On the spur of the moment

Leinster Bay, St John, USVI

My recently rekindled passion for jazz has made me again realise the similarities that exist between that art form and my paintings. Both rely on spur of the moment spontaneity and for both the end result can be fleeting. For the jazz musician it is the unrecorded impromptu improvisation and for me, the hundreds of past paintings that were made within the timeframe of a passionate fifteen minutes and then whisked away by an equally passionate buyer. 

In those days there were no cellphones or digital cameras by which the memory of a painting could be quickly saved. Luckily the for above painting my 35mm camera had one frame left on a roll of colour slide film. The image is less than perfect: film deteriorates quickly in the tropics.

Over the years jazz has benefitted from the perceptive writing of its reviewers and critics, the best of which verges on prose and reads as an art form in itself. Good examples being James Lincoln Collier's definitive The Making Of Jazz and Philip Larkin's All What Jazz. 

NB. My copy of All What Jazz has been out on loan for almost forty years. Perhaps a closely related regular reader of this blog could look to see if by chance it can be found languishing on his bookshelf.  

Unfortunately, writers and reviewers of the visual arts run a poor second. A rare exception being how Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), Belgian, writer, poet and journalist, described one of Rodin’s sculptures:

At the Maison d’Art there is a torso that seems to have been spewed out from the furnaces of Gomorrah. It has been savagely torn and splayed the way a fissure in the earth cracks open, as though a crucible were exploding in its depths...