O255-O258

After a trip away from home in August and September, I really struggled to get back to painting. Pressure at work and a mind that was too busy meant I was only in the studio for short periods of time and those were mostly short and distracted. In this mind-state I just played around with paint and slowly emerged three abstract paintings which I decided to keep. Some others did not make it…

The one above was the first time I painted on canvas in quite a while. I rather enjoyed the feeling of canvas and will probably revert back to canvas more often in future.

This second one was painted the next day, and I started leaning into a more green and blue atmosphere. This is oil and cold wax on panel:

The third one was made in the same week. It seems to be the most popular, based on Instagram likes – if that is anything to go by:

O258: Pathless at Night (oil and cold wax on panel)

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Robert Henri wrote:

THE WORK OF THE ART STUDENT is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.

Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit (p. 12). Basic Books.

When I made the last painting (O258) I was feeling my way through the days. My father had recently passed away (I wrote about this in another post), and since my return to New Zealand I have been ambivalent about my art and what I want to – or will be able to – achieve with it. I mean – why do this?

The emotion I felt reminded me of the phrase from Rilke’s poem “We must die because we have known them”. It is the sort of uncertainty one can perhaps only keep silent about – like wandering “Pathless at Night”:

...
But the grown man
shudders and is silent. The man who
has wandered pathless at night
in the mountain-range of his feelings:
is silent.

As the old sailor is silent,
and the terrors that he has endured
play inside him as though in quivering cages.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Oh yes! I have a silly little website up now for my art! For my upcoming exhibition at the David Lloyd Gallery in November,  I needed to have something more than an online blog presence, so I created my site Fritz Jooste Fine Art just to showcase some paintings.  It still needs some work to make it more professional, but it is there at least.

Thanks for visiting my blog! Special thanks to all followers and long-time supporters who have encouraged me with kind and thoughtful comments.

 

O252-4: Wait Without Hope

One of the larger landscapes I have done. This one is about 70 x 70 cm (Oil and Cold Wax on Panel). The images below show a close-up as well as another painting done in the same week.

O254: Oil and Cold Wax on Panel (approx. 70 x 70 cm)

It is difficult for my iPhone camera to capture the nuance of light and color correctly. In the photo above, the painting appears to be almost uniform in tone and color in the fore and middle ground. But as the closeup below shows – there is a bit more color and variation than the camera captures:

 

The painting below is one of my favorites, but sadly it does not seem to appeal that much to others (going by my Instagram feed). That’s OK with me.

O252: Lost Landscape (Oil and Cold Wax on Panel, approx 60 x 45 cm)

My numbering of paintings got mixed up – there is no O253, but I do not have the energy to re-number all the ones afterwards, so this will have to do!

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In a sleepy, seaside second-hand bookstore, I came across two books on TS Eliot (one of my favorite poets). The one is The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, by Hugh Kenner. My morning coffee has new life all of a sudden. Kenner densely but steadily persists to show how Eliot found his way through the no-mans land of artificiality in his art, partly through his study of the philosopher Bradley:

It freed him from the Laforguian posture of the ironist with his back to a wall, by affirming the artificiality of all personality including the one we intimately suppose to be our true one; not only the faces we prepare but the “we” that prepares; and it released him from any notion that the art his temperament bade him practice was an eccentric art, evading for personal and temporary reasons a more orderly, more “normal” unfolding from statement to statement. A view of the past, a view of himself and other persons, a view of the nature of what we call statement and communication; these delivered Eliot from what might have been, after a brilliant beginning, a cul-de-sac and silence.

The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, P48

For me, Eliot’s poems are landscapes of the inner landscapes of people who may or may not be Eliot himself. It exposes, but does not focus on, the petty decisions (“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”), to larger ones, including: “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

But always the question “Who Am I?” seems to hover around Eliot’s poetry.  Kenner quotes a segment from Eliot’s play “The Cocktail Party”:

Who are you now? You don't now any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait.

This may seem fatalistic or nihilistic; but Eliot I think was pointing at a more humble form of waiting, as hinted at in “East Coker” (one of his the “Four Quartets”):

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

 

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