Father Mother Sister Brother (2025): review: 8/10

 *

Three films, inter-related, by Jim Jarmusch, set in a country town in the USA, in Dublin and Paris, and featuring Tom Waits, Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett among others. 

The film concern relationships, small deceits, hypocrisies, and dishonesty across generations. All feature cars as visual devices, homes in states of dilapidation, as upper-middle class showcases or for sale.

The least satisfactory of these is Father, featuring Tom Waits and Adam Driver: unsatisfactory because of the clumsy performances both from Waits and Driver. Waits really is a dreadful ham.

The film suggests, with the Paris section, that only with the death  of their parents, can children live freely from a parental web of half-truths.

The film is beautifully shot.

Canasvieiras, lodging house

*

Canasvieiras, lodging house

What attracts me about this, and many of the buildings in its vicinity, is its uncompromising rectangularity. This accords so satisfactorily with the grid plan of the streets around it. Was it built by the military?

In addition, I like, despite the blank square practicality of it all, how lives led here have left their traces, mysteriously floating  in the air. 

The wretched, Tom Waitsian mood fascinates me. I`ve always been drawn to slummy, collapsing places.

In despair lies a story, and with a story comes a moral, or at least a punchline...never could stand that dog*

That green colour is very nice too.

*Tom Waits, Franks Wild Years, 1987

*

Valparaiso - in the centre

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 Building in the centre, oil on card, 14.5 x 11 cm -  -unavailable

Valparaiso, shop in the centre, 14.5 x 13.5 cm, oil on card   - unavailable

Valparaiso

There are fine trolleybuses painted green and ivory. There is graffiti or, as some idiots call it, street art, and it`s nasty and disfiguring. There are schoolgirls in hideous grey uniforms which include monstrously thick grey socks. Why humiliate your children? A legacy of British influence, I fear.

There are innumerable solid little shops and to get anything you go and ask and an endlessly patient soul gets the stuff from the shelf then puts it in a bag. There is very little to choose from, making selection easy and making one feel grateful when you find roughly what you`re looking for, Then he writes the cost on a chit which you take to a minuscule kiosk about a metre away. Then you pay (sometimes its the same person that put the stuff in the bag, they`ve just walked along behind the counter metre or so). Then your chit is stamped or initialed and you return to the other counter to pick up your stuff. Obviously, this Soviet style system is extremely slow, but I suppose it makes theft next to impossible.

Neruda's house is not especially interesting, though the steep walk there is. The Fine Art Museum isn't that interesting either but does tell you something about late nineteenth century tastes and their insistence on imposing a certain cloying sentiment over everything, so that the depictions of nature are most unnatural and forced. Thus, the few impressionist pictures there come as a tremendous relief.

There are stray dogs all over the place and consequently dogshit everywhere.  The town is disintegrating- there are bits and pieces falling off buildings and everything seems to require renovation. Some of the funicular railways work and they are marvelous contraptions. People sell a bizarre array of used goods over near the bus station, laying out car parts, children`s clothes sweets or whatever you might imagine on the ground. That reminds me of Ukraine just after Communism, though the sellers faces are considerably more cheerful in Valparaiso.

The city is falling apart, for sure, but it is doing so with a certain geniality and a  Tom Waitsian style that is utterly  beguiling.

*

Valparaiso revisited

*

From Stanfords Library Series, 1912

I was so impressed by Valparaiso as a painting city that I'd had, since my visit there back in June, 2012, the idea of returning to do more paintings. So I'm returning in early April.

In many ways it's an ideal painting city: not too big and set on many hills with splendid views, great crumbling 19th century architecture and and that Tom Waitsian atmosphere of abandon. The light was clear and the people weren't annoying.

I have a feeling that I'll visit relatively few totally new places this year, there being so much pleasure in revisiting the old and capitalizing on the benefits of hindsight and the knowledge of the place that I've garnered, There is also considerable pleasure in seeing if one has advanced in any way creatively too.

But revisiting is an art in itself. If one revisits too soon, and one might as well never have left. What is nice is for ones memory to have blurred a little and for the place or oneself to have changed sufficiently to incur surprise,  to discover other perspectives, and feel delight, 

*

A Journey to Bolivia: part 3: Sucre

*

Sucre, the capital, is a restored city of green squares and fine, white, often Beaux-Arts styled buildings.

 I found it difficult to work in the centre of town, however, where everything is a little too "finished" to suit my interests, and took to the outskirts.

 A boy in a street, oil on card, 12.5 x 14.5 cm unavailable

 These, above and below, are rather Japanese influenced.

The city cemetery is very good: well kept and planted and most serene.

 A garden in a cemetery, oil on card, 16 x 15.5 cm - available

It was the Bolivian National day, or perhaps rather week, given the extent of celebrations, with flags hanging all over and no end of brass bands parading the streets. As in other Bolivian cities, there are sellers everywhere. But I felt the general economic level to be generally higher than elsewhere. 

I went above the city and worked there:

 Garages, oil on card, 12.5 x 17 cm - unavailable

This, above, is the sort of collection of broken down buildings and Tom Waits-ian junk that I like, set in a dramatic and unfriendly landscape. Prettier places don`t work so well for me. I think its like seeing the inside of a mechanical clock: so much more interesting, and so much more revealing of the clock`s functioning than the bland finished exterior.

Trees on a mountainside, oil on card, 10.5 x 14.5 cm unavailable

 Farms and smallholdings, the Andes, oil on card, 12.5 x 15.5 cm  unavailable

*

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








*

A visit to São Francisco do Sul

  *

São Francisco do Sul, a railway crossing, oil on card, 14 x 9.5 cm  - available

 

 

 

 

São Francisco do Sul, a yacht, oil on card, 11 x 9 cm   available

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures from a trip up to São Francisco do Sul: the port has a touristic charm, with many well preserved, charmingly painted buildings in various eclectic, quasi Art Noveau or Deco styles.

It also has a pleasingly Waitsian element: great freight trains move continually transporting something or other from a giant and noxious factory , near which are bars with varying degrees of seediness. 

 

 

Train Song by Tom Waits:

 

Well I broke down in East St. Louis on the Kansas City line
Drunk up all my money that I borrowed every time
And I fell down at the derby, the night's black as a crow
It was a train that took me away from here
But a train can't bring me home
What made my dreams so hollow was standing at the depot
With a steeple full of swallows that could never ring the bell
And I've come ten thousand miles away, not one thing to show
It was a train that took me away from here
But a train can't bring me home

 

 

 

*

Painting in Puglia: Lecce and Bari

*

Lecce, early evening, oil on card, 11 / 16 cm  unavailable

Lecce was too perfumed for the sort of painting I like to do. It felt as every square inch had been combed over, tweaked, by a team of interior designers. The town's plan is labyrinthine, and it is flat and riverless, and has no seafront, which means it lacks vistas and, moreover, becomes claustrophobic and uncomfortable on hot days.

Bari, the town, oil on card, 10.5 / 13 cm  AVAILABLE

Bari- the Adriatic, midday, oil on card, 15 / 18 cm   AVAILABLE

Bari, was considerably better, more "normal", less airbrushed for tourism. I stayed near the station in the sort of crummy hotel with a strange lift and the view of the backs of buildings, and everything painted brown, the sort of Tom Waitsian place that I like though I am not sure why as they are self-evidently quite grim.

It's nice to walk along the seafront and paint. The people seem friendly and relaxed in Bari. it would be a good place to go if you were sick and just wanted some time to get well and have simple conversations about their dogs or the temperature. There are lots of nice little shops too. Italy doesn't seem to have suffered the corporate colonisation that blighted the UK, homogenizing every high street.

*

Valparaiso, Chile

*

 Valparaiso, Cerro Bellavista, oil on card, 11 / 9 cm  SOLD

A smallish town, a port, dirty but striking with good old architecture and fine views from the hills above: in short a good painting city.

I spent most of my time in the lower commercial areas of the city and painting some of the many, impressive stucco 19th century very brightly coloured. There are many pleasant squares, though everything is in need of renovation and the whole reminds me very much of decaying Brazilian port towns that I've been to such as Pelotas or Laguna. The port area is very much Tom Waits territory, like so many ports, that air of dilapidation, which at times is very beguiling, at others merely squalid.

 Valparaiso, waterfront, oil on card, 14.5 / 10.5 cm  - available

Of Whistler I see just a little sign:

 Valpariaso, the British Arch, oil on card., 14.5 / 11cm  - available

I didn't work as large as I'd anticipated. For travel the intensity of that postcard size is quite ideal.

*

Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006): review: 4/10

A road movie in which three characters wander through a Post-suicidal purgorory which is a joyless post-industrial landscape.

The film is on the edge of being very good, but there is something not quite right about it.

This is connected to the lack of depth of the acting, and a certain drowsyness to it all.The drowsyness comes from the film not exploring the central and obvious question of why they committed suicide and  from the fact that the central imaginative premise of a post-suicidal world which so utterly resembles the real world is hard to acccept.

 Tom Waits appears, but his acting is stilted and his fuction unclear., The film contains an absurdist element, but it doesn't carry forward because there is such lack of compulsion to the character's car trip.

Four from Catania, Sicily; tourist painting

*

Four from Catania, oil on canvas with coins for scale

Catania is a strinking city- dilapidated, dirty and gorgeous. As I walked from the train station past the seedy harbour area to the fish market where my hostel was, lines from Tom Waits' Tom Traubert's Blues  played in my mind:


"No one speaks English, and everything's broken", or "And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, And a wound that will never heal."

It's a great place for painting, there's that variety of textures and sensations you get in places with haven't been sterilised for tourists- the mess, the squalor: the wounds unbound - lending you intimacy. The baroque architecture of Catania is fantastic and the city has hills that variety of levels which allows for varied perspectives. And at night the city has a sinister allure.

View near the Garibaldi Gate, oil on card, 10 x 11.5 cm   - available

Catania- view of the city from the south, oil on card, 11.5 x 9.6cm  - available

Catania- opposite the Agora Hostel, oil on card, 9.5 x 11.5 cm - available

 

Catania, Sicily- view near Piazza Curro, oil on card, 12.4 x 9.5 cm  - available

I had been thinking of doing some paintings in London which specifically tackled known tourist sights- Houses of Parliament, Nelsons Column etc- but I think that the idea is poor, because these places so control resposes, denying intimacy and nuanced responses from visitors. They are propogandist, like official portraits lacking personality, and it would be better for me to do a series set in London's non- touristy neighbourhoods, such as Brixton or Battersea, where it is easier to locate one's subjectivity.

*

Paintings from this site are generally available for purchase. Pplease see label "buying art" , below, for details.

One From the Heart (1982): review- 1/10

Unhappy suburbanites make for a rudderless film with weak, uninteresting characters, whose meagre plot is suffocated by the set design.

Not even Tom Waits's music or Nastassja Kinksi in suspenders can save it.

Short stories, vignettes

I have always been curious about seedy places, and the people who inhabit them. It's something I like in Steinbeck and in Malamud and Tom Waits.

I'm going to write some pieces inspired by the bus station and put them on here. Some will be very short, barely a paragraph, more like vignettes.