Hot Moonlight
Blackpaint 2020
I’m reverting to the idea I had a few years ago, of putting one of my paintings in at the start of a blog: that way, you get to see at least one of my efforts, even if you’ve landed here by chance and head off again immediately… The title is stolen from the Highwaymen track, “Born and Raised in Black and White” – “Welcome Home! said the hot moonlight, We were born and raised in black and white…”
“What Painting is” by James Elkins (Routledge, NY and London, 2019)
Originally published in 1999, this book is the most idiosyncratic and fascinating book on painting I’ve ever come across, I was astonished to find it so, because the author is “Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago” (back cover of the book). I thought, therefore, it would be another discussion of the finished product in its various forms, historical probably, or philosophical, or both, like “What is Painting?” by Julian Bell, which I also got for Christmas.
How wrong I was. This is about painting, not paintings – the actual process. Elkins compares painting to alchemy, which he treats not as a pathetic and laughable attempt to “do” science before the proper subject was invented, but as a dedicated, almost heroic pursuit of the knowledge of things and properties and states – before we knew what the elements were.
It’s not wholly successful – too much alchemical detail. But what he says about paint and painting (he painted before becoming an academic, but felt he had to give it up) rang bells for me. Consider the following:
“…some paint is like the refuse of the studio, and some is like human waste. In the studio, it can feel as if paint is not just reminiscent of shit, but it is shit. The alchemists realised that excrement cannot be denied, that it has to be used.” Hmm, yes, been there… Or this, occasioned by a section of a painting by Francis Bacon: “A fixed element in a work, such as a dried passage where a painting is effectively finished, can be a cornerstone around which the work is constructed..” [This can become a nuisance as the painting develops and “gathers” around it, however : ]”…The paint gathers around the one fixed spot like the nacre of a pearl around a piece of grit….The painting swirls around the fixed spot, protecting and enclosing it like a bandage. But thought rubs against it , and it aches.”
My partner often says to me that you have to paint out the “best” bits in a painting, because they can hold you back, or force you to make the rest of the painting “fit” round them. I suppose this is the same idea as hers. This book is turning out to be something of a revelation to me.
The Day of the Locust, dir. John Schlesinger (1975)
I finally got round to seeing this, after a friend of mine spent an hour or so out of the last forty years (not all at once, but in several bits), telling me how good it is. I should have taken more notice. It starts as a portrait of several “types” of struggling characters on the fringes of the Hollywood cinema industry in the 30s – and turns gradually into a surreal disaster film, almost a horror story. It reminded me a little of Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished “The last Tycoon” – probably because that too had a Hollywood lot disaster (a flood). I haven’t read the Nathanael West novel, but my friend says the film is pretty close to the book, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland (whose character is called Homer Simpson) and William Atherton are all great. Burgess Meredith is maybe a little exaggerated – but maybe not. Artwork, some scenes from Goya, some hint of Marlene Dumas (but she’s later, of course, and might even have seen this) striking – but who did it? Art Direction is by Richard Macdonald, but I guess he’s not the artist. And I wonder why it’s called “Day of the Locust”.
I was going to write some more, but I want to publish and I’m well over my 500 words so I’ll leave it for now, with a few more of the old pictures I’ve been “revising” over the last few weeks:
Caught the Wave
Embero
Eco – Worrier
Greenhorn
Until the next time.
Blackpaint
12/02/21
Tags: Day of the Locust, James Elkins, Nathanael West, What Painting is
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