The thing I like most about Christmas is our Christmas Tree. Deborah and I have been gathering Christmas decorations from around the world for decades. We actually have two trees, one is relatively large and the other one is quite small. These pics speak for themselves. Enjoy the sumptuous decorations designed and made by so many throughout the world.
The pic of this hill has inspired a number of my paintings. The first one I did was close to what the scene looked like, but as I was painting it, I had a number of ideas for other paintings. I imagined a fire across the horizon, a lightning strike at night, the wind sweeping across long dry grass or a line of trees beyond the horizon. Of course, these ideas were not be painted from life because the scenes did not exist but even if they did, it would be impossible to paint lightning from life as it cracks across the sky for only a split second and painting a bush fire close up would not happen. Having said that, the painting with the fire on the horizon, the wind pushing the clouds and grass, and the tops of trees beyond the horizon were all painted at the same spot I did the first en plain air picture. Although I was not painting what was in front of me, returning to the spot seems to keep ideas fresh in my mind. All the other paintings were done in the studio from my imagination, although it was a hill that inspired all of these works.
This painting was done from two different locations. The hill and clouds were painted first but I wanted a line of trees appearing above and beyond the hill's edge. Since there were no trees there I looked around for a set of trees that would suit the idea I had in mind. My concern was not really the trees, hills and clouds, but the possibility of taking the viewer's gaze into an unknown place. Like something that is an existential journey.
I've always loved the art of self portraiture. It can provide an opportunity to paint a human figure or be the means to experiment with ideas. I've occasionally used myself as the model in a painting but rarely as a straight forward image. By this I mean that my face or body is presented in an indirect way to express something other than what I look like. This 'something other' can be explained as who are, we? or what are we made of? Most of the images can be located in reality but sometimes a surrealist element does enter the work.
Bernadette Robinson is an Australian singer with an incredible vocal range. She has a unique ability to impersonate great singers of the past and present, both in their songs and in their everyday speech. She weaves instances of a singers's life around their songs and she does this with poignancy and humour. But the main reason she succeeds is that she's just as talented as the singers she impersonates. Her high notes are electric and the feeling she puts into her music is something only a singer who can act the song can achieve.
I've seen her perform on a few occasions and she has never disappointed. Her latest performance in the Fairfax studio at the Melbourne Arts Centre embraced the personas of Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, Amy Whitehouse, Barbara Streisand, Kate Bush, Shirley Bassey, Miley Cyrus, Karen Carpenter and Dolly Parton.
I can't wait to see her perform again.
Paintings of interiors have always fascinated me. They seem to be about something else rather than a picture of a room. The ones I like best are rooms that seem to invite a state of meditation or reflection, that bring you into a calm centre.
The painting I did of my front bedroom was inspired by the sunlight streaming through the semi- transparent curtains. The curtains seemed to be as ethereal as the light itself.
Two of my favourite artists are Gwen John and Vilhelm Hammershoi. Here are two examples of how they interpret the space and light in a room in their house.
WHY DRAWING IS IMPORTANT
In contemporary art there are two different processes of image making taking place. One is where, through drawing, an artist creates a body and its idea at the same time, a process that follows the laws of nature and the other is when objects and images are assembled and manipulated from images and materials that already exist. It’s like comparing Dr. Frankenstein to nature. Frankenstein assembled a man but nature created the parts he used. Without nature he would have nothing to assemble. Without a draughtsperson, an assembler has nothing to piece together or manipulate.
Why drawing is important can be explained by what drawing does. Without dimension one can only see a flat pattern, but when light and air enter the process of drawing, which is what dimension is, flat patterns are changed into forms. It’s almost a contradiction to say that the more we’re aware of invisible space and light, the more presence the visible has.
Sometimes there can be confusion between the process of drawing and drawings themselves. Drawings are often defined as works created with pencils, crayons, pastels or any medium that isn’t paint. When paint is the medium, then the words ‘paintings’ and ‘drawings’ are used to separate them from each other. But placing marks within the light and air of a picture is what drawing does, it doesn’t matter what medium is used.
In art, there often seems to be a misconception that content or subject matter is the art. But this is not true. The meaning in subject matter is what we talk about but sometimes the words seem to be more important than the images. Words are used to avoid drawing by bringing excess attention to the subject matter. Content can be important, but if an idea is not brought to life through drawing, then what is its value as art? It then does not transcend its verbosity.
Drawing is not a skill or a mechanical process. It reflects stillness as well as mechanical motion and it has a quality that is transcendental as well as observational. There are endless combinations of colours and shapes in drawn images but the light and air within these images remains the same. The observational aspect of drawing is these shapes and colours, the transcendental aspect is the air and light. Cezanne put this way, ‘If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul’.
These transcendental qualities in the art of drawing are not understood by technology because machines have no inner life and therefore cannot bring to life to the things and images they manufacture.
It’s enlightening to read more quotes from some great artists and philosophers on the nature of the inner light and air within the image, and within ourselves.
MATISSE - Colour helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that truly exists, what’s in the artist’s brain.
PICASSO – There are artists who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
MANET – The principal personage in a painting is light
WIM WENDERS – Wim Wenders is a film maker and he has been inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Wenders responded to Hopper’s work where he says,
‘The only subject is the light as an existential condition of man. There’s no need to paint a person, light suffices, it produces us’.
DEGAS – The air we see in pictures of the old masters isn’t the same air we breathe.
HANS HEYSEN – Train the hand to record not only what the eye sees but what the mind behind the eye sees.
LUCIAN FREUD – William Feaver wrote a biography of Lucian Freud, and he met with him on many occasions. Standing in front of a painting Freud was doing at one time, Freud drew his attention to a certain section of the painting and remarked, ‘I’ve already put some air in here
REMBRANDT – Without atmosphere, a painting is nothing.
BHAGAVAD GITA –Yet beyond the senses it is, sustaining all,
Motionless, yet still moving.
LAO TZU – The way is void
Used but never filled
An abyss it is
Like an ancestor
From which all things come
EMILY DICKINSON – ‘Do my poems breathe?’
The above quotes suggest that art has its source within the artist. When artists separate themselves from the creation of their work, a quality that should be there no longer is there. Bringing an idea into the world through oneself is not the same thing as leaving your idea to a machine to manufacture. Our art galleries and museums have become spaces to display images and things that are designed and manufactured. The light source comes from an extension cord and its electrical socket rather than a light source from within the artist. The air within the work is no longer there because machines have no breath to extend into the images and things they manufacture.
There are people who say contemporary art means we no longer need to draw but what they don’t seem to realise is that they are completely reliant on those who CAN draw. The contemporary art practice where an artist sources and manipulates another artist’s work and re-presents it as their own derives from a source of images created by draughtspersons. Our world is full of technology but what is often forgotten is that the existence of all machinery can be traced back to a drawing.
The culture of manufactured art has now lead to AI being given permission to gather images from a data base and present it as art. If artists are content to source other artist’s work then the next logical step is to allow AI to do it for them.
Technology has given us the large spectacle, the sensory immersive experience, reproductions of other artist’s work and manufactured images and things to fill our galleries and museums. It would be disastrous if we entered an age where drawing no longer existed. Our only access to images would then be through a data base where once human beings COULD draw. What a loss of soul that would be.
The variety of images made through drawing.
Paco Pana is 81 years old now, but he still has that magic when he plays. He takes you to another world and it's a shame we have to leave it. I'm sure many Melburnians are eagerly awaiting his return to the Melbourne Recital Centre.
Photo credit - Paul Compton.