Every boldness begs for tenderness

All art is about this thing called rhythm.

"In my view you must either do away with ornament or make ornament the essence.
It's not something you add. It's not icing on a cake. It's everything - or it's nothing."
Jean-Antoine Watteau

Words are like the rational numbers, they are infinite, and their cardinality has a one-to-one correspondence, a countable infinity. The language of painting is closer to the irrational numbers, who's cardinality has no one-to-one correspondence, the non countable infinity. A picture is a 1000 words, endless words and no words. Aleph Null x Aleph Null = Aleph Null

Making art is about searching, about looking for a translative moment, a hole in the fence,
about trying to stand close to the fastest and dirtiest train the world has ever known

It is not about what looks good, or done well, it is about the sensibility of the tangible, the feeling about what there is in the most imaginative sense. Even after it is complete it is not about its completion,
it is about the potential, it is always about the potential, to take and try again

Drawing and painting are at a constant fight with each other, drawing can be with paint and painting can be done with a pencil. Drawing is thought of with a the pencil because of how it evokes your behaviour when you use it. And drawing has everything but only in one sense, maybe the most important sense, fluidity and directness. In another sense drawing has none of the other qualities that paint has, it doesn't translate doubt in the way where doubt matters, the rethinking of consequences, its own mind, its retardation, mass and being. Where what lasts is that which comes last, its ability for erasure and materiality. Because drawing is free of all this, it has much in one other sense.
Painting comes in and is at odds with drawing, they are seperate modes that one needs to make one. And these two modes fight at the heart of getting there. To paint like your drawing takes a continual self renewal, as if your last marks are done like your first mark. Painting gives you nothing and then only everything, it works against you and takes a lot of will power, it is a win or loose situation in paint. And drawing gives you everything for nothing, within its disposability it is so generous to you as a medium, I think how can one paint as one draws

There is border a line somewhere in my mind, on one side permanence of the object, truth, art, on the other side, nihilism and meaninglessness. Everything is real and matters all while aware of the claws behind, each is the antidote to the other

I paint on the street, everything is worth it. But I have to chose and that is the hard part. At some point after painting I realise that it didn't matter what I chose, but that next time I will still have to chose and thats the harder part. I like to paint the people passing by right there and then, the fleetingness of the person walking through the canvas within the movement of the world. Theres a time when I wait and watch with the brush hovering for the moment the person passing looks at me watching them, I paint them then when they are looking at me from the canvas

Sometimes the more you want, the more you loose, and the more you try, the more you want. There are some games in life, in which knowing more and more about them doesn't bring you any closer to achieving them and the aim is to break that realisation

" I’d like to finish with a brief comment on the role of people in David’s paintings. You notice pretty quickly that David’s human subjects nearly always have their eyes closed. When I asked about this, he said he was more interested in depicting people looking within that staring out at the viewer. He is interested in inner worlds, but evoked using the outer world as a scaffold on which to build a sense of experience, feeling, and emotion into the painting.

So these paintings of landscapes, cities, and people are also about something entirely different. They are about states of mind, about energy, about the ecstatic experience, about a universe humming and buzzing with life force. They offer something unique, and I urge you to take it up, to do as Robert MacPherson implored at the end of his series Little pictures for the poor: “Enquire within”. "
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Opening speech of exhibition by John Cruthers.
Curator of the Grundy Collection of Australian art and curatorial adviser of the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia.

To win in a way that no one else could ever know about it. There is a situation called almost, almost everything is almost, sometimes a painting can live for years in the place of almost, and there is no way to take it forward, and you live in the state of watching it. You learn how to let go and you get better at it over time, you recognise how to let go of almost sooner

You know when your in the shower and both the hot water and cold water are running but it’s either too hot or too cold, so you need to turn one up or one down, and you have to decide. It’s like that sometimes in drawing, you choose where to take the darkness and light which forms from itself and its opposites. You need to feel what it’s like, it’s like being in the middle of that hot and cold shower

There is so much to learn from painting. I am starting to see everything in life is in there, there are as many variables as there are things in the world. All of psychology hangs on the brush even before it touches anything and even more so afterwards. All of epistemology and ontology is there when you look and look away

One inspiration that planted a certain emotion in me at a young age and has never entirely left, was from the 1960s movie The Time Machine of H. G. Wells. It was the story of a man, who locked himself away and through invention was able to transcend his present reality with a mechanism that worked but is never explained. This gave me the notion that by pure thought and obsession a person who locked himself away from the world was able to venture and access something that was not in plain sight. It is this childish and naive sense that I think still drives me, a kind of internal adventure.

In antiquities...., I sense something qualitatively different, the inherent sense of the devotion in the form. I feel a longing to be able to have that devotion, it is the thing that is born out of limitation and exclusivity

What is light? When I look at a star, I know that my eyes could see that star anywhere, twelve hours drive away, and so what is it that is making its way to my eye, whether I'm standing here, twelve hours away and every cm in between. I don’t see how that light could make its way to all those places at once, but now I do know why and still interests me

In a painting the question is; is there are parts and wholes, 
a single dot has the power to change everything, the painting is to present the whole instantaneously a total totality

Shake the can until it turns cold then press very gently 
and let little specks shoot out to create for yourself a globular cluster

What I want and what can I do, what I see in my head doesn’t endure long enough, my intentions change in response to my actions, my mind can’t sustain what was envisioned even a few seconds ago. As soon as I try to solve its over, its hard to learn how I must not do that, there are so many ways to learn how not to do, and they are always so hard to remember. To become that thing that has no intentions, that is a hard state get to, to do the opposite of what your trying to do. If the painting succeeded, I now only see the closure and the journey is erased in my mind, the ways that took place to get there are no longer conceivable to me anymore and consistency becomes a hard thing to achieve. It takes so much time to relearn that its not in my hands, there is no easy way to proceed forward or to behave. Where what I am wanting to achieve is to do the thing that is out of my hands in that moment, is what I am trying to remember

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“I once asked him why he stopped a particular series of his paintings. You know, he would start a type of painting and keep doing more and more of them until he made one that he thought was the best of the series, and it always was, and then he stopped, and started another series. Why stop, I asked him. "Dead end," he answered. But Stepha [Fernando's wife] once gave me a better explanation: "Your father tries to find God through his paintings. When he realizes that a particular visual concept he's pushing will not get him there, he stops and tries a new concept." So one day I asked him if he believed in God, or at least did he think he could ever find God. He answered, No, of course not, then added, I remember very clearly, "There is no God but the purpose of life is to find him."
[John Gerassi, son of Fernando Gerassi (1899-1974)]

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The objective is that it says something within the most subjective space and be able to say it as best you can. The language of painting says without saying, the spectrum between words, the abstraction of meaning, of concreteness, in the most unspecific way. It is a language of suggestion

Where there's light there's shadow, there's shadow in the light and light in the shadow

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There is something called the audience in your head, its whats needed but which we don't realise even exists, it has been replaced it with a yearning for reality. It is the reality that creates reality but also doesn't need reality. It is not something you can will into existence, it can be coaxed as a gift to oneself or one may be lucky. It is the feeling of what you deem is your responsibility and the call to life that one can only imagine which money can't buy

There are no magic solutions to making art, no approach that is guaranteed to work a second time. There is no clear way of seeing the ramifications of decisions until they are actually made. It is learned but never learnt, it is this unknowing and discovery that keeps drawing me in, its as complex and sustaining as the human relationship

Art is the meeting place of sensitivity and aggression, love must contain some aggression to last

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#today I carved this head when my teacher wasn't looking.

You will get to know your painting if you sleep with it in your room, when you lie down and wake up. You see it in ways that you can’t see when you're going about your everyday life.

I spend time staring at the painting and painting it in my mind, trying this and that.
It can involve any aspect of the image, how I’m going to hide this part, etc. Sectioning parts off in the mind, there are so many variables, it hardly goes the way it was intended, most of the time I can’t imagine it at all, as has to be painted to know what happens. It’s hard to hold so many moves in your head, it’s not unlike chess, and your opponent never lets you take your move back

All music is about death.

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I bite my tongue and then my tongue tastes itself

When I was young I used to get this feeling often and only sometimes I have it now rarely. It is having a feeling for a place that is specifically not to far away from you, but not visible to you either. And in that moment it felt like the a feeling of magic. I remember being in school looking out the window of my class room and seeing the tops of trees in the park across the road. Out the classroom, I could feel what it was like to be there and then, without being there. At night lying in bed, I could feel some street around my house as if I was there in a dream but awake, I could feel the night air. I didn’t need to be there, it was maybe better than being there, just to know that it was there.
Last night I felt it in a different way, I was thinking about Rushcutters Bay, named because of the rushes they cut from the marsh land to put on roofs to protect from rain. Before they reclaimed the land thats now a park. I was practically there I could see a small river streaming down from towards the cliffs of Edgecliff, the trees all around the sun in the valley, towards the water, the birds

To get so comfortable to destroy, to cut your losses so many times in a row, taking risks on something that is possibly already what you intended it to be, but maybe just not entirely. Painting is learning the meaning of gambling. To win is to surpass an inevitable contrition. What feels like destruction happens only when you look back, it grabs you, because you are scared of the truth. Every time paint goes on, something is destroyed, even if it is nothing and an emptiness, it is destroyed, it is no longer nothing and that nothing has been taken away and now that piece of nothing is impossible to get back. It can hurt when you realise that it was the greatest bit nothing you could never have left alone, because you never even saw it until it was gone

I need to to be so giving, giving is believing, scale of a painting is not simply about scale, it is the generosity of the mind. It is a play between quality and quantity, which go though each other like peaks and troughs of waves. Scale is the re-conception of form and it should be unique at each scale because it is non fractal

They say there's 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars in each one. But im lost in some forgotten corner of the cemetery trying to find an unreadable name in the fields of headstones. To quote the distant relative, the last living family member that knows no one will care for it after she dies

Some say seeing is entwined with understanding. What you understand is what you see, if you lack understanding you wont see particular things, they are invisible to you and its this way around.
Huxley writes about this in the The Art of Seeing in 1942. Painting and drawing teach you the opposite, that you actually see and you don't understand

To be inconsequential to your aim, to do that which is not suppose to work. I hardly paint in the way I think I should be painting, I never have been able to yet, because I don’t have the courage, the endruance, to paint only in piece meal, in moments and sections. All I know is that I have changed and it is now not the same, and that it had changed me

What kabbalah says about empty space (the kav and makom panui), the spiritual worlds.
Where are they? They are nowhere, specifically, which is to say they are everywhere and right now with you in the room. I find that Right now is hard.. I feel that tomorrow I will open my eyes. Painting can be helpful, it is an engine for the capability of now, which is only just the chance to make a start in a moment, an opening to now. And nevertheless equally for me painting is that thing that is all about tomorrow, it is the thing I know is there that could be done without doing it and that makes everything that is not the thing, for the time being worthwhile

Never lose sight of
the vision of your
daydream reflection
notion cousin.

Like the apple core in the middle of the road and the moonshine by day, and the paint that makes its way from the back of my hand to my shirt and then onto yours, I will be here for you

One definition of love: It is a feeling that nothing lasts forever

If you paint the trees before the sky or the sky before the trees, there is a big difference

To paint a portrait of my Mum from a drawing. I knew if I couldn’t draw her there was no chance of doing it in paint, so I needed a drawing, as a drawing distills what it is, it is the essential of depiction. I drew her and drew her from this photo and I could almost say it was impossible to get a drawing that felt like her to me. Even when all the lines lined up in the right places it failed to have any real resemblance of her.. I tried so many ways of thinking about how to do this, mental ways, I turned the image upside down, I thought of only outlinesm capturing strictly, and then only shades, drawing fast sketches, not over thinking and also slow drawings, for so many hours over 2 weeks and ways. When I got to see each drawing there was just nothing there that was her, these drawings were of a million other people, characters in other universes but not her. I don’t think it’s because I can’t draw.. I thought I could draw, I have been going to drawing classes recently for weeks drawing from models 4 hours sessions I’ve been drawing for years. I don't know why I could not capture her, I think maybe I don’t know how to draw.

I heard the brain thinks about faces differently to the perception of other things, faces are not seen in piece meal, broken down part by part to tell you this is this person, like objects in the world, we have an entire complex mental machinery when it comes to decoding faces more than all other objects in our world. I thought maybe this is the reason, this highly developed left brain architecture, and I need to turn it off, de-objectify the human face from myself in my mind, It’s nothing but shapes of course ( I knew this already for year and do this all the time). I had no problem capturing the blooming yellow and red flowers across her dress, they were accurate… but still it must be my mind getting the way, I wasn’t able to get it not to be itself.

Then after I realised that what I wanted in a painting even if it could be a likeness of the photo, would not be what I wanted in a painting, to capture likeness would not be what worked for a painting, what I wanted in paint would have nothing to do with what is in that photo, because precision is so far from art I wasn't sure. And she was smiling in that photo and I wanted to capture her smiling and I’ve always tended to find that very hard. The realm of the smile, is very difficult for me, one ill move in the eye and its weird. Fran’s Hals could do it. Velasquez and so many they do it. I tried it was awkward, was I that unlearned, un-trained after so many years or was it that I learned too much, learnt too much incorrectly.

I also knew that I have come to an aversion of thin paint washes so the vernier meets all at once. Because its difficult that I needed the liberty to put something here and there and it builds up and the paint becomes stale and clumpy, paint is awkward it hates me and resists doing anything I want. It’s acts in such a way to not make people look nice, at least for me. And how could I do that do my mum who has aged beautifully with all the delicate aspects shown in that photo. I tried and felt a deep need to paint her out of love. How could I live up to that. I have become dumb enough to to do something in which everything says its at odds with what I am trying to do. I am not using my strengths but using all my weaknesses as the starting point. Or am I just dogged enough to keep doing something I know for all the reasons I know, all of them.

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"Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today" Benjamin Franklin.. this sentiment has taken hold in my system, it is the dredges a functional mind inside the ordinary world. It eats away at the thing that has no beginning or end, at that which is not worth doing and that which ordinarily is not able to be done, it is my ambition to undo this unto myself, im really not sure how

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The feeling of what the night will be is more important than what the night will become

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The landscape existed first, people come into the landscape and they can walk out of it. People come at the end of a painting, they are placed above the previous paint. This makes sense but from all the orders of operations, this is just one of endless ways within painting. There are so many modalities, sometimes there is no where to start from, the entire canvas is everything as once, there are no parts just wholes. Other times if I can perfect this one corner, it is a painting within a painting and everything emerges there on. There is truth that the tiniest drop of paint can change everything about a work, and sometimes many litres are eviscerated all just to make way to a paintings presence in the world

Unsure what these dots are, but when I make them I feel like I’m in a therapy session. I feel the brush in my hand and that im starting to be digested into the world

​“An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.” (Ben Shahn)

To create: It is to refuse not to be able, to have the chance to look upon what you think could be seen again. Refusing to let go of what you believed you thought you could have imagined but which you know you never really saw, the determination not let go of what is invisible to you

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Once there was a young man who traveled through many distant countries in search of a master craftsman from whom he could learn a trade. After a while he returned home and announced to his family that he had become an expert designer of chandeliers. “I have become so talented in my new-found trade,” he explained, “that my work far surpasses even the greatest masterpieces of my teacher.” Then, realizing that the family was a bit dubious about the measure of his success, he asked his father to invite the leading chandelier craftsmen in the city to view a sample of his own creation.
 
The craftsmen came and carefully examined the young man’s work. They all agreed that they had never before laid eyes on such a monstrosity. “It’s a disgrace to our entire profession,” said one, “though this particular piece right here is quite good.” “It’s absolutely hideous,” said another, “but that particular piece over there is excellent.” “It should be burned,” said a third, “so that others need not suffer the experience. However,” he added, “that piece there is perfection itself.”
 
When they had gone, the young man approached his father and said, “Now you know that I was not exaggerating at all, I am indeed the master of all master craftsmen.” His father looked at him in bewilderment. “What do you mean?” he exclaimed. “You heard their conversation, your chandelier is a monstrosity!”
 
“I heard,” replied the young man. “However, did you notice that each of the craftsmen admired a particular piece of my work, but no two craftsmen admired the same piece. For when I was abroad I studied the work of each of these men. Then I decided to make a chandelier which combined all of their imperfections. Today you saw every craftsman recognize the imperfections of his associates, while pointing to his own mistake and seeing it as nearly perfect.”
 
Rebbe Nachman concluded this parable by stating:
 
“If a man could know all the possible imperfections and shortcomings of a given thing, then he would also know the exact makeup and appearance of that same thing in its perfect state, though he had never seen it before.” I feel like I am all 3 characters in this story, the son, the father and craftsmen.

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I want more than I can handle. I bit off in my mind more than I can chew in the world. This results in a series of indecisions, mistakes and and failures. Nevertheless I believe what is still possible and get a glimmer of hope again, sometimes from my all my efforts or abstinences, the engine fires up and I believe in my mind that I will make it happen again

A hangover is an organisms act of rebellion against itself. To feel the joy of being alive having come back from the dead, a survivor of stupidity and feel the pleasure of simply to be. And then we forget this feeling over and over again

​Thinking about how we live our lives in a certain locations, we spend our lives in certain spaces, a room in our home and office etc, that space has contained us so much, and is so particular. Then when we move through space, as we travel we span entire blocks so quickly in seconds its like flying though worlds

There was a Sidney Nolan exhibition on at the AGNSW. There was a printed brochure. On the cover was a photograph of Nolan in the studio and far in the background was painting leaning up against something. I was inspired by that tiny bit on the brochure, say was the width of thumbnail,
Another time I parked my car, I was picking up my wife and in a restaurant window at the back of a side wall I saw a picture. It appeared to be a painting of a woman standing on a windy beach, with a dark blue ocean behind her, from the sky above a huge dog was leaping down with its paws outstretched towards her. I went to see this closer up and as I approached it started to disassemble and suddenly I was looking at a print of a rose

I receive the Art Spectrum prize, and the prize was oil paint and smelling the saffron oil. I stuck my thumb into the Naples yellow, it is the colour of the asphalt road in the sun

I have realised that the state of longing is superior to the state of fulfilment.
It is easy to understand, but hard to feel that its true

Found a place called Johnson’s lookout, looking down over all those trees, seeing pale yellow-greens, warm yellow-greens, copper yellow-greens, neon yellow-greens, suicide bomber greens, blood greens, bright red greens, light blue-greens, white glowing greens, purple greens, red black greens, cobalt greens, turquoise greens, purply blue-greens, navy greens, 70's greens, warm brown greens, space blue greens…

There is feeling for the place I am, even when i’m painting only just down the road, something happens there which I would never have noticed not painting, and that feeling of the sense of place can sometimes last for hours afterwards

We won a bid on ebay for a heater, which was in the Northern Beaches, so we made a day of it, we got the heater and went to the beach and I started painting there. Phthalo blue is the most saturated paint, so don’t forget to put the lid on tight when you chuck it in the bag because it has a way of going everywhere.
I kept getting this feeling because of where I was standing, that there was always someone standing behind me and watching me and I’d turn around and there was no one there. Its funny to see that when one person stands and watches you paint, it makes more people do the same. And you paint differently when that happens. People talk to me and I'm happy to talk back but I keep painting, there is more intention, its like being able to catch some wave during those moments

To want to see is not indulgent, it is to commit beyond what it is to feel. To be acted upon if one has a sense of responsibility to the moment to try and come up with the answer

Westfield
June 2010

​At the Westfield shopping centre in the Junction. Painted on the top floor with Steven Durbach. Looking down. I always loved this idea of painting around such an environment because of the advertisements of giant people in sunglasses, and women in poses. After about 25 mins we were approached by security guards, "your not allowed to paint here... unless you have a permit...” so we had to pack up and leave, sadly a few days later a guy committed suicide from that top level