or action and one should indeed challenge oneself occasionally. But even in such forays into the new one departs from a point more secure than in one does in youth and the experience is more likely to be received positively. 

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Santa Catarina Road trip: Fourteen Paintings: the first four

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The BR 282 near the turnoff to Urubici, oil on card, 13/ 11cm  (damaged/ discarded)

Campos Novos: a view from a hotel, oil on card, 13 / 11 cm - discarded

Campos Novos: the evening skateboarder

 oil on card, 11.5 / 13.5 cm discarded

Industrial building on the outskirts of Maravilha, oil on card, 14.5 / 11.5 cm - available

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Itinerary:

Day one: Florianópolis- Lages- Campos Novos
Day two: Campos Novos- São Miguel do Oeste
Day three: São Miguel do Oeste- Paraíso- São Miguel do Oeste
Day four: São Miguel do Oeste- Chapecó- Curitibanos
Day five: Curitibanos- Orleans
Day six : Orleans- Florianopolis

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Five nights and six days driving and stopping: fourteen paintings. Doing more in my little Celta would be hard as my right arm started to ache badly: it's a city car really. 

But I feel I've won a good sense of the state: there isn't now a region I haven't visited. The most interesting, both culturally and topographically, is the Serra from Lages through to Orleans, where Brazilians of usually Central European descent live in a landscape of considerable variety, with amazing mountains and valleys, where the temperature varies much and little communities heft there way forward, steadily in coloured wooden houses, like characters from Growth of the Soil.

I've no truck with the rubbishy modern Brazil of identikit shopping malls and degrading television. Nor do I find much in the Brazil of Carnival and foolishness, which serves as a palliative for low educational expectations and squalor. I don't like the Brazil of Brasilia and of bureaucracy and politics and greed and legal minds. I detest the disorder and filth of the big cities, and those rich Brazilians in their preposterous four-wheel drives and Barbie wives and smugness, cruising from their costly prison-condominiums through dismal streets where beggars and drug-addicts sleep in thousands, to office blocks whose only architectural qualities are their lack of distinction. And I find the holiday Brazil of beaches and sungas indescribably banal.

I sense an intrinsic worth to the communities that patiently tend their allotments late into the evenings, and who are polite, conservative and, at least superficially or sentimentally, religious. I like the sun hardened faces of the people with their stern lines and reserve, I like seeing them with their cattle or driving their trucks and I like how they don't say too much and are modest and tough.

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I don't entirely like travel, with its dislocations and the mental travails that it brings in the melancholy of strange evening hotels: does the work make it worthwhile?

Glancing over, there are good individual pictures, but across the series there are too many repetitions of design, often a consequence of using the same level of distance from the motif, usually with little foreground.

And I'm wary that I'm starting to use and re-use certain "catchphrase"  brush strokes- typically a certain whiplash line-a mannerism, I should be careful not to habitualise. The solution is to re-think the entire architecture of the painting: to begin at another point: though quite what that means in practice I am not clear as yet. It has something to do with classicism, to do with reinvesting in the underlying construction of the work and the conscious rejection of  easy gestures.

Also, the small standardised format is becoming too much the same: it's become a limitation. So I need to vary more, with some larger pieces, about A5, I reckon.

There's a sky-land dichotomy which all landscapists face: an obvious central contrast defining the composition from the onset.  But when landscapists like Klimt rebel against that format, the result often appears contrived, as if the novelty of composition has taken over from the actual perception of nature: so I’m somewhat uncertain how to vary this, or even if it is in vain to try.

The landscapist makes a peculiar claim to be painting the world (at the other end of the spectrum is the still lifer, though those philosophically minded might say that there is no less of the world in a flower petal than in a an entire Alpine vista) and from this derives the ecstasy that landscapists feel: a pantheistic joy so glamorously conveyed in van Gogh, Munch and Turner. Ergo, there is a weight of responsibility upon him, not necessarily present in other genres.

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Two pictures from near Santo Amaro da Imperatriz

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A view of the mountains from Santo Amaro da Imperatriz, oil on card, 14.4 x 10.8 cm - available 

A community near Santo Amaro da Imperatriz, oil on card, 13 x 10.9 cm - unavailable

You can see in Brasil, as if from a late novel by Hamsun, communities establishing themselves from almost nothing- a tiny cluster of houses: these often have a paradiscal quality.

And, as if to confirm Hamsun's pessimism about cities, you can also see how these little communities grow into huge areas of urban squalor. Santa Catarina is free of these huge cities, fortunately.

A portrait of a young man

A portrait of a young man, oil on card, 9 x 11.5 cm

Lucas, again- he is a fine model, very hard to "catch".

For me, the most interesting models unconsciously reveal some element of their nature: they are not entirely in control of the messages that their faces and body languages transmit. The process of portraiture is not to affirm what is known and controlled, but to reveal "the unconscious life of the mind" - to transpose Knut Hamsun's words describing his writing to the practice of painting.

A trip to the mountains, part 3; solitude and painting

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Chalets and a distant mountain, oil on card, 9.5 x 14 cm

Five Araucaria trees, oil on card, 14 x 9.6 cm  - available

Here is a final selection from my little trip to the interior of Santa Catarina, which I spent largely alone and painiting.

The first is very "picture postcard": beautiful places always carry the risk to landscape artists of bringing a certain kitschy obviousness to the work they do there. I cannot find a way round this: for me part of the pleasure of being a landscapist is the delight of being in a beautiful place: it gives me an excuse to go there (I believe fishermen and birdwatchers say the same thing). The only thing I can do is to try to offer a balance by also painting places which are without immediate beauty, such as industrial and suburban sites.

Landscape painting also lends a focus to solitude. And I confess I have the misanthropic tendencies common to painters and it hardly pains me to escape the herd*. Many people do not like being alone, it makes them anxious. But I think for this very reason, that it's important to be alone at times so as not to become enslaved to a social network.

I also feel, when I am alone in nature, that sense of rhapsody so forcefully conveyed in Knut Hamsun's glorious novels, especially Pan and Mysteries. Alongside rhapsody though, comes melancholy, and yearning: emotions relating somehow to an increased awareness of ones connextion with the life and death cycles of nature.

*I've never had the least sympathy with Christianity's generalised love of humanity: how can one when there there are simply too many people.

Factotum (2005): review- 9/10

Matt Dillon is magnificently world weary as the struggling writer, stumbling from job to job in St Paul, Minnesota.

This film is Norwegian and there is more than a little of Hamsun's "Hunger" in all this, though the film is based on Bukowski.

Very beautifully shot, with great music too.

Before the Party

Before the Party was painted back in 1993, when I was living in Maude Road, in Camberwell, London.

It shows four men- three are dressed to go out, while one remains in bed. He is ill, or sleeping. A putto urinates in one corner; there is an elephant, a fantastical bird and a giant snail in the room too. A demon lurks behind the bed.

It was a breakthrough painting for me, bringing to a close several years of doubt about what sort of creative art I should be doing. I had graduated unhappily, knowing somehow that the art I'd made for my graduation show did not do what I knew in my gut art should do, which is, in Hamsun's words, to reveal the "unconscious life of the mind".

I'd been oscillating uncomfortably between art that was essentially impressionist and art that was very directly autobiographical and illustrational for some years. I'd wanted to incorporate elements I'd gained from the sort of literature I like - (fables, fairy tales, Kafka, Bulgakov and Waugh) - into my work but hadn't been able to find a format. I think I'd felt embarassed about how close my work was to children's book illustration, as if that wasn't sophisiticated enough.

The themes of the painting are friendship and strangeness and death, but I do not understand it entirely myself. I made it very instinctively, following no sketch. I think sometimes art is made like sleepwalking, following deeply set patterns of movement and consciousness. Perhaps it's a false idea that art can be "understood", anyway? No-one would talk about "understanding" a game of football or a plate of asparagus, other sensory experiences.

Artistic breakthroughs are solutions, but the solutions they bring bring problems, -artists often get stuck repeating the same solutions for their entire lives (the worst case being Chagall, I think, whose work turned into a a series of catch-phrases with the same forms, colours, settings, faces and hands used over and over again from 1930 until his death in 1985. Miro likewise, alas). For me the risk was that I would do "room" paintings forever, and I baulked against that, going on to produce a lot of architectural pictures in a sort of realist style, while continuing to work on these more idiosyncratic images.

It was painted at an odd, lonely juncture in my life, but after I painted it things improved for me, at least temporarily.