Pochades: an attempt at self-criticism II

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The intellect demands understanding but while I might draw my conclusions, make recommendations, stipulate policies, all this seems to make no difference to the sheer strange willfulness of art-making itself, which is, so much, too much  like leading a lively dog across a meadow full of rabbits.

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Two recent pochades with coins for scale; painting pochades

Two recent pochades with coins for scale: a Brazillian centavo, a British penny, a US quarter and a Euro.

The size below has become roughly my standard- a little smaller than a postcard. The paintings are completed in about an hour, which is a good length of time to paint plein air here in Brazil, giving the speed of changing atmospheric conditions (in the UK it is might be less), and it allows me to produce a "finished" looking picture on this size. I sometimes work a little larger, and as above, sometimes smaller- though I find this somewhat fiddly.

I like working quickly, and in a burst: I find it exciting, in a way that is analagous to being a live performer. Instead  of making a studio recording: it stands or fails as I make it, there's no secondary editing process. I produce a good number of duds, at least 10%.

A certain number of duds are a certainty at any scale: that's a necessary collorary to being at all experimental, but at least I don't spend weeks and much money producing them. It is difficult for me to know immediately whether a picture is a dud or not and sometimes I am decieved, only realising later that a picture is poor. But it is very hard for me to find guiding principles: the jugement is subjective and falls outside words. This is one of the things that animates me to make art: the simple difficulty in knowing for sure which guiding principles- outside mere technical judgements- will produce good pictures.

The paintings can be easily stored and posted, and are accessable to people on lower incomes.

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.