This is my latest painting, it owes it’s name, ‘Octopuss’ Garden’, to a friend dropping by during a particular arduous period in the painting’s life. If the painting owes a debt to this friend for it’s name, it also owes a debt to the paintings of Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) and my high-school art teacher, Bronwyn Culliford. Culliford was a particularly talented, if somewhat hard arse art teacher, under her less than pedestrian teaching techniques I freed myself from my ideas of what I wanted to paint. She handed me some reproductions of de Kooning’s work and banished me to the corridor outside the art room for the next year or two.

My process was thus…

1. Visit hardware stores and use all teenage charm to wrest them of left-over test pots of paint for free.

2. Hang a large (6ft plus) canvas, piece of paper or whatever at one end of the corridor.

3. Set up paints, brushes etc at the other other end of the corridor.

4. Hang out with the brushes and paints, look at the canvas, make a decision about where the next mark would go, the colour it would be etc.

5. Collect necessary materials (paint brush or similar loaded with paint) in my hand, run…. as in RUN RUN RUN at the canvas and use all that momentum to put that one mark on the canvas. BANG!

6. Turn around, walk back to the starting point, 20 metres or so away, replace brush and paint, settle in, look at the painting and repeat the process again… and again… and again…

I often repeat this story, why? Not because I have deep scars from the experience, in fact the opposite, it taught me a little bit about letting go, a whole lot about looking and deciding and most importantly about allowing enough space between marks so that each one could have it’s say before the next one said it’s piece.

In my late teens I grew to love de Kooning’s palette, bold mark-making and when I made my way overseas after art school and finally saw one of his works in the real for the first time I had a renewed sense of awe at the complexity, boldness and subtlety of the work that was hidden in even the most mindful reproduction; the ‘real’ Mona Lisa, on the other hand, far from being a revelation appeared the same in the Louvre as she did in any decent reproduction.

Tonight I finished reading ‘de Kooning, An American Master’. It is an amazing book, offering an unflinching view into de Kooning’s life; multiple mistresses, a wife, girlfriends (all at the same time), terrible alcoholicism in later life and obsessed with his art to the exclusion of anyone around him. It chronicles de Kooning in a way that is always insightful, never offering a gratuitous or voyeuristic look when it would have been easy to do so. I was transported into his life, and into his studio as a trusted assistant, watching the master at work, carrying his secrets… did you know that de Kooning might work on a single line for a day to make it look perfectly effortless?

An illegal immigrant to America from Holland in the 1920s, de Kooning was friends with artists such as Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Gorky and others before they became a part of a movement that turned heads outside Europe as the centre of art for the first time. The biography builds up a vivid picture of New York’s coming of age, the poverty and struggle many went through, the forming of an artists community and their bohemian lifestyles before any such phrase could become cliche.

So much for ‘artistic genius’ (not that I buy into this), it was usual for de Kooning to struggle with his paintings for long periods of time, in some cases he would work on a single painting for a year and half. On entering the studio each day, de Kooning would begin by scraping the previous day’s painting off the canvas and starting over. In the darkest of times he would work almost every day on a single painting, completing nothing for almost two years. This reluctance to complete works prevented de Kooning from having his first exhibition until well into his forties. When he did have his first show, it was a disaster and he sold nothing. Over the next decade despite being selected to represent America in the Venice Bienniale de Kooning still couldn’t sell work.

In his later years, de Kooning reversed both dynamics; painting around 100 works from 1983 - 1984. Now de Kooning seemed to let go, about painting at this time, he said, “There’s no end really, I just stop it. Abandon it”. He also starts to empty out his paintings; less paint and more and more white; a limited palette, often consisting of primary colours. Around this same time, de Kooning set the record for the highest price paid for the painting of a living artist, with Pink Lady selling for $3.63 million. De Kooning wouldn’t have received anything from the sale (an education on the archaic ways of the art world works wil be saved for another post).

Back in high-school I wanted to study Modigliani, an altogether tidier painter, who died young, in his early ’30s, I am glad that Bronwyn intervened so that I could wade into de Kooning and all his messiness, in the words of the master,

“I’m in my element when I am little bit out of this world: then I’m in a real world - I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say hey, this is interesting! It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me: I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff. As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping most of the time, into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser.”

… ponder what you could do as a slipping glimpser, “I think you can do miracles with what you have if you accept it.” de Kooning… a final quote from the stowaway from Rotterdam who decided to be an artist and became one of the best ever.