The Truth Dawns

It feels as if for the longest time I have been wrestling with the challenge of painting honest landscapes. Time and time again I fall into the clutches of the picturesque, the “pretty landscape”. The past week I have been back at work on this analysis.

The challenge I set myself was to dissolve the landscape I had in mind – a view of the mountains near my home with a semi-invented foreground composition – into something more abstract. My first effort came out like this:

Mountain View I (Oil on Canvas, 11″ x 14″)

I was pleased with the outcome, especially the warm, rich and juicy foreground. But that horizon line immediately cast the image as a traditional landscape. I set to the problem with pastels, this time using only blocks of color with little or no lines:

Mountain View II (Pastel on Canson paper, 8″ x 10″)

I liked this one a little more. But I am quite comfortable with pastel, so this felt like cheating.

I went back to oils, this time taking away the option of lines by using only the palette knife:

Mountain View III (Oil on Canvas, 8″ x 10″)

I felt I was getting somewhere, but was weary of the palette knife – it very easily becomes a gimmick or mannerism that an artist cannot escape from, like an actor associated with a certain role.

Finally, as the weekend approached, I resolved the idea with an image that I really love:

Mountain View IV (Oil on Canvas, 8″ x 10″)

There is little left of the original concept, except color, rhythm, harmonies. Who knows how I will feel about this image in a week’s time? I know I felt good, relaxed and happy while doing it and after doing it. It is a good sign, but I know that art is an ever moving target, a mystery that deepens infinitely.

I have been reading The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, by John Calder. Initially a somewhat dry read for my engineering brain, I started paying better attention in the chapter “The failure of art”. Calder quotes Beckett:

…to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

By Beckett’s measure I guess I can say the past week I failed several times, and currently with attempt IV I am under the illusion of having succeeded. Slowly the truth about this journey dawns:

Slowly the Truth Dawns

To wake, and know
your heart sinks
dark and heavy,
hardening into stone...

Slowly the sea lifts its waves,
slowly the trees turn red in the gorge,
slowly the fires begin to lap in hell,
slowly the truth dawns...

Olav H. Hague, translated by Robert Hedin, in
The Dream We Carry

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Blue Mountains Dreaming

I have been dreaming of mountains, moonlight and clouds. During the recent full moon I stepped outside at 2am. Stars abound in the New Zealand sky, clouds scurrying along the Hakarimata mountains across the river. What a universe!

Acrylic on Canvas Paper (11″ x 14″)

Lady Izumi Shikibu lived at the border between the 10th and 11th centuries.  She must have dreamed of mountains and moonlight as well. She wrote:

I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains

Izumi (translation by Kenneth Rexroth, in 
One Hundred Poems from the Japanese

 

Pastel on Canson Paper (8″ x 10″)

Through busy days and dreamy nights, I keep pondering meanings and purposes – those of life, business…and painting. At times it feels as if a huge purpose holds me safely in its sway. Other times I drift as a leaf in a late afternoon storm. I try to live upright through both these views of life.

In his wonderful book The Silence of the Animals, John Gray writes:

Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of any oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being. There is no redemption from being human.

 

Pastel on Canson Paper (8″ x 10″)

Thanks for visiting my  blog! I hope you are happy and content.