Oil on canvas, 16″ x 16″

It’s been forever since I last chronicled my work, which is whole the point of this blog; a way of recording the steps I take on this art journey lest it all sink into a blur. Unfortunately this is how the memories of my life usually are, all soft and out of focus and difficult to retrieve… Friends and family that can clearly remember events, experiences and interactions, from the visuals of the setting down to what clothes were being worn, to the dates and seasons, which year it was and what the weather was like, have a much richer life than mine, and I envy them whilst bemoaning my sieve-like brain. What to do. Hence this blog.

Add to that unfortunate personal flaw the Covid-19 pandemic that has melted Time into a blur for everyone, and the result is a determination to claim what I can before its too late and not lose anything more.

So now to catch up on the last many many moons and document my work, starting with today and working backwards.

This morning I excavated a pile of canvases that I’d been working on since the pandemic began and had put aside in order to clear a big space to work on a 32′ mural (more on that once I’ve caught up with the past). All of them are in various stages of being, from just needing a few finishing touches and a varnish, to being beyond retrieval and heading to the bin, with a spectrum of everything in between. This one was an easy finish, and I’m happy with it. I’d been working with bottles, which had been excruciatingly challenging, and I thought that by adding some other elements to the composition I’d have more breathing room, so to speak, and allow for some freedom within the space of the piece for brushwork and gesture and colour, and also more of a narrative: who doesn’t like a cool gin and tonic at the end of a hot and demanding day? The fun discovery of today was the result of cleaning the old oil paint and grimy dust off my palette before I began to paint. My palette is a long and narrow ex-shower door, and I used a glass cleaner spray that I hadn’t used before, and which cut through the scud really well. The palette was sparkling clean, and I happily got to work (it’s been almost 6 weeks since I’ve worked in oils; the mural was in acrylic, and I’m excited to work in oils again) by mixing up a turquoise glaze to add to the gin bottle. I did a few other minor finishing touches, and then saw that beautiful mottled marks had emerged on the gin bottle, and I realized that there must have been a residue of glass cleaner on the palette that mixed up with the glaze. This is something I will use again. What a bonus to discover a new paint effect.

Now this is something I’ll have no trouble remembering….

A very kind friend once told me that my poor memory of past events is due to my whole-hearted living in the present moment. I often recall her supportive words and actively choose to believe them, ‘though ’tis a leap-of-faith…..

It’s not what you paint but how you paint it.

I well believe this mantra, and it’s probably the infinite possibilities of how to render a subject that keeps me engaged, and indeed, without this approach a dead fish would have its limits. I have seen enough beautifully rendered, gutsy, dramatic, tactile paintings of fish to know that it’s a worthwhile subject, so I figured I’d give it a try when a friend brought me one freshly caught. Oh! the colours of it are so incredible, such glistening iridescence, each and every scale perfectly formed. Such minutiae are beyond my capabilities alas and I focused on the shape of the fish against the shape of the pan.

A masterful painter I found online, Scott Conary, was offering an online course in April and May of this year, and I signed up, thrilled to be able to receive some instruction from someone whose work I so admire. I had limited time to practice what he was teaching, but thinking I had the full summer ahead I wasn’t worried. It didn’t turn out that way, and I only have the two small paintings of fish I began the course with; he said to paint the same subject twice, at least, doing it faster every time. These days with my right arm strapped up I’m painting nothing, but I’m thinking I should re-listen to his classes to inspire me once again… such a long absence from the easel does certainly break the flow.

It was months ago that I was working on this painting, a scene that I spotted in a much- frequented compound here in Kingston (Dr Gomes’ office for you Kingstonians), of light dappling on yellow awnings, and a bicycle, and palm trees. Its initial horizontal rendering worked beautifully, apart from one area, which when I tried to ‘fix’ became two and then three areas that didn’t work, and then the whole thing got lost, as so often happens, and so, after many days’ work, I flipped it in frustration to the vertical, and took on less of the scene, and hoped for the best.

It turned out OK, and it’s found a home already, and the lady who bought it exclaimed when she saw it, and said, “It makes me happy!”, so I’m really glad about that. I do want my pieces to have a positive emotional presence and to calm people’s souls. So it has achieved that. At least for her. For me it was rife with issues – all those straight lines of the grillwork, and trying to have the metal bars look soft in the shade and not like a prison cell, and then of course the bike…. bikes are hard, at least for me, and it went through so many manifestations, none of which came out alive, and I eventually left it as is and put my brushes down in defeat.

I look at it now and mourn all that I lost, all the lovely little areas that were so good and to which heavy-handedness dealt a fatal blow… but, I don’t stay there. There was A LOT of learning in it: using a ruler was fun, and new for me, and I want to use them more because I really like straight lines (news to me); and I introduced a grid for the bicycle, which again was a fun accuracy tool that I’d not used for many years (in fact, I think I’ve only used it for teaching, to people who are new to drawing, but it’s a very handy tool that this painting reintroduced me to, so for that I’m grateful). And I got more experience using the newspaper, which is such a lovely element on the surface of a piece, but elusive, as it can only take the lightest of glazes before it’s lost.

So, I’m chalking it all up to experience, and there are other areas that I like; the brushwork of the shadow on the awnings, the drips coming off the building and suggesting palm fronds, the textured palm tree trunk that is all that remains of the first vertical painting, and so on. Indeed, it’s the smaller areas that work best. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that, to paint smaller and try and get what’s within a small space working, rather than have such big pieces that present so many problems when trying to make all the little places work as a whole.

As it happens, I can’t photograph the whole thing without glare and shine, so it’s best to enjoy the details in all their abstract mark-making cameo glory….

But I do have to ask, what is it about us artists that has us struggling after something that we can’t even define? Why are we never satisfied? I’d think it was just me that sinks to depths of despair if I didn’t teach art, and am therefore a witness to others’ frustrations, and the subsequent coaching is as much a part of teaching as anything technical as they too struggle with finding satisfaction.

I garden too, and it doesn’t cause me ANY grief, and the flowers are way more beautiful than my paintings will ever be, so what is the problem?

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‘The Bicycle of Many Moons’, Oil and collage on panel, 48″ x 36″

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