Small again...painting pochades

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Primed card

SMALL PAINTINGS

I decided after the Aberdeen Art Fair that I would, again, work small. I had been working on a larger size for impact at the Art Fair, but now I feel that is not really my true metier.

How small, I`m still not sure, but I guess abut A5? I will play around. 

There is something about this format, which is to do with the idea of crapping the impossibly big- a landscape- into the  portable- a postcard  size - which I find immensely appealing. 

Moreover, it`s a format that seems to belong to me, as I`ve worked so often within it.

Thus, I proceed- priming boards and getting carriers sorted, and in a week or two should have some work to show, and perhaps am prepared for Spain and Morocco, the Winter escape.

I feel strongly drawn to revisit the works of artists who set me off on my path as an artist: Odilon Redon, Hammershoi Fatin-Latour: late nineteenth century masters of the strange.

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The spiritual one

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Spiritual one, pen on paper, 5 x 7 cm

  

This one owes something to Odilon Redon's Parsifal.

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Trunk; St Sebastian

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Trunk

 St Sebastian

From Wikipedia;

"Sebastian had prudently concealed his faith, but in 286 it was detected. Diocletian reproached him for his supposed betrayal, and he commanded him to be led to a field and there to be bound to a stake so that certain archers from Mauritania would shoot arrows at him. "And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks, and thus left him there for dead."Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him. The widow of Castulus, Irene of Rome, went to retrieve his body to bury it, and discovered he was still alive. She brought him back to her house and nursed him back to health.

"Sebastian later stood by a staircase where the emperor was to pass and harangued Diocletian for his cruelties against Christians. This freedom of speech, and from a person whom he supposed to have been dead, greatly astonished the emperor; but recovering from his surprise, he gave orders for Sebastian to be seized and beaten to death with cudgels, and his body thrown into the common sewer."

When taking the photo, I had a recollection of a work by Redon, that peculiar and very marmite* artist, whose work captured me in my late adolescence.

I found four Redon paintings of St Sebastian being shot, but when I looked at them  I found less similarity in them to my trunk than I had expected. I believe I conflated various pictures by Redon. His Sebastians feature trees but these are not close up like my photo, though the Saint Sebastian (1910/12) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington has the long rectangular format.  There are several Buddha which use a single tree a but these do not feature close views of the tree. 

Closer in spirit and composition are some of the artists's noirs: the magnificently titled lithograph I Plunged into Solitude. I Dwelt in the Tree behind Me (1896) in the Art Institute of Chicago; and two charcoal drawings: The Trees (1890s) in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Tree (1875) in the Art Institute of Chicago. There is also the cover of In the Dream, a set of lithographs, (1879). In 1883, there is an Angel and Demon.

There is also a painting of the martyrdom by Gustave Moreau, an artistic predecessor, of Redon's, depicting the martyrdom with a large tree behind- it is much like a deposition, with the saint being assisted by two women. Neither Moreau and Redon give detail to the body of Sebastian. Instead they try instead to create the atmosphere of a spiritual event. 

 I was  right to recall that he had his saint killed against a tree- as indeed do many others (some however, use columns, often supporting crumbling structures, as execution posts). The tree, when specified is a Laurel.

Depictions of the martyrdom occasionally show the archers (Signorelli (1441-1523)), while others go closer up and depict the martyr with arrows piecing him. This is often a little bizarre. In Mantegna's painting of 1459, in a feat of archery, an arrow has pierced the martyr's forhead and exited through his neck. Matteo di Giovanni (c.1430–1495) shows the saint walking easily though there are arrows penetrating him.

The subject should allow a range of extreme identifications: of courage, resistance, of sadism, or indifference to pain, or spiritual victory. But few artists show much emotion in Sebastian's face other than a vaguely defiant aspect, as if he is simply refusing to pay for a dessert wrongfully placed on a cafe bill. Or, as with Guido Reni's post-execution picture (1615),  he's looking skyward wth a God, can you come and untie me now? It's been over half an hour and here I am still with these darn arrows expression.

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 *there is, for sure, a histrionic quality in Redon, hence, perhaps, his appeal to adolescents. Personally, I still get him 50% of the time. The drawing is often awkward: sometimes that's effectively naif  and sometimes that's an obstacle.. The melancholy that pervades the best work seems to connect with lived experience and, the sense of humour meeting the macabre is fun or silly depending on one's mood. The blacks are dense and entrancing but I find his colours garish. I adore the titles.

 Julian Barnes writes enjoyably about Redon in his excellent Keeping an Eye Open

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Jug, plate, egg

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Jug, plate, egg, oil on card, 15.5 x 13.7 cm - unavailable

A little Redon-esque, I suppose...

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Annual Review: 2014: Flickr, Blogger, Facebook, and other sites

Alfredo Wagner, a small town nearby, oil on card, 16,5 x 18 cm

I travelled to Morocco, the UK, Bolivia and made some excursions in Brazil, including Salvador, Bahia. The Moroccan trip went especially well.

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A little posy, oil on card, 11 x 12 cm

I often painted flowers. I like painting flowers because it can be very intimate and one can use very bright colours. If the landscapist is paiting the world, then perhaps the still life painter paints his inner world: I carry Redon's torch. 

I increased the size of works, using brighter colours on lighter supports to make more vibrant painting. I am going to increase the size in the next year again.

Looking back, however, I feel I became somewhat channelled into certain compositional and working processes, sometimes becoming repetitious. One finds solutions: why not repeat them? But that way lies boredom. The artist must engage: the sort of landscapist that I am is fundamentally expressionist and one who depends heavily on novelty of experience for inspiration.

 Bolivia: paintings from Potosi

Travel  is often  lonely and tedious. But there is something immensely satisfying about the narrative of a journey: to simply be able to state in paint I was there and then press on; to have gone from a- z. Travel lends urgency to art, and it's not surprising that so many landscape painters were great travellers.

But there are different ways of going about this: the linear journey with stops on a line (a-z); the tour, which begins and returns to point a (a-a); and the star: the option of staying in a fixed point and making excursions from there (a- b, a-c, a-d etc). This last is the least tiring, but does not allow the intellectual satisfaction of having a clear narrative.

There are of course, combinations of the above, but it is this last which I am most likely to adopt in future: this star format frees one from the tedium of packing and unpacking, lugging bags and finding places. It allows one to relax more, to become orientated, and if the weather is poor one day, there is always another on which to work.

Paintings from Morocco: the complete set

Flickr

I have continued to use this site, and it contains a complete catalogue of my work. I have 838 followers, up from last year's 721.

Blogger

The number of followers went up from 78 to 83.

Facebook

I enjoyed using this site to show work, and it`s a good place to make contact: add me there if you wish.

Saachi

I revised my site here and sold four paintings through their portal. It is wiser to buy work directly from me, however: it is faster and cheaper.

Plans

There are no immediate travel plans, though I dream of going back to New York in 2015, and to Scotland. But this depends very much on sales and money, which are, to a degree out of my control. The economy in Brazil is not healthy.

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Thanks

Thanks to those who bought work, offered criticism online or in person. Thanks to those good anonymous souls who assisted my in my travels in Morocco (especially the German couple who bought me dinner when my bank card was swallowed by the cash machine in Taroudant, and the Moroccan fellow who bought me breakfast) and Bolivia. Thanks to my very supportive parents. Thanks to Jonathan Heald for use of his beautiful house in Florianopolis for a little exhibition; and thanks to John Collins and Jane Wheeler for bringing me paints from the UK. Thanks to the Ecclestons for their hospitality and kindness in London.

Marrakesh: cart and market, oil on card, 14 x 13.5 cm




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Carnations 5

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Carnations 5, oil on card, 9 x 10.5 cm   SOLD

The final of this series, a tribute to that most delicious line in French painting which runs from Delacroix through Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour and ends, I think, with Matisse.

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Birdshead revisited

Returning to an earlier set of pieces: the birds.

 I had worked on them and they had become more and more like very obvious toys. I like toys, but the toys I like have a sense of abstraction about them, which is what lends them their charm (contrast Britains' very realistic animals and soldiers and cars with the far more abstracted tin soldiers and cars of earlier epochs).

I'd forced the pieces, making them far too explicitely "fun" and decorative when I should have let them be, allowing the viewer more space to draw their own interpretations.

Thus, in the guise of Redon, I return.

I also began making some horses: again I haven't found quite the equilibrum between a sort of Giacometti abstraction and realism, and they became too cute: I shall persevere.

Three Scottish still lives

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Still life with the black cat, oil on card, about 10 x 9 cm

Still life with yellow flowers, oil on card, about 10 x 9 cm

Still life with red flowers and the Chinese rider, oil on card, about 10 x 9 cm  AVAILABLE

These pictures were painted in Aberdeen: it was too cold to go outside.

I've tried to paint still lives in Brasil but they don't work out- the sort of introverted "gothic" still life, with it's Redonesque aspects is so much a product of an introversion, sometimes an unhappiness, that seems particular to cold Northern Europe. There seems something very peculiar about staying in to paint cut flowers when the sun outside is so welcoming, and there are flowers covering the hillsides!

The third photo in particular leaves something to be desired: I have left these paintings in the UK in Scotland and was unable to properly check their quality before leaving (I was also foolish enough not to record their sizes so the sizes given are approxomate). But such shiny dark painted surfaces are always hard to capture well.

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Licht und Blindheit

 

Licht und Blindheit, oil on card, 14.4 x 9.5 cm discarded

Painted near the petrol station, and the most satisfactory, most Redonesque of recent nocturnes, bridging better than others internal and external.

A yellow boat

A yellow boat, oil on card,  15.2 x 10.2 cm  SOLD

As I was painting I kept thinking of van Gogh's famous fishing boats on the beach, then of Puvis de Chavanne's "Poor Fisherman" picture. I looked these up and they are not really similar to mine, nor is Redon's "Yellow Boat".

I carry memories of pictures, and they serve as inspiration, but when I look them up after having painted I find my memories to be totally erroneous.

Paraguay / Paraguayan, Venezuela / Venezuelan, Argentina / Argentinian: doodles

Nemesis

Three Wise Men

Doodles made in a beginner's English class, details above

While I am doing them I sometimes have the idea of working them up into huge, insane paintings. But to do that would be to miss the point entirely, because the very essence of the doodle is its incidental nature, they way its scratchy amateurishness leads one into the crevasses of a bored mind.

Alfred Kubin and Odilon Redon managed to bridge this gap between doodles (semi-conscious meandering) and finished large scale art piece, but I cannot, either because of some inner rigidity, or because I am not insane enough.

For me, therefore, the doodle must remain an end in itself.

And I cannot sit down and decide to make doodles, as I would a painting- they seem necessarily to be a semi-conscious, nervous response to tedium. It's the tedium (usually of giving English lessons, in the case above teaching the ajectives referring to Latin American states) that lend them the qualities that, at best, animate them.