Conversations from the Field
Part Three
Sunday is a perilous day for the plein-air painter. All kinds of citizens are at large, and the festive atmosphere that springs up in a park or reserve on the weekend, transforms the working artist into a curio: the Sunday painter, appearing as a relic from another time. To paint outdoors on the weekend is to become a part of the scenery, a charming addition to the backdrop of other peoples’ leisure, and with their workaday inhibitions relaxed, people will poke and prod. On Sunday afternoons I’ve often become the object of a kind of confession that it’s hard to know how to respond to; a monologue that I, a captive audience of one, end up absorbing as a silent service to the speaker, in spite of my desire to work. There is one subject that is more common than any other to this kind of speaker: their connection to art, which more often than not is so slender it barely warrants mentioning.
Only the other week, a grey man parted company with his picnicking companions especially to harass me. “Lost your easel have you?” he yapped as he paced towards my painting spot. (He was referring to my practice of laying the canvas flat on the ground.) I did not reply to his jesting enquiry. Even from a distance I could see that this man was going to be a handful, and when he repeated, “have you lost your easel?” I feigned absorption in my work. Undeterred, he surveyed the painting in progress and was quick to remark, “aaah, it’s abstract”, in a questioning, almost sceptical tone that invited me to expand on my aims and attitudes. The painting under my brush was not particularly abstract. Its proportions were accurate, its colours only a bit heightened. The broad strokes I’d been making did affect an abbreviation of detail and gave to the image a feeling of movement, but it was every bit a picture of that place. Sensing that the grey man was spoiling for a debate, and fearing that I might reciprocate, I steeled myself and kept painting, quietly. He tried another tack. “My friend over here, he’s actually a close relative of Brett Whiteley. He doesn’t talk about it much, but they’re cousins”.
I broke my silence: “I don’t like Whiteley’s work.” My defensive faculties had swung into action. He shot back: “Well, no, me either! And unfortunately he didn’t end up with any of Brett’s paintings. Not that you’d want one, but it would have been handy to sell…”
The cynic in me is inclined to see in a person like this, nothing more than an egotistical bore. There I stood, concentrating on a reality complex enough to be thought unfathomable, practicing an activity that has confounded some of the greatest minds, and the man’s demand was that I shift my attention to his stake in art: the fact that he is twice removed - once through friendship, once by death - from Australia’s solidest art auction performer. As stories go, it’s not much, and yet it’s more substantial than some I’ve had to listen to. Over the years I’ve been stopped with tales of sisters who sketched, sons who are studying art, even by a man who thought I’d be interested to know that a friend of his friend had in his house “one of those ink drawings the Chinese artists do”.
But the good part of my soul senses something else in their buffoonish approaches. In their way, aren’t these people asserting that they are connected to the thing called art, which evidently matters little in their lives, leaving them with a feeling of hollowness where there ought to be something more? The dialogue described above is not a good illustration, but sometimes my interrupter becomes quiet as they tell the story of their artistic relation; their words fade to an uncomfortable silence and it seems that they are bearing the weight of loss. Maybe that person is gone and they are grieving, not thinking of art at all. Perhaps, and here I risk venturing too far, they are half-conscious that to arrest appearances on the picture plane is a small victory over death, a way of holding on to perceptions that are fleeting, leaving them for others to see. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that these people are attracted to the sight of an artist at work, and on noticing that something real is taking place between the painter and the world, they want to be recognised in return.
They would do well to note the examples set by little children. Like the artist, they haven’t stopped struggling with the basic matter of observation. Not yet acquainted with the whys of art, when kids see a painter at work they are thoroughly occupied just trying to understand what is taking place in front of them. “What colour is that?” they will ask, as purple and brown pool together in the mixing tray. “Is that stuff water?” I have even been asked “are your paintings Italian?” which seemed to be an inquiry as to their quality more than their nationality.
It’s heartbreaking to see this inquisitiveness disappearing as children grow towards adolescence. At seven or eight years they ask “why are you painting over it?” baffled by my recklessness in starting again on a painted canvas. Their question cuts to the very heart of what it is to paint a picture, and like all simple, philosophical questions it is surprisingly difficult to answer. By the age of nine they want to know “is this your job?” and at eleven it’s the more direct interrogation: “How much do you sell it for?” (Which seems remarkably similar to where Whiteley’s cousin’s friend ended up.) But in that precious pre-adolescent decade, the child exhibits just the kind of intelligence that looking at art requires: an absence of hardened attitudes and a willingness to appraise work from the ground up. Works of art push the viewer to the consideration of strange forms and relationships, and who better to serve as a model of an ideal viewer, than the child who’s able to ask: “is that red?”