Cortes 20.00

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Cortes 20.00, Canasvieiras

 I like the black and white photographs of the barbered. The effect is rather punk: there is indeed a mohican in the top right corner. But I do wonder if the punk aesthetic is intentional. I rather doubt it. Punk and Florianopolis really don't combine. Punk is too engaged. Everything here is so laid back.

 I haven`t been to this barber`s and I don`t know if I dare.

 I passed a barber shop here which has just one chair, as if it should really be in a huge city like New York, beside a subway station, to serve hurried commuters.

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My coming to live here did not seem willed. It was more as if I were waved by a giant invisible hand, or pulled by a gigantic magnet. 

Coming here to live was my Covid 19 thing: a response to the sense Covid 19 gave me that I 'd be in Brazil for the rest of my life, and should find a place of my own and settle my my differences with the country. It made me accept the idea of having a home- something which I had always resisted. 

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Shop window

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Window display

The window display suggests conflicting notions of intimacy: as pleasure, as peril, and as commercial transaction. 

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Window displays in the centre of Florianopolis really are like this: I didn't set it up, I promise.  I do wonder what they tell us about the sexual lives of the population?

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Nocturne- shop window

Nocturne- shop window, oil on card, 9.6 x 7.1 cm - discarded

Painted on Madre Benevenuta, part of both the nascent "shop windows" series and the "nocturnes". 


I often find myself unconsciously connecting with Atget's work- he did a whole run of shop window displays- realising after producing a picture that he was there before me: he was there at the start of the modern age ready to record urban architectural archetypes, and he had an eye for subtle strangnessess that makes him more than a documentarist.

Shop window- a homage to William Sickert...or perhaps Edward Hopper..?

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Shop window, oil on card, 14 x 9.5 cm  AVAILABLE

The first of a run of pictures of shop windows: a sort of homage to Sickert, or perhaps Hopper. I'd intended to start this investigation some years ago, but somehow never got onto it.

I'll paint them mostly in the centre of Florianopolis, at the weekends when it's quiet there.

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