Another excellent artist, James Gleeson explains it as an integral ointment to the process of painting:
If the Light is right the darkness will remain
to hold the form in stasis.
Something will be that had not been before

As a amateur painter I can relate to the Gleeson, as a broken individual I am addicted to the Cohen.

I paint to retreat and make meaning of things.  Right now I’m painting a scene on the river at Woy Woy on the Central Coast of NSW. The painting is of the home of my grandparents.  A retirement home they gave up, when they moved back to Sydney to look after us following the death of my mother. My need to paint this scene, is parallel to my need to make sense of what home means.

The unfinished work sits on an easel in my spare room. And it’s as if there’s a presence in the house. As I pass by the open doorway and look in, it stares back. And I wonder – is it working?  Should I stop now when the potential is still there, before I stuff it up? Do it like it? Would I know?

Undertaking the actual painting is like navigating a battlefield – one part of you motivated and defending the perfect vision of home, memory, life and loss. The other part, questioning and criticising your choice of colour and topic, and always with the eternal chant, “You’re not a painter”, “You’ll muck it up, you know you always do”…crack..

To add insult to injury, watching the progress of a painting is like caring for the wounded. Wandering the corridors with a lamp, you’re motivated by care, diligence and hope.  Wanting to keep it alive, to rub it back, add more and then take off some.

And compelled at the open door, as if addressing an ailing patient, you whisper aloud, “You certainly made the right choice adding in that central focus point”.   “You did well with the tone and depth”. But always when you turn away, if you’re honest, you’ll admit it could just as easily turn septic with the next encounter.

And it can happen at any time. These mistakes that take us on a certain path, unlike the one we started out on, these are the cracks and breakages and they are part and parcel of the artistic – healing process. Gleeson writes,

From the known a newer resonance
shaking old doors open to a separate incarnation

Last week I got an email from my niece, Georgie. Along with it – she’d attached the copy of a beautiful painting she’d just completed. It was the way she processed the loss and separation from her long-time boyfriend. The work was done on silk, full of abundant flowers – each with a symbology of loss, meaning, honour, fidelity and care. Not the work of a depressed woman – but certainly the work of a mind-ful one.

George stayed with me following the death of my husband a couple of years ago. She’d graduated and had given herself a year before applying for college. Most nights we’d sit out on the veranda talking. We spoke about life and hope and loss. We talked of death and battlefields and of caring for the wounded.

As much as you would hope it wouldn’t happen to an 18 year old, she had lost a friend in a car accident only months before and had  seen it first-hand.

Georgie painted her way out of that grief as well.  Embellishing a plaster cast she had made of this girlfriend’s torso some weeks before the accident It was a living canvas – potent with life, as it should be when you’re 18. And it was now frozen in time, attended to by the painter. So she took that cast and painted it with decorative meaningful emblems and gave it to the girl’s mother.  The act was classy, brazen and inspired by love.

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

For you darling G

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We are, as the old English writers would put it, on an excursion today: to Murano, famous for Glass making,  the Lido, famous for Byron et al, and the Island of Burano, famous for lace - all aboard the Vaparettos! a water  boat that chugs from station to station up the waterways of Venice. What fun indeed.

We are staying in the suburb of Cannaregio far from the maddening turistos, near the jewish ghetto in a moorish inspired hotel, reminiscent of Shylock and all things shakespearean. Funnily, I’ve learnt more about Italy, during my life, from an English Playwright than from actual travel. Well, that is all changing as one can’t help but be inspired and aroused by this place.

Gab and I are in Venice, Italy. What a place! I thought Croatia was beautiful, but this is like a balm for the spirit.  A fair amount of it is enhanced by a delightful golden liquid called Prosecco (Miss Garner used to drink it in Salley Vicker’s book).

This intoxicant is enhanced by the vistas as well, the bright and variegated colours of the walls, the distresseed brick and rendering, the mossy-water-licked edges, the rotted wood and coloured striped poles that poke up out of the rocking rolling green water, the many boats navigating, bumping, in a dance across the canal ways: hell I can even stand the American tourists!

It is like living inside a painting or an art Gallery. This became especially apparant to me, when I went to the Accademia (Gallery) a day or so ago, and sat before enormous paintings from the 17th Century of the suburb in which I am now living. Why I even recognised the washing hanging from the shuttered windows, in much the same way they are displayed these days. Now that was surreal!

Yesterday we went to Frari the basilica that houses The Annunciation by Titian as well as a Donatello statue and surprise of all – the tomb of Monterverdi (my all time favourite composer of sacred music). Just when you thought you’d seen it all. A few days before we’d seen the graves of Ezra Pound, Serge Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky at Cimitro, an island cemetery visible from Venezia town.

Well the city beckons, I need to be off to taste some more scampi, some more casa vino Blanco and catch another Vaparetto. Another glass of your finest my good man, line them up.

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Right now I’m wrestling with 2 paintings. Both are based on photos I took on a recent trip. The wrestle is with the process and I guess the outcome.

My problem is that I don’t want the work to be a replica of something I saw, yet I do want it to replicate what I saw – if that makes sense. The images that are pre-occupying me are steps that lead into the water. In both, the water seems so mysterious: one is slightly more bouyant or playful and the other receding with the tide – revealing the rich variegated stone patterns beneath.

I work with the forms yet all the time resisting them. I want to shape and push the forms, to stretch them so they don’t resemble the starting point, and then reconfigure them to make sense of the whole picture. This means continually massaging how they relate to each other on the canvas. I enjoy the colours, the balance, the solidity and fragility of some elements – and have immense fun with the texture of the paint itself. Yet I wrestle with the fact that it should look more like life, more like the original picture, more like reality.

People who see my work – describe it as impressionistic.  Is that because I can’t reproduce forms realistically? The reason they say this is because each painting has a feeling of transience and movement.  I also think they are impressionistic because I use the knife more often than I do the brush.

Another pecadillo, if you like is a lack of planning. I prefer the painting to emerge as I go along. I like to be suprised at what the painting process delivers – almost magically. It may not resemble the starting point much at all, but it comes to a point when the work is finished and I’m happy to let it go as an impression of the starting point.

Nearly every time I look at my work I feel good about it and about myself. Which is a world away from what I was like when I was a teenager or young adult. In fact, I would recommend painting for all depressives and those working on the renovated self. It’s a great way to fall in love with life and with your participation in it.

I knew a woman once, whom I thought was quite a gifted painter. I couldn’t understand why she judged her work so harshly, refusing to pick up the brush for many years after a “bad” experience (ie a painting she didn’t like). I’m not saying don’t strive for perfection, but really - the world is full of critics enough, why would we add another one to the equation?

Yes, I love the process and I do like the workat each iteration. I like its boldness, the “painterly” (as a teacher once described it) style, which I think just means the fact that I’m not afraid of using a variety of and large amount of paint.  In fact I relish in it. Bloke used to find the “mark of bubba” everywhere around our house. A smear of paint on the light switch, on the fridge, on the phone and of course on every wall along my path.

He would be frightened of the work. Not because of the mess, but rather frightened for me I think. He’d notice when the perspective was wrong, or the composition didn’t resemble reality. He thought I’d be disappointed at the end. Of course he was projecting, and when I asked him why he didn’t paint, given that he was an excellent draftsman, he told me that he was too scared. He would spend so much time planning what to paint, that he would become too intimidated to begin – in case it didn’t work out.

I guess I get scared too. Scared that it will end up looking like crap. But I push on through that, it happens about a third of the way through the painting’s life cycle. And I remind myself that crap is all relative. One person’s crap is in fact another person’s delight. Last week I dreamt someone commented on my painting to the effect that “It looks like shit”. “Exactly what part of it and what sort of shit?” I asked in the dream. At the time, I put it down to a heavy night on the turps (booze that is)  because the painting resembled a truncated intenstine, and I did feel like shit the morning after.

So I’m writing this while my two (yet to be finished) paintings dry. I’m writing it to remind myself that the process is incredibly rewarding – with fresh discoveries all the time. And I’m writing it to remind myself that the process itself is a way of wrestling with my own way of seeing the world - ”In real life” or in my head. The view in my head is like “real life” but is mixed up with all the excitement of other inflluences.

Farewelling my sister on this morning’s flight to Hong Kong, and then onto Budapest; cleaning the house and washing the linen in preparation for interstate friends; getting ready for dinner with a close friend and her guests tonight, and remembering how sublime the Merchant Ivory production of “Howard’s End” was last night.

Yes, all of that has an effect on whether I see the water as emerald or mauve, and whether I paint the stones with a dab or a dash and just how much paint - that I’ve just plied on  do I now scrape off – in order to give a sense of well trodden steps.

Magical.

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