A drive to the mountains

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 Rancho Queimado- in the mountains, oil on card, 14 x 15 cm

Aguas Mornas- logs, oil on card. 15.5 x 14.5 cm

It's slightly cooler- just about tolerable, therefore- to drive to the mountains and do some work.

 When painting you are very alone. Your're in this arena against the subject and your own worst instincts. You just have your paints and and your thoughts as weapons, and you have to be determined, or very lucky to win. Or sometimes you have to know when it's right to cede defeat and abandon the work. Clarity of mind is everything, and that's why solitude is so essential, as is the right mental state to begin: humility, courage, stoicism...

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Lagoa, haze; Dufy

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Lagoa, haze, oil on card, 22 x 18 cm   SOLD

A Dufy-influenced piece (specifically his San Giorgio Maggiore), painted near the docks in Lagoa.

I'd always been suspiscious of Dufy, finding his work easy, but now I feel it has something to offer me.  Sometimes, in painting,  the greatest challenge is to say just enough. At times I feel like the subject at an interview: desperate to prove myself, I babble. Dufy gets the right balance, often. Maybe I should have painted with a sharper brush, however.

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It's difficult to work with people around me, I need to be alone to work, and I need to find places which allow me to work me in peace. This is not as easy as it sounds. Brazilians are extremely sociable, mostly pleasantly so. But it isn't easy to work when people are watching and trying to talk to you.

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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.

A path in the woods; paintings for sale

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A path in the woods, oil on card, 10 x 13.1 cm

Today's picture is straight from yesterday's list (no. 4).

I was totally undisturbed while working except by some midges who seem to hang about in a great clusters near these trees. They are very attracted to black clothes for some reason.

I don't think I have been so happy in the last few years as when painting outside. Meetings with others are so often marred by tensions. My increased inability to handle commonplace social tensions and my consequent preference for solitude is the sign of a failure on my part.

Today's picture looks set to be quite popular and I might do another, looking in the opposite direction.

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Almost all the pictures on this site are for sale; the prices for these little pictures (labelled "postcards", or "pochades") are about 55US$; postage and packing is an additional 10$.

I can take cheques or direct transfers from UK or Brazillian buyers, or SWIFT payments from other places.

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