The avenue I walked down

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 The avenue I walked down

 avenue 

 

I came on Sunday. 

I wasn't feeling too well. I had a sad feeling, I felt pointless too. The bad part of Sunday, the mooching around, the irritation, the boredom. 

I had a thought about how thirty years ago I had the same feeling. You might think that one's emotional life would develop over time, so that such negative states no longer affect one. But it seems to me part of the essential misery of life that one never really escapes the treadmill, even after learning that one is within it.

 

 A twig representing how I felt

 

I had passed this avenue on the fast road, an exquisite road with endless, tall dreamlike Scots pine, rising with such heavenly aspiration anyone would feel enchanted there. When I passed this entrance, I always thought, " oh you must stop there one day." I must have had that thought over three hundred times.

And so, I went there with the Lumix camera, a lovely black metal thing that fits snugly in the hand. 

From this entrance you follow a track through woodland, and then, you meet a fenced parking area and a kiosk with sign with bold acronyms, telling you that it pertains to a work-based social organisation of some sort. 

Then, over a sandy path you reach a fine narrow beach and the Atlantic.

 I felt, when I met these facilities somewhat like a trespasser, a bit uneasy. The mood in Brazil has become less laid back lately, even in touristy areas. There`s a sense of suspicion that I feel wasn't present when I came here 16 years ago, and this affects people's behaviours in these areas- you don`t have the sort of ready conversations that you used to- I`m sure I`m not imagining that. Though I must say that the only person I met, a woman with two small children, smiled and said hello in a pleasant way, a way that made me feel all right.

Oh how strange that my sentiments might be moved by such an easy thing as a lady`s smile? What is the point of thinking at all, when ones feelings jump and rise or fall with the predictability of a pin ball on a warped board?

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This is a shell I found lying on the sand-

The shell in my hand

I'm not going to show a picture of the ocean. Imagine it yourself.

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As I drove off, I heard the Velvet Underground song ¬Ocean¬.

I can find two versions of the song, one on an early Lou Reed Album and the other on a posthumous released Velvet Underground compilation called VU. The Velvet Underground version is earlier and more surreal. The song that I heard in my head was the Reed`s solo take and is also intense and troubled. But it is more coherent, with scenes of drowning and desperation, of castles and towers and warlocks - rather Shakesperean. Whether the lyrics have directed meanings or are meant as imagistic poetry is not clear from the commentaries I have found, but I suspect the former. 

 However, it is argued by David Caune on Quora that Malcolm is a reference to the son of Henry Melville, author of Moby Dick. Malcolm`s suicide, a result it is argued, was the result of violent abuse from his father. Lou Reed was subjected to Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy, an attempt by his parents to control his homosexual tendencies, and Caune sees in the song a refence to the trauma that this treatment caused him, which he parallels with that of Melville's son.

Castles glowing at night, towers above outfright

Warlocks decapitating

Malcolm he lives on hate, Serve your brain on a plate

Feasts on your mouth for dinner

The song ends-

Here comes the waves

 

 

Following Caune, these waves might then be waves of ECT therapy. And you hear the music rise into a crescendo, loud and more pain filled, a music which seems to not just describe but glamourise destruction. 

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There was something self-pitying and just plain crappy about how I handled the day.

 But it's just like that sometimes.

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New York III: Coney Island

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 Yachts, Coney Island, N.Y., 15.5 x 11.5 cm   SOLD

I traveled down to see the charms of Coney Island: here described in Tom Waits', Coney Island Baby:

 Every night she comes
To take me out to dreamland
When I'm with her, I'm the richest
Man in the town

I also think of songs by Lou Reeds: Coney Island Baby , and the Velvet Underground's,  Coney Island Steeplechase, which, at a rockier pace takes a not dissimilar angle:

Would you like to go on the Coney Island Steeple
Go and have a good time
We'll take the subway right down to King's Highway
Gonna have a good time
If it's all right it would be so nice
If you come and go with me
The roller-coaster you and me

But the Coney Island I found more interesting was the sense of ruin and only a half kilometre from the newish boardwalk, where elderly Russians perambulate. Tom Waitsian territory indeed, of bust up car repair years, pawnshops and broken down tenements. I painted to a backdrop of police sirens.

Blocks, Coney Island, N.Y., oil on card, 14 x 11 cm  - available








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Pedra Branca; New York and painting cities.

Cmbirela with Pedrs Branca, oil on card, 14.5 x 18 cm unavailable

Pedra Branca, lost dog, oil on card, 13.5 x 14.5 cm

I watch with a mixture of bemusement, horror and a sort of perverse admiration as I see another town being constructed here. Brazilians have heard of planning, they even have a planned capital, and very striking it is too, and a planned state capital called Curitiba, but plainly urbanism isn`t something they really want to spend too much of their time bothering with, like the British with cooking and dance.

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I am trying to set up my New York trip for October. If you can advise on any art contacts, dealers, or galleries that might like my work please let me know.

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My painting trips have aways confounded my expectations- generally the better I think it is going to be, the worse it is. And the more preconceptions I have about a place, usually garnered from books, films and photos, conversations. the more the reality surprises, or disappoints me.

Generally small unknown places are best- you arrive there without preconceptions, style uncrampted and after, when looking at your pictures no one can respond- Oh but that`'s not how I remember suchandsuch!

I dislike both shoebox modern glass architecture, and molten wax baroque: neither are fun to paint.  Deco is good- so is austere Scottish Georgian. Both have a clear geometry that catches the light. But Po.Mo is nasty. I agree, if one likes Deco one should probably like Foster and Stirling, but somehow they are displeasing, in part because of their awful palette and insistence on humour (groan).

Trashy make-it-up-as-you-go-along Brazilian slum architecture is fun too, with bright colours. jumble, and blurring between interior and exterior spaces, so the private and the public are not so harshly distinguished. And there is still a street life here, at least in poorer neighbourhoods, something which has been virtually banished from the UK.

My notions of New York are founded on a distant memory of the three day trip there back in 1992, books by Singer, Paul Auster, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Joseph Mitchell; photos by Steiglitz and Feininger and Weegee; films by Woody Allen and Scorsese and songs by Lou Reed.. I.e a peculiar mixture of the sinister and the sentimental and down at heal, or downright squalid, and mostly located between 1920 and 1979.

Much of what I paint in a city is conditioned by where I can comfortably sit, preferably without either traffic bums or salespeople bugging me. Ergo, waterfronts are good, as are cafes at corners and places which are high up. Were I a photographer, my subjects would be considerably different, with much more movement.