Two months have passed since father died and while I cannot say that terms have been come to, the resumption of daily life and daily work have helped move us along. (The other day however I thought I saw him in the street...) Our time has been well spent and indeed we have taken advantage of this most unusually clement of winters to produce numerous paintings and drawings in the Cezannian way but as was the case last winter I have not been able to keep up regular correspondence so with this entry I sent in a batch. Maybe this is how it must be from now on especially with our change of master and by the way, in case you elect to rescind my scattered and indulgent 'go on' from the previous post I should just mention here that we have made the decision to work with Cezanne as master for a bit, something that we tried a few years back.
So we have been Doing but instead of steaming-in towards realisation like an express train a la Van Gogh, we have adopted the timorous but determined limp of Cezanne, where paintings emerge slowly like an old photograph in a bath of developer,1 slowly agitating. To show for it we have four oils done and two more in the dev so to speak. But it should be said however that with Cezanne as master the works cannot so easily be determined as 'done' as was the case when working in the Van Gogh way.
With the latter method works marked the days and ones experience of time and events in linear fashion. Most often VG went out and experienced the day and came home with a painting to show for it. It is illogical to return because that time has gone, he'd just start another, but with Cezanne time and experience must be understood differently to enable one to return to different motifs and re-enter the space of the painting, each one of which is a world. Thought of thus it is beginning to feel tremendously, almost gravely inspiring but at the same time I can feel it dragging us under to the point where it has been necessary to check our ropes.2
I squeezed in a trip to the national recently which was a birthday present to myself and there we were able to examine a couple of Cezanne's in the up close and in complete solitude I might add. Their best Cezanne however, or rather the one I looked forward to seeing most is on loan in Mora and then off to Basel for a year. No matter, their still life of a little statue and fruit is in that wonderful inbetween or half developed state which one often finds with Cezanne and where one wonders whether he considered it finished? I have begun a work based on it.
We have a trip to Scotland planned to scatter my fathers ashes at the cemetery where his mother lays and to introduce my girls to the family. That will take us out of it for a week or so but it will perhaps provide the chance to see the Impressionists exhibition at their national.
Reading: I have continued reading Don Quixote and it continues to please and dazzle although I can already see why Nabokov wrote that it is a an exercise in extreme cruelty. You see in his madness, his fantasy of shivelry sees him essentially becoming a raj3 who just goes around starting on whoever he comes across. The cruelty is due to the fact that because he is not a knight he just gets battered all the time, at least so far. But the all the tricks I thought so modern are in Cervantes right enough.
Also I have my mitts on a wonderful book about Pissarro and Cezanne and their collaboration which accompanied the show at the MOMA in 2005. Written by Lucien Pissarro who is the great grandson it presents a fascinating account of the years they worked together. It is especially interesting to see works of the same motif side by side but my enthusiasm is always tempered by the reality that we shall never experience painting as experimental discovery, as they did. We can but ape, and so saying I think it is time to reassess our rationale of breakage and see how our initial reasons4 for the return to the origins of modernism stack up today, but not in this post. I wonder though if an honest assessment concludes that breakage has no legs would we be able to stop painting? Have we become too attached to the colours, too the duk and the thrill and solitude of the plein air?
I finished the laying out the book of the first season and had an author copy printed by The Amazon and am now in the process of doing the corrections so in a couple of weeks it will be ready. It has turned out rather well and I hope you will be pleased, maybe it could help you in any future funding bids?
The Chinese are at it bless'em with an Orwellian AI surveillance system that puts old George's5 original vision in the shade and no mistake. It includes a method of predictive policing whereby the algorithm decides, based on harvested data, who is a likely criminal and those unfortunates are scooped up and served a sentence to rehabilitate them prior to their crime. Come to think of it that punts old Franz's6 vision of a secret court into the long grass also. In fact what fun it would be for some postgraduate to rewrite the trial replacing the secret court system with an AI algorithm. It would work very well I fancy, just imagine the opening scene of the arrest and the two lazy jobsworths carrying it out. It must be happening on a daily basis all over China!
"You are under arrest"
"What have I done?"
"Nothing...yet."
I suppose we better watch Minority Report.7
This new fear from China was the subject of a SVT report about uses or mis-uses of data and the threat of AI learning algorithms but I now treat these terrifying developments with a happy cheer. Oh those elites! And you know they are selling their total surveillance system to other countries all over the world, establishing what the journalists termed a ' virtual bamboo curtain'. In any case I have decided to be rid of my smart phone and to become even more conscious of internet usage. I do not want to be predicted by an algorithm and so I intend to try and become unpredictable. Yes, yes, perhaps unpredictability and irrationality might be a way of life in resistance to the Borg to go along with the noise makeup that some in London are donning to thwart the face-rec cameras.8
So with the world travelling further and further into the pit of state gangsterism and the people along with them I find myself needing to construct myself a wee ladder of hope which even if hopelessly naive will help orient us and also will help in my personal quest to not appear to be a miserable son of a bitch for my children as they grow up. But where oh where to we find our first rung?
A handshake,
John
1 Chemical solution used in pre digital photography.
2 Possibly a mental health reference.
3 North east regional English slang word meaning a volatile and violent nature.
4 See Torpoint Art Service.
5 Orwell
6 Kafka
7 Cruise
8 Facial graphics designed to thwart facial recognition surveillance systems.