AfrikaBurn, Africa Plays

For those not familiar with the "AfrikaBurn" festival, it's a gathering of people in the dry N Cape Karoo, bringing with them all manner of inspired or crazy ventures into creativity. Based on the "Burning Man" festivals in the States, the creations are actually burned at the end, thus the name.

The conceptual framework of the festival is rather interesting and you can find out more here, but what drew my attention was a series of pics taken by a photographer friend on mine at the 2009 event - Monica Miguel Vaccaro. She documented the entire event using a rather specialised fish-eye lens, warping space, curving horizons and giving the sense that, yes, we actually live on a round ball.

I relate strongly to Monica's sense of composition and her eye for interesting elements, so some of the images were saying loud and clear, "paint me", which with her permission I began to do earlier this year. The first of these began with this image.

It's taken through one of the circles in the dome above, and the line in the sand is actually an enormous pictogram a la the Nasca lines in Peru, visible only from the air. In this case the lines were laid out with the use of GPS, but unfortunately no helicopter was on hand to get the full effect. Nice concept though. The bicycle is there because cars are banned and cycling is the best way to get around.

 As is usual with my approach I messed about with the image in Photoshop, and in this case took that a stage further by printing out the result and doodling over it with a ballpoint pen. For no reason other than that I could, I enlarged the rear wheel of the bike and added a flag. The lines in the sky followed an idea of drawing a pictogram there.

In practice though the bike had to be reduced on the canvas, the lines became a crisscross dividing the painting into segments rather as if reality itself were cracking, and the curve of the horizon changed. How that last happened I really don't recall, but I much prefer the final version.

This piece is something of a stylistic departure from earlier work, in particular because I was experimenting in the final painting with the  doodles and cross-hatching of the conceptual sketch. I found that the paintbrush isn't that comfortable with the approach so the result was quite messy, but somehow it works.

At 180x110cm it's a big canvas, but as of this writing I'm contemplating doing a short run of prints which will be smaller due to the limits of printable canvas size.

So Anyway...

It's been quite a while since my last post, and rather a lot has happened. Out here in the African Sticks the big annual shindig is summer season, when the N2 snaking along the Garden Route fills up with happy holiday makers eager to spend the money they've slaved for all year. It's rather like the Sardine Run elsewhere along the coast, only with BMWs.

So I took advantage of an empty shop at a fascinating take on the shopping experience - Timberlake Village in the middle of everywhere alongside the N2 - and put on an exhibition of work by myself and some other local artists.

Looks awfully trendy don't it just?





Well, be that as it may it all went pretty well and by the end of season the place was almost cleaned out.

Recession? Huh?

So anyway.

The point of this bit of back patting is that the various works in progress reported on last year were brought to completion for the show. In particular Beach House Kleinkrantz last mentioned as merely a thought was done, up in pride of place and nice and big.

Earthen Moon, Tall Story and Scorpio Sunbird were also complete and were sold over season along with Beach House and African Dream. Of these Earthen Moon, Scorpio Sunbird and Beach House are still available in limited numbers as giclee prints on art canvas.

So what now?

Well, I rather like Timberlake, so after the show was taken down I thought I'd try the shop out as a working studio/gallery. It's been about 2 months now and I'm rather enjoying this, having started on a new series of paintings derived from the 2009 "Afrika Burns" gathering.

More about that shortly...

The search for authenticity

And then you get and artist
says he doesn't want to paint at all
He takes an empty canvas
sticks it on the wall

Mark Knopfler
In the Gallery


Behind the scenes, pretty much constantly as I watch the stuff that appears on the canvas of my mind and on the easel in front of me lurks the inevitable question, "Is this Art?"

This leads to the next question, "What is Art?" and waiting in the queue just behind that one is "What is art to me?"

I'll confess that I've never really resolved any of these questions. Mostly I dance around a sort of central pole that I sense but don't fully grasp, but a few days ago some of the mist cleared when I realised that my obsession with marks as they land on the canvas is a quest for something authentic. This doesn't take me very far because immediately the next question pops up, "What's authentic?"

What Mark was complaining about in his song quoted above was that the passion of his hero Harry, who "made a bareback rider, proud and free on a horse" was dismissed by the hip art crowd in favour of clever statements like hanging a blank canvas on the wall and calling it art.

So is cleverness authentic art? Could be. I guess.

But then investment banksters are also clever. In fact it could be argued that their diabolically clever manipulation of our lives via the money system is as much art as Damien Hirst's provocatively clever manipulation of our sensitivities with his sheep in formaldehyde or rotting barbecue.

Perhaps Art then is what you can get away with. After all a con artist is still called an artist.

However that may play out, one thing's clear - I'm not in the con business. Between the need to communicate with an audience and the sometimes errant meanderings of my mind there's a wobbly line that defines a common perception of value. The elasticity of that line has often surprised me as I veered closer to my own brand of madness than seemed safe, only to find an enthusiastic reception in the people passing by. Or at least some of them.

So bolstered by this knowledge I now find myself playing with something I don't even really understand. If I look at this current piece objectively I must admit that it flirts dangerously with a terrible cliche, the raven haired voluptuous beauty. I guess I'm attempting the opposite of cleverness, allowing whatever arises to arise and dealing with the fallout later.

So is it art? Mmmm.

The only thing that's clear to me is that I'd like the strokes that land on it to have the honesty of living their lives much as they were born. Some will pretty, some ugly but interesting. Those who are neither get dissed and scrubbed into the chorus line. More marks will land later and slowly build up a song amongst themselves.

As for the overall impact of the piece as it progresses, I'm willing to keep pushing paint around and wait to see if the story that eventually emerges is of value.

In the meantime another Tall Story is slowly approaching that mysterious central pole. I pushed some more paint around this week and found some resolution to the lack of integration that has been its big issue since the start. It's been a rather difficult child with a 6 month labour so far but as I look at it now I begin to think it might just turn out to be a favorite one.

Also meanwhile, two other children are looking for re-incarnation, both of them revisits of much earlier pieces that I've been wanting to explore again. This one's currently called Water Phoenix but that could change. Here's the digital thought form. I'm thinking of making it nice and big.

It's a development of the 4th piece I did when this painting lark began, when I knew that I wanted to work loose and free but didn't know how to yet, and settled for painfully careful.

The other revisit I'm thinking of also harks back to the early universe - Beach House, and again I want to go big, currently thinking 180x120cm. Even bigger would be even nicer but there's a limit on what I can move around the world, and that's it. Here's the original digitally manipulated as a guide.

Tall Story

So something moved.

Let me tell you something about sitting doing nothing in a deliberate and sustained manner. It's not easy. The mind wants to constantly jump up and go ferreting about in it's grimy old haunts and has to be repeatedly ushered back like a child to its lessons. Which in this case is a little silly because what it has to be ushered back to is this incredible African Spring. Paradise can't be all that different.

Anyway, the experiment was to see if something moved on its own without me moving it, and I can now report a useful outcome. Earlier this week I got interested enough in the unresolved King of Streets painting to get up from my stillness and try an idea I'd thought of on the weekend.

That was the first thing that moved.

The beauty of computer imagery is that I can try things out digitally before committing oil to canvas, and in going there I discovered an earlier digital experiment I'd forgotten about. It was suddenly so obviously right that I took the jump and painted it. And ended up in quite new territory.

Here's the backstory. Back when I lived in the Cape Town I was often struck by how much the faces of the city's street people resemble the original inhabitants of this land, the Bushmen. Whether this is true or not it seems feasible that their hunter-gatherer lifestyle got shunted aside by a new world that had no place for them, and they ended up at the bottom of the pile.

However that may be, at the time I often looked at my own struggles of survival in the modern world in terms of small nomadic bands roaming and living off the indigenous landscape. The modern equivalent featured shiny buildings and BMWs cluttering the same spaces, but the struggle for survival still ran strong in this new world. Only now with TV and more angst.

So probably my interest in this couple was more personal than just a subject to paint. What attracted my attention was their incredible vitality and joy in the moment in spite of their poverty, so the contrast in the painting between them and the wealthier but more inhibited crowd around them wasn't lost on me.

But the painting just wouldn't get resolved. I'd tried all sorts of ways to fill in the bottom left corner which clearly needed something, but nothing worked. One idea that kept surfacing was to put cave-style images of animals there but it seemed somehow too obvious, or maybe too pretentious. But that was in fact the idea I discovered when I looked at my earlier digital experiment.

So I did that and immediately the dust of Africa entered the picture. The new atmosphere was undeniable. A layer of prehistory had become superimposed over the modern street scene, as if the deep memory still running in those lined faces had seeped out and onto the canvas. It felt authentic.

Only trouble is, I felt like a fraud. What business did I, a first world white man, have painting in a bow carrying hunter? Ok, it's out there in my world which happens to be the Africa I love, but it's not my culture. Hell, I haven't even seen a real life bow hunter, other than as cave drawings. I'm basically being a cultural thief.

And then the second movement happened. How would those ancient cave painters view this bizarre white man's world? Without really realising I was doing it I scratched a primal hi-rise building amongst the dusty animals.

It took all of 10 seconds, but it completely transformed the painting, and for that matter my role as painter. The whole long human story of civilisation rising like a bean stalk through the most fundamental patterns of human life got summed up in those few strokes, and along with it our dislocation from our own deepest nature.

In the months I've been hunting for a solution to this painting I've occasionally been asked what the man in it is saying. In the context of the primitive hi-rise and the plane I added afterwards, the expression on is face is saying, "You won't believe this baby, it's just too wacky to be true, but I swear, it's real."

So I've decided to rename it Crazy Story.

Come to a stop. Get more done.

Because I can, and because circumstances have suggested it, I've been experimenting with the complete absence of effort as a way of getting things done.

If this sounds like a load of bollocks to you, indulge me for a sentence or two before you sign off because there is method at work in this seeming madness.

It arises out of the process that produces the work I do. I've noticed again and again how the best paintings are most often those that arise by surprise, take over the creative process and basically paint themselves. Quite often this will produce something that I believe at first the public will dislike, while typically it's those pieces that become the most popular.

Because of this I often say that I just follow orders, it's not me doing the work. This is familiar to many creative professionals, like musicians who report songs dropping into their minds essentially complete, all they had to do is write them down and soak up the applause.

Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.

By contrast I've also seen with tiresome monotony how charging after some stated goal with all the enthusiasm of a puppy far too often just produces a tired and disappointed puppy.

So for some years now I've been fascinated with the possibility that life can be lived from a state of non-effort. Rest on Existence as a seed rests on the breeze. Move only when moved, so that what emerges is the product of a deeper current and is achieved effortlessly even if vast amounts of energy are being expended.

The most recent bout of this thinking came along as a result of the Lightrider piece (seen here in its final form). The metaphor of surfing got me pondering the interplay between the immensity of Immensity and the small but crucial human.

Take that tiny dark figure out of the painting and it's just a meaningless abstract. Put him back and a huge crashing energy is given conscious intent.

But here's the point - the rider doesn't create the wave. He/she paddles out, gets to the ideal spot and waits. Floats on the water's surface. Gazes attentively at the vastness that is the ocean, and . . waits.

When that particular wave is seen approaching it becomes all about place time and balance. If it all works out there's an exhilarating ride that gives the rider a rush like a clean drug, and heshe heads straight back out again for more.

Now obviously there's plenty of effort involved in paddling out to the back line, getting to the magical spot where the wave picks you up, and of course tons of practice and lots of getting wiped out at first. But ask any surfer if what heshe does is hard work?

And here's the bottom line. If the surfer tried to get that rushing ride by paddling furiously without the push of a convenient wave, you'd quickly see an exhausted and very disappointed puppy dragging its soggy self back home. The wave supplies the effort. The rider just goes along for the ride.

It looks rather as if something was trying to make this point to me, because the Lightrider painting is itself the result of a creative surge that arose without my conscious intent. And once it had my attention it pretty much used me as a brush to bring itself into physical form. Certainly there was plenty of kinetic energy expended in its making, but it was energy I simply rode to completion. It was exhilarating and effortless.

Sounds like a damn fine way to make a living if you ask me.

So. With this still fresh in my mind, various forces conspired to lead me this week to carefully and constructively do nothing. I don't mean just hang about idly. I mean do Nuh . . thing!

Because if there's one thing we humans do incessantly and uselessly more than anything else, it's think. Lay the body down in a comfy couch and the mind goes hurtling off all over the place. And usually it's fretting, strutting, or fantasizing. Uselessly. First thing AM to last PM. 24/7 (with sleep breaks, but then you dream). Year after year. Most of it utterly fruitless.

So what happened is that said conspiring forces made me acutely aware that a whole lot of discomfort had chosen to visit with me and that said discomfort was rooted in the incessant chatter of this monkey mind chasing its own tail trying to solve the unsolvable.

What might happen if I pulled the plug on it every time it got up to its junk jive? Made like the surfer, lay at rest on the surface of whatever mind rests on, and . . . waited?

As it turns out it's Spring out here in the African sticks, and a rather gorgeous one at that. And because I got no deeds to do no promises to keep (spot the cultural ref? I'll give you a clue. Paul Simon) I have the freedom to sit and constantly refer my inner monkey to the gorgeous Spring out there and away from the tedious and useless obsessing that it so does love to do.

As a whole lot of Tibetans in funny clothes know, this is not easy. Bizarre how much work it takes to relax. Except that then you're not relaxing, you're working. Bummer. But I've had a bit of practice at this over the years so convincing those little internal clutching hands to unclutch is at least possible in bits. And the gorgeous Spring helps.

Ok. So I open my mind to the pretty space in the garden. What am I waiting for? For a wave. For something to move without me telling it to. Could be a painting. Could be go make some popcorn. Go snooze. Maybe the solution to the unsolvable. But mostly what I'm interested in is a glimpse of the mysterious something that makes a painting happen without me painting it. That great things can arise out of stillness. That life can become effortlessly fulfilled.

Sounds cool, huh? But before we get too excited - assuming you're still with me -, the jury's still out on this one. It's really just a working hypothesis and an experiment to match. But the fact that I'm now writing this blog is because something moved - Go write that blog, it said. A first result. Woohoo!

Originally this posting was going to be about the painting at the top of the page. The painting was itself an unmeditated product, having arisen out of a whoosh of creative energy a couple of weeks back. At first I couldn't stop staring at it, smitten by the freshness of stroke and what they represent. But after about 3 days the honeymoon was over and I set about adding to it.

And completely lost the plot.

What you see here is the result after rescuing it from a place that was seriously not well. I'd followed a daring idea to smear red onto the canvas direct from the tube, living dangerously and confident that it would work out fine.

Well, it didn't. The result reminded me of those colourful paintings of clowns, usually very well executed but churned out en masse and corny as popcorn without the taste (I sprinkle Kikkoman on mine).

And so things stayed for a while, until this last Tuesday something moved again and I splashed some more paint across, this time coming off my third day of sitting in non-monkey space.

It's an improvement, but I can honestly say I have no idea where it's going. What seems to be happening is that the disconnect from humdrum thoughtwheels has entered into the creative flow. I found myself adding white right across the body of the figure, following the sort of impulse that I might normally notice but be too timid to act on. I guess I had nothing to lose so I followed it.

A similar impulse produced the squiggle over the right shoulder. A friend had visited earlier in the day and was talking about a bird tattoo across her shoulder. I hauled out an old sketch of a piece I still intend to do sometime, and the upshot was that the sketch got in on the act too.

So now I find myself adrift on the creative breeze as far as this piece is concerned. It's become the external version of the internal experiment.

As Zorba said, Ghoo ghno what ghappen next?

Art and the elves, boys and girls

That hidden hand or mind or whatever has been at work once again in the latest piece in progress. After uploading the previous post I thought I'd better reshape things into a rough usable form before the paint got too dry, so I got to work and scraped, pushed and shoved until it seemed ready for me to get more focused the next day.

As usual I hung it up on my work-in-progress lounge wall and went about the evening's  routines. So it was only some time later that I realised it was already almost perfect.

Here's how it looked at the time, and below how it was after adding light and dark the next day.

Behind all that huffing and puffing the real creative process had been at work again without my normal conscious mind being aware of it.  The big long strokes and vigorous scrubs I'd intended as a guide to later work had already taken on the essential form of the finished piece, all I had to do was add depth following the shape already laid down.

And try not to bollocks it up.

This appears to be the way this other mind seems to prefer working. It likes it best when the thinking department is occupied with something other than a direct focus on how to apply or remove paint, as it was when scrubbing away. It's as if a space gets cleared somewhere in the creative warehouse because the well-meaning but rather plodding clerk-mind gets called away and the elusive mercurial genius-mind can take the gap and run with it.

Another thing that struck me about this latest piece is how similar it is to the previous one. That too had a stand-back-gobsmacked moment, the time the profile landed all by itself, gifting me with the core of the piece to dance the rest of the painting around.

Like this one, that piece also emerged at the last moment to bump off from the prepared canvas a different idea I'd been about to start work on.

What fascinates me also is that at the time I was obsessed about it being a chick painting and omigod how was I going to hold my head up in the world producing chick art?!? Well, this one's a bru painting. Parity has been found.



Another similarity of opposites is that the first is a woman-shaped gap through which is seen what seems to me like deep galactic space, whereas the second is a small but significant man-shape riding what looks like a wave of light rolling in from those same depths.

Are these two siblings? Are they lovers? Hopefully for painting genetics it's the latter, because already there's been cross-pollination from the Lightsurfer to the Earthen Moon. The coloring and strong free strokes of the surfer dude helped free up some of the angst-laden paintwork in the goddess. Following the momentum of that kinetic energy I reworked some areas, particularly the area behind the head, and at last I'm beginning to look at it with a sense that it feels right.

Now to loosen up those horses...

Ride the Wave

In another of those surprise moves that the creative process comes up with - and it does so more and more often now it seems - the canvas on which I'd planned to begin "Strange Pilot" got hijacked by an entirely different subject.

Part of it was that I've spent so much time finding my way through the last two paintings that I found the idea of a fast simple piece rather appealing, but perhaps more to the point is that this image caught my eye and was so immediately striking that I just had to go deeper into it.

Here's what happened. I was at a party with a mix of old hippies and young surfers where the video projection at the back of the stage was surf footage. I've dabbled in surfing over the years but it's hardly top of my mind, so when I hauled out my camera it was to take shots of the play of light around the silhouetted dancers. Scanning through the shots later I saw some interesting stuff but the background video in this particular shot for some reason jumped out, strongly.

So I culled it out, pushed pulled and so on and here's the result as a digital layout.

The extreme simplicity of it is somehow very appealing, but the suggestion of movement in the crashing wave devoid of detail also suits the big strong brushstrokes I've been exploring, so that was part of the attraction. It's interesting too that "Strange Pilot" was going to be an exercise in light emerging from dark, and that's happening here too.

But behind these more obvious motivations I suspect activity from that other mind that seems to have the final say in so much of what I do these days. A big wave, crashing hugely, a human form in the thick of it, riding that storm of natural energy? Why should this jump out and say "paint me"?

As a working hypothesis I'd say it's because that's the way my life seems to be at the moment, and along with mine the lives of many of those around me. Now I'm not gonna stick my head out too far here because humans have encountered challenging times repeatedly over our history, but it does rather seem that something pretty damn big is rolling in.

So. Note to myself. Priority one: Keep your balance. And if in doubt, paint it.

Anyway, here's the first paint as it landed on the canvas. As happened last time it's tempting to leave it like this as there's a freshness about it that's rather appealing, but I'm gonna press on with the plan and go high contrast. A bit too Turner-esque as it stands. There'll be plenty of opportunity later to land strong fresh strokes over dark background.

Meanwhile back on the back plate,the much agonised-over "Earthen Moon" and I seem to have made peace. The she-being has been given the dark mysterious core that seems to be her nature, and in doing so I've come to realise that what we have here is not an image of a woman but in fact a woman-shaped cutout looking onto something like galactic space.

This is in fact an unconscious realisation of what I'd thought to do when painting "3 Dreams", but at the time I didn't know how to do that without getting lost in the obvious and the corny. I'm not entirely convinced I'm in the clear as far as that goes, but I think - I hope - I'm out of the danger zone.

Still. Dreams, it seems, will have their way. Dreams of she-beings. Dreams of waves.

In dealing with each - keep that balance.