A fleeting moment in time

A fleeting glance captured at a nutmeg factory in Grenada.

A sketch is all I need to remind me of a brief moment in time. It is a note to myself that no one else can read or fathom. I gathered them by the hundred while travelling the Caribbean thirty-five years ago in search of life as it was then lived in the islands. I stress "was" for nothing stays the same. My book Caribbean Sketches is a record of those earlier times.

In recent times the camera shutter has made the lightening sketch for most artists a thing of the past. They have become reluctant to set down the fleeting life of a subject in what might be considered an imperfect form. Laboured finish is the order of the day, whereas the sketch that says all that needs to be said in a few hurried lines. 

Having said that; the prerequisite for a sketch is a subject that inspires rather than a contrived art class exercise. 

You must believe in spring...

A detail from one of my sculptures in the series You Must Believe In Spring.

Living on a small island in the Caribbean, together with trust in my natural immune system, has so far enabled me to escape the Covid virus. But try as I may, I cannot avoid the blues brought about by the pandemic restrictions. An absence of models has brought my paintings and sculptures to a halt. And the same goes for work on my Bare Minimum fashion designs. For both I need freedom to work from the unmasked live model.

This week I found hope for these frustrating times when glancing through the social media posts of a past pupil, friend and fellow artist. For Nirvana, rock bottom became a solid foundation on which to build her life.  

It then dawned on me, that it was only by reaching rock bottom in past times that I was able to rebuild my life and move on. This brings me back to a line from the haunting lyrics of "You Must Believe In Spring":

Just as a tree is sure its leaves will reappear, it knows its emptiness is just the time of year...

These lyrics, sung here by Cleo Laine, were my starting point for a series of sculptures intended to give hope to patients in cancer care. The story of this controversial commission is given in my equally controversial book Notes on the Nude.

In the spirit of carpe diem, I must create anew.

FOOTNOTE: I have tried sharing this post on a friend's facebook site. However, it has been blocked by Facebook Admin as being contrary to their community guide lines and hence unsuited for the innocent eyes of their users. If I cover the offending nipples they may reconsider! 

This video clip  is the only way to respond to their Christian horror of nakedness.   

If music be the food of love, play on...

Who is Sylvia? What is she

That all her swains commend her?

Lovely, fair and wise is she,

The heaven such grace should render

That ador-ed she might be,

That ador-ed she might be

Sylvia is not the young lady in my painting, but the girl that Shakespeare's Gentlemen of Verona waxed lyrical about and Schubert set to music. Nevertheless, my models can claim similar attributes. 

In the context of this post Sylvia takes me back to school music lessons in the 1950's. There was a problem with my class's rendition and I was the culprit. I was singing out of tune and out of time and the music teacher told me to stand silently to one side. My fledgling interest in music was quelled there and then. And it may have remained unfulfilled for the rest of my life had I not discovered jazz in my teens - a music in which key changes and timing are judged differently. 

Fortunately a teacher in my primary school days encouraged my flair for art. Rather than putting me down for not painting the subject the way the class had been instructed, she declared the result brilliant and prophesized that one day I would be an artist.

As I said in my blog post "On the spur of the moment" there are similarities between my kind of jazz and my way of painting. In his book The Making of Jazz, James Lincoln Collier has this to say on the subject of key changes and time schemes:

If it seems complicated, it is. Jazz is not a simple music. It is the necessity for reproducing the effects as the ones I have described that makes it so difficult to teach, so difficult to learn. Of the tens of thousands who have attempted to play it, not one in a hundred or so have ever done it supremely well. It is a demanding art form indeed.

Returning to Shakespeare; jazz singer Cleo Laine made an album in 1964 titled Shakespeare and all that Jazz. Here she is on the track from that LP, If Music be the Food of Love.

And music being the food of love brings me to a question recently asked by one of my daughters: which has meant most to you in life, romance or painting? My answer: They are one of the same.

The artist as a sitting duck

Tuel Lane Lock Under Construction, Rochdale Canal, Sowerby Bridge.  Watercolour 18" x 28"

I paint from life, whether it be the model indoors or a townscape outdoors. It is the only way I can capture the living moment. 

When outdoors I am a sitting duck for mischievous children. My painting of Tuel Lane Lock was made under a hail of pelted stones. In the Caribbean I have had sand thrown my way when painting beach scenes. If not children, biting ants run a close second. The photographer can click his shutter and run, I can't.

In the tropics, shade is another factor. If, a hundred years from now, some critic gives a learned opinion as to why I chose a particular vantage point, I doubt that my need to find shade would come into it.

When working indoors from the nude figure, it is the model that becomes the sitting duck to troublesome mosquitos or sculptural techniques that go wrong. On one occasion when taking a life cast, my model was covered in plaster that refused to set and later encased in a plaster cast that stubbornly resisted being removed. Fortunately my models are made of tough stuff and have a good sense of humour. 

But working from life can have its idyllic undisturbed moments. My painting of the Rochdale Canal passing through rural countryside is a case in point.  

Rochdale Canal.  Watercolour 18" x 28"

Capturing the elements

 

A preliminary sketch for a series of Virgin Island paintings made 30 years ago. 

A lightening sketch reminds me more about the subject than a photograph can ever do. The lines that I put down in those few seconds are a brain scan of what I want to portray. 

A note in my diary relates to the above sketch and reads:

And now back to the landscape and a need to escape from the limitations of the past. 

The painting below is from the same period and proves that I made my escape!