Happy new year to you and anyone who is left over there at Kommune Norrtälje.
The DS has taken the fiddlers seat over this past ten days or so in favour of an enforced period of complete switch off from work and from the world, followed by a gentle re entry via some detached reflection. As a result I have decided on one or two things about the future of the season which I would like to lay out. The first thing is perfectly straight forward; please forget all that I said in the previous communique regards music and the MirrorMan. You would be doing me an enormous good turn if you could just consider it all just a bad dream. Secondly, and this is quite serious news, I have resolved to put the muzzle on Van Gogh for a while and have invited Cezanne back to his perch on my other shoulder where he whispered to us during the latter part of my SAS campaign and throughout my failed commercial season. I think I mentioned this last season, the turn to Cezanne I mean, but probably just in passing.
My decision to return to this way of working now however requires a little more going over and that is what I wish to do in this post which as you have seen contains no attachment. Instead I thought that you yourself could add a reproduction of the pictures I refer to below from the archive that your KN man took back in autumn 2018? Assuming that will be possible please indulge me for a few paragraphs.1
Look here, aside from some oily juvinailia inspired by my then sambo, the artist Rebecca Hough, my plein air painting journey really began with my Torpoint Art Service residency and the work, rationale and technique of Vincent Van Gogh. That was it. I was just wanting to paint along his lines as best I could. Over time however, and through reading on the post-impressionist period, the work of Cezanne became more and more of a fascination, perhaps due to all the lessons learned about Van Gogh’s working method (through practice I might add) I was in a position to understand just how radically differently Cezanne went about it.
Cezanne was a figure that I only knew through the mist, so to speak. His widely accepted position as the 'father of modern art' was known to me but only via some potted history and the odd Picasso quote. All of that is very much out of focus in the contemporary art factories, just something to breeze past. I had no real notion of his work and how revolutionary it was and after all I initially only entered into the fray of plein air painting as a conceptual move, to provoke and ask questions of the would be art radicals after the financial crisis and austerity had changed everything; there was no base knowledge. Wind the spool on a few years and we can be found here in Bergby having become bewitched by the painting for real and making a semi successful fist of pretending to be a painter. Being a stranger in town it was possible to over egg my experience and standing as a painter in the UK to the punters over here, (it helped having come from Cornwall of course - forgive me) and we in fact became semi successful in terms of sales during a couple of summers and there was even that interview for Jacksons. On the back of this whiff of success ambitious plans were laid for a commercial season; loans were taken, materials were purchased in bulk, business cards were printed, websites were launched, a 'house portrait' venture was established and I even became officially self-employed! Oh how earnestly I calculated my predicted earnings. All told I was about a nut hair from disappearing completely into the identity of 'local painter'.
Well it didn’t work out and the failed commercial effort of that 2017/18 season led me to dispense with many ambitions and delusions about the viability of a painting business beyond the local success I had enjoyed. To put it simply I hit the ceiling of what was possible in this area and with my talent, but more to the point a valuable lesson was learned that painting for punters was a dangerous red herring which robbed the whole process of its magic and life giving energy. So I drew a line under it, but before the dust had time even to settle I chanced upon the Dignity Scholarship.
Forgive me for this review but I feel the time has come to put down a bit more about how it is and has been. No doubt a reaction to the death of my father and a desire to get it together, to set things to right, to square up and clear the decks or some such, but I'm coming to the Cezanne.
I did for a time try to paint following Cezanne in a serious way, more of which I will describe below, but that good work I let devolve into a bad painting style designed to better produce the commercial work I had planned. Tut tut. By the time all was lost following the costly Stockholm blank1 and the humiliation at Ekman’s,2 I was more than ready to reset myself to pursuing the Van Gogh method with full force once again, but look here, it is important for me and I owe it to you, considering the change of direction that I am proposing so early in the 2020 season, to brush in a little history, so let us hark back to when the initial spark of Cezanne fell into my kindling.
It was before the idea of our commercial bid had even taken shape, at some point perhaps early in 2016, when I came across the biography of Cezanne by Alex Danchev which I found to be excellent on all fronts especially in the awkward, stubborn, determined character he wisped up. Most fascinating however was the picture he painted of how Cezanne, painted his pictures. To be precise, the way Cezanne came to develop over his life a way of Doing it entirely his own, resulting in ripples of influence extending through all fields and still being felt today; You know Danchev places old Cezanne's influence on modernism at top table saying even that "the revelations of Cezanne are akin to those of Marx or Freud". (!) High praise indeed. Following this intoxicating read the draw and challenge to try the Cezanne way was very great especially after the Van Gogh way was all I knew. You know it is hard to imagine two approaches to plein air work more opposing; one fast and loose the other perversely, painstakingly patient. One improvising within the moment, attacking in great salvos of energy finishing a work per day at least the other observing, thinking, waiting then a gesture, a couple of strokes then up to twenty minutes can elapse apparently before then next. A work by Cezanne could evolve for years in this way and still not be covered, quite impossible to imagine but alluring also.
So what is it exactly, this Cezanne way? Well we must say that we don’t know; nobody knows how he did it really. We can say that he works at a very slow pace, returning again and again to the subject for months and years. He painted in patches, here and there at different spots all over, as opposed to laying in areas and thinking in preconceived terms of sky, land, sea, tree, house, horse. These patches were developed in reaction to the academic rigours of salon painting but they were more, they were revolutionary. Beneath the patch, Danchev writes, lies a democratic ideology, an equality of emphasis where all patches are equal regardless of what they represent. Cezanne famously treats some piece of fabric or table edge with the same importance as an eye or head.
He painted to a two tone logic in which the painting process becomes understood as the setting off of two tones together, again and again. He paints with his 'constructive stroke' which is to say, systemically constructing forms using a build up of repeating graphic motifs, like a set of short vertical dashes for example, which are used to describe form. All this by the way was developed in league with an anarchist by the name of Camille Pissarro in a collaboration that is quite the opposite of Van Gogh and Gauguin, but by far the most eye opening aspect of his ‘way’, an aspect which forms the basis of his entire approach it seems, is the painting of sensations. Painted sensations perceived whilst in contact with nature rather than painting too readily what one knows is 'there' in nature. This also is the origin of his famous departure from traditional ideas of perspective no doubt, but look here, these sensations are quite the enigmatic concept and there is not much on offer in terms of a definition or any description about what the very fuck he might mean. All I can say with confidence is that the way I have understood 'sensation' and worked with it in practice did have a profound effect on the way of painting for ourself and once in that groove of sensation it can provide a creative buzz of a different sort. A slow burning kind of visual sorcery which my dimmerd mind can only liken to young Neo outwitting the matrix and suddenly seeing everything slowed down. That state though appeared only as the promised land to be reached after years at the easel but even so it gives one a lift to see a clear path.
The most revealing and inspiring bit of words regards Cezanne’s working method and the sensation comes, naturally enough, from the old bugger himself. Talking about his painting process he wrote:
“There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things are tending to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again… Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close the errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradations, I bring them together… They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They acquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes and spots which I see in my mind and which we see with our eyes, then my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high or too low. It is true, it is full…”
Well, “not be a single loose strand” the man says. “Not a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously.” This translates to me as the gradual build up, the withholding of the urge to Do too hastily, to let it out gradually like the controlled escape of air from some knocked about soda bottle. In short: restraint.
“I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradations”. Painting according to sensations of colour and movement gleaned according to no sequence or preconceived idea regards to what one knows the objects to be. In this way one fixes a little of a tree trunk then a patch of sky, then a clod of earth, then a tone of rock then back to the tree; all executed without order and at the same time to the highest order - of loyalty to what one observes.
“It does not waver. It does not reach too high or too low.” This is simply discipline and the temperament not to stray from the tactics - like Joshua vs Ruiz 2,2 and I have found that if one can follow the recipe with enough discipline, even as a rank amateur, something unusually balanced, and often calm and ‘right’ can result.
When I first heard about Cezanne’s patients at the easel it only cemented my decision to ape the Dutchman but over time and perhaps owing to discovering my own limits, the idea of a different more considered approach seemed more attractive. After all, during these years I had no institutional commitments aside from my wish to apply to the SAS residency, so I was free to Do as I pleased without need to weave the work into the world and so I resolved to try the Cezanne way for a bit. But look here, we must acknowledge that all this painting talk can be read in any given ’learn to paint’ manual you might pluck from a shelf. The revolutions and discoveries of Van Gogh, Cezanne and the rest, are today just 'how to paint', so to be sure the ideas are not hard to absorb but my goodness me, achieving anything remotely like the original is simply not happening. So why bother? Why indeed? Well, for us it started with the TAS rationale of breakage and has evolved into a quest for Dignity and orientation but this post is not for those thoughts. Let us instead look at the results of our humble Doing in the Cezannian method. (You will have gathered by now that I intend to permit myself a full account and as we are in no danger of touching on our political themes please feel free to edit or discard this post. I leave it up to you and await your decision serenely.)3
Work A
Work B
Work C
Our first go I believe, after setting Danchev down, was a still life of paintbrushes and logs4 and another of logs and fruit. We tried a few ideas but the slowness of the Aix man was never something we could begin to emulate or we’d still be at it right now, but sensation, the two tone criterion and the democratic patch were up for grabs.
I recall being confused during these attempts, particularly at the idea of treating all aspects equally regardless of compositional relevance. I think in the paint brushes study an attempt was made to render the wooden floor of the studio in the distance which would ordinarily be brushed out into a blank or pattern. The fruit and logs study5 was gone at with my attempt at the constructive stroke combined with the two tone logic, scoring a result that while not exactly winning, was at least noticeably different. There was another of fruit and objects6 on a table that had a calm also but all told it was encouraging just to see try a new way of producing a canvas.
Following this was a still life with stacked logs I believe.7 The logs atop a wooden table and the rear made up of the wooden staircase which I placed the Danchev book. Again it was a case of staying very patient and of suppressing the urge to go too far, to not reach too high or too low as the fella says, and painting bit by bit, in patches, I recall how it became easier to disconnect psychologically a patch of tone or colour from its representational home, and this disconnected glimpse is what I understood to be a 'sensation’. They come in all shapes and sizes with varying movement, stresses and emphasis and you know it is possible to wait for them; look at a blank wall even, and sooner or later a certain shape will suggest itself and real or not that’s your sensation. So we put it down.
After a few other studies I tackled a larger, more ambitious still life arrangement of objects and fruit on a fabulous bureau.8 Putting all the lessons of the previous studies to work, the patches, the two tones, the equality of emphasis, we came away with something good, something that has a far more calm, solid and balanced feel. In this one I remember learning that is possible to radically alter the balance and weight of a composition with a patch of tone and the constructed stroke, the little cipher of green at front desk for example. The culmination of this picture brought with it a feeling of satisfaction with progress made but it was a cool headed pleasure, very far from the dizzy buzzes of the one session way.
Next I tried another bureau but with a little more symbolic content;9 art theory books, logs and oranges. This work made clear to us that the Cezannian method and pictorial symbolism make uneasy bedfellows as the very concept of symbolic content, the emphasis on certain objects of symbolic value I mean, is quite at odds with the ideal of the painted equality of the patch. But we also learned a little about leading the eye around the canvas with the constructive patch in combination with the compositional objects. For example in the second bureau painting the eye can begin in lower right where it can catch the blue patch which hops up the side of the bureau and tips the stack of books over and finds its way to the only book still standing (Castoriadis) before toppling off the edge and boinging downwards, off the open draws before scampering across the logs back towards the foreground. It's a circular read.
Work D
Work E
Work F
Those bureaus brought the experiment to an end and by the time that last one was finished, the spring was approaching and I returned to the quick work to catch the blossoms. That said there was evidence of the new approach in the spring work particularly in the fore grass of the Bergby Apple Blossom study.10 A majestic leaning apple tree which unfortunately was butchered down by its owner; and so for a few weeks of heat we have lost a lifetime of apples and blossoms.
Around the studio we have many other studies which betray more evidence of the patch method which even when applied without the rigours of discipline required to really carry it off nonetheless provides a good technique for regular plein air work. Then working on through that 2016 summer the Cezanne experiments receded, as did the work generally as the exhibition schedule took over with one in Grisslehamn, and a long showing in the barn. We also took a few weeks in the Bräcke stugans. By the time all had quietened in the early autumn, when the children were back in school and all the punters had put their game faces back on, we were able to return to regular existence. It became possible to work again and so thoughts turned back to our new man, this time however we made a bid to apply our little gleaned way of the patch to some plein air studies and to try and hold the discipline as much as we could bare. (Cezanne’s patients and discipline is not attainable of course)
The results of this autumn go began with a pair of studies of the same subject, one lashed on,11 the other pieced on via the sensation.12 It was indeed like a coin toss to decide which way to go; a penny hike, left or right, Van Gogh or Cezanne. It came down on Cezanne and there followed perhaps six or eight interesting experiments in plain air sensation painting where I can say that we did as well as we could with some modest success at least in terms of applying the lessons learned from the still lives to the outdoor work. By the end of this autumn period I felt sure I had found the direction of travel.
Let me say a little more about these then we’ll leave it.
The first work after the coin toss was a study of long grass in a harvested field.13 This one took many sessions which I was more than happy to take, feeling, as I was, boosted with the decision to commit to Cezanne. It was a field close by and I popped down there when I had a spare hour or so and worked with concentration until it waned then I stopped. Sometimes just a few strokes and obviously compared with how we have thus far tackled the DS 2 work that is radically different. Other than a study in patients and observational discipline, this work was an effort to apply a consistent graphic motif or sensation; a group of three or four strokes leaning to the left to represent the long grass. I recall that this came about organically enough and was in fact the first gesture of the work sketched out quite unconsciously, before we started almost, but then repeated and adapted, rather like when one sits down at the piano and tinkles out a phrase quite unconsciously. And just as in the music one must be careful on how one elaborates on the unconscious gesture as it seems the more aware one becomes the more stale the work can become; the freshness of the initial bunny egg disappears as quickly as it arrives and one is left only with the clunking weight of ones trying. But there's nothing wrong in that either, all our work resounds with this clunking but this preserving of lightness and look, of not going too far, is the whole shooting match when painting to the Cezannian way it seems. So I proceeded with caution and thought, taking the initial sensation as the lead in the painting and edging towards realisation best I could. You know that Picasso, (we really cannot go near that one, far too various and in any case the surrealist dreamworld is not the ticket at all politically I would say) well he said of Cezanne something that only made sense to me after this canvas in the Bergby grass - that in contrast to the usual way of painting where one works on to reach a point where a work of art is created, with a Cezanne the canvas is a work of art from the first strokes. Now that sort of talk may well sound like the hogs wash but the point is that when working in the way of sensations the game is afoot from the outset. There is no laying in the sky in a general sense for example, or the tone of some bank, no. The discipline and honesty of painting by sensation prevents thinking in terms of the tricks of the trade and shortcutism.
The considerable patients of this work compared with our usual Van Gogh rush to realise, gave us great encouragement, not that we had achieved a Cezanne but because simply it opened a door to a new way Doing in the field. In the next study of the autumn perimeter14 opposite the house we tried to adhere to the discipline of painting to sensations even further, and while we succeeded in that respect we went a little too far and came away with something a little too piecy, and not various enough. The lesson of this go was that we must be aware still that we need difference within the sensations to give better architecture the work. We need our bigs and smalls, our heavies and lights.
Work G
Work H
Work I
Work J
Work K
Work L
The next work, taken from the same position but on a size 30,15 showed us that scale works differently when working to the sensation in that the size of a canvas becomes pleasingly irrelevant, and this is a great relief from the Van Gogh way where for a size 30 one must psyche oneself up as if for a duel. I wonder if the same can be said of the smaller scales? Once again this work highlighted the sense that the strain to adhere to the sensation resulted in a forced over consciousness; how I longed to attack it. The next work was an autumn scene of a group of hay balls and a background of trees and a little red house.16 This is perhaps the best one. It shows a combination of sensation method with the spirited attack of the wet on wet or what is better termed the 'one rush' method. Now the only idea more barmy than trying to paint like Van Gogh is trying to paint like Cezanne but perhaps the greatest folly of all is to try and combine the two. A fudge Sunday! But that is what we have here, not through our mastery but precisely through our lack of mastery and discipline. We worked with restraint until we could restrain ourselves no longer and LASH! On with the ochre in the foreground grass!
Work M
Work N
Work O
The next painting was a house portrait commission which rather halted the flow of the work but I did adopt the new way. In fact I painted two pictures of the house (as I usually do) to give the customer a choice of one close and one distant view and on this occasion it was a choice of styles also; he chose the one rush close up and so we are left with the distant view of the little red house set in a autumn landscape and a broken blue sky.17 It shows signs of discipline I feel and is perhaps a little more varied in form and motif than the two over disciplined views of the perimeter in Bergby. Due to customer care though the house is well overdone.
If memory serves the next work was a forest scene18 just down the back lane from the house which again took many short sessions to complete. It ended up decidedly rough and in fact probably could have done with much more work. You know I can quite see why Cezanne paintings often either look quite unfinished or are impossible to date because when adhering to the painting of sensations the terms finished and unfinished do not make sense anymore. Start and stop seems more appropriate and for whatever reason we stopped this forest view.
Work P
Work Q
There were a few other works in this autumn campaign, I recall an autumn effect study19 of trees featuring the spearmint green of the grass in the suddenly cooler mornings, and a view of City Hall in Stockholm.20 This latter one painted already anticipating the commercial efforts of the next year. There were some winter studies also. I remember a view of trees vertical,21 like bars across the canvas with the snow set in rhythmically between and also a view of the cut wheat field in the snow22 which was not so much a continuation of our experiment with sensation but was rather just painted with a little more patients. I think there was a self portrait at this time with ourselves hunched in a patchily painted brown overcoat. Perhaps a nod to the Pissarro portrait of Cezanne looking a little grimalkin.23
Work R
Work S
Work T
Next came a view of old Engstöm's studio in Grisslehamn24 which granne Elisabeth purchased and which perhaps shows an authentic amalgamation of the 'one rush' plein air technique in ape of Van Gogh and the lessons learned from our Cezannian experiments at sensation painting. The sky particularly shows all aspects of our Cezanne engagement; the two tone idea, the patch and the constructive stroke have been applied with the force and vigour of the one rush method. Could this point the way forward for us now I wonder?
As the winter cleared in 2018 it was full steam ahead towards our commercial program and that meant tackling works to suit the exhibition schedule I had laid out which featured no less than nine exhibitions. Unfortunately this zeal for success robbed us of our artistic sense resulting in all that we have learned being marshalled into positions to best suit some imaginary punter. A familiar story for those artists hoping to score some living, and had we made a killing we would no doubt not be complaining but our reverse was so dramatic as to ensure we shan't venture down that road again. We ended up with a sort of soft shticky version of sensation painting with which to comfortably apply to any scene. It was a sure way of constructing a picture but without the discipline, the results just don't cut the mustard. There were apple blossoms25 and plum branches, a couple of rock views in Grisslehamn and I even sat like an arsehole in Kröns trägård knocking one off to a row of plant boxes and a red barnhouse.26
Work U
Work V
Work W
No. Thanks to our commercial venture, the door to a new way of Doing that we peeped around during the autumn experiments was politely closed on us. No admittance. And now, with the events of the last few weeks still dominating the hours, I feel the need of a change and it is my decision to reach for that Cezannian door knob once again and see if we might get through. Where might it take us?
The last picture we painted before applying to the DS was a simple view from a field of small shrubs in long grass and a row of larger trees at the back end.27 It was painted in a state of despair and grim defiance after having assessed our season and calculated our reverses both financial and artistic. We had been longing to get back to some disciplined painting and this work was perhaps the most patient of all, taking some eight sessions, working slowly and concentratedly, not reaching to high or too low.
You know, as we were painting this last one we were penning our Dignity Scholarship application poem. Indeed, even though the world had been off the table for us since the TAS debacle we had over the summer plugged back in to the critical context and as we whiled away the invigilation hours28 we discovered, online, the horrors of the post truth era. The Russian social media meddling and the alt\far right monster that was choking the globe; the beast stretched its SD tentacle all the way to Trästa Bron!! Well the only way I knew to combine the painting work and the wider world was to go back to Van Gogh and pick up from our rationale of breakage. Now here we are with our plans for the 2020 season of all seasons in tatters and even our bid for orientation that we strove for last season and hoped to continue this, has been blown apart by death.
The question I suppose is will the reality of experiencing death, my fathers death, at the closest most intimate scale possible, serve to set our feet to the ground or send us reeling?
Work X
PS
A glance at some news rag in a waiting room revealed to me the extent of the Conservative alt right election victory in England; a wash of ugly blue. Heaved sigh. What can one say? The results confirm that enough of "the people" have asked for it and by God now they're going to get it.
1 We have added the relevant images.
2 Pugilist prize fight noted for the disciplined performance of Anthony Joshua.
3 We have published the full account.
4 See Work A
5 See Work B
6 See Work C
7 See Work D
8 See Work E
9 See Work F
10 See Work G
11 See Work H
12 See Work I
13 See Work J
14 See Work K
15 See Work L
16 See Work M
17 See Work N
18 See Work O
19 See Work P
20 See Work Q
21 See Work R
22 See Work S
23 See Work T
24 See Work U
25 See Work V
26 See Work W
27 See Work X
28 At this time John was exhibiting in Galleri Svea in Stockholm.