The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
I’m stealing a really good idea here that Monica uses in her Substack: The Smart Creative that she calls “Anatomy of a Painting.” (She has lots of really good ideas!) This painting is one that I recently finished but has not yet left the studio - so it is keeping me company and giving me the opportunity to get to know it a little better. That’s how it works, generally. I know my work comes from something somewhere, and I do work with purpose and direction. However, at the same time, I often don’t fully understand what the work is trying to tell me until some time later, maybe even years.
This painting, a mid-sized horizontal in oil, titled, Autumn Leaves, on the surface comes from an obvious source. We had an exceptionally beautiful Fall here in Massachusetts with crisp, blue skies, good weather and vibrant color on the trees persisting late into the season. After working for years in old mill buildings in Pawtucket, our new studio in the country has put us in the front seat of the show that nature can put on in a New England Fall. We’ve been planting trees, grasses and bulbs for the Spring. The yard surrounding the house and studio that was mud for most the construction, gave way to green grass and planting beds that will be an ongoing project to fill out in the coming years. Looking out the window of my studio, I only needed to reach out and bring the Fall colors inside, toss them on my canvas and watch the magic happen. This is a new chapter for us and we are loving the life we have created and the beauty we have surrounded ourselves with.
The seeds of this idea, creating a place we could live and work surrounded by beauty, were planted during our time in France a few years ago. Our residency at The Chateau Orquevaux and travels through the country, clarified the need to surround ourselves with the beauty we both seek in our work. After chasing the work of Claude Monet around Paris - from the Musée d’Orsay to the Musée de l’Orangerie (where the Waterlillies are displayed so beautifully), to the Musée Marmottan - we decided to spend a day in Giverny to visit Monet’s home and gardens. It’s a fascinating place - absolutely gorgeous even on a rainy day in early October. Remarkable for what Monet created in order to have something gorgeous to paint. We’re a long way from a Giverny of our own but what we’ve managed by getting our hands in the soil so far, feels like a good downpayment on that idea.
I’m partial to the later paintings of Monet. The daubs of paint in short brush strokes of his early impressionism, give way to the longer, looser strokes of intense color. There’s a directness and urgency in the work, an almost unfinished quality. I love the immediacy, the lack of second-guessing, the confidence of a painter who knows his subject and his medium well. I doubt he was thinking in terms of abstraction but I do think his aim was to paint in a responsive way. Rather than depicting a picture or scene, he was simply responding in a natural and felt way to the beauty in front of him. Easy to see now how this late Impressionist work relates to the Abstract Expressionists that followed, like, Joan Mitchell, who worked in an older studio of Monet’s in Vétheuil. This late work of Monet’s, once seen as sketches or leftovers from the l’Orangerie murals, were, in the words of the critic William Seitz, “pushing naturalism to it’s bursting point.” I see a spiritual approach to Monet’s painting that, again in the words of Seitz, saw nature as “mysterious, infinite and unpredictable”, an attitude toward the landscape that I am constantly striving for.
And then there is the song, Autumn Leaves, with lyrics by the late Johnny Mercer. There’s a million versions of the song, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra come to mind. (My favorite version of the tune comes from Keith Jarret - listen here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/autumn-leaves/1443285007?i=1443286200) There is a wistful sentiment to Mercer’s version of love lost and regret - a sadness in the season. I’ve been feeling that. My father passed away a little over 2 years ago. The last time I saw him, I was sharing floor plans and ideas for this home we were about to build. Now that the dust has settled on the construction there’s been time to reflect and I can’t help but wish he was here to see it all, this thing that our creativity imagined and manifested somehow.
That’s a lot to put into a painting that feels like it was made in an instant of painting Jazz! As an artist, we carry all these kinds of things with us to the easel. I try to forget them as I work, to not over analyze or assign symbolism to things. It’s all there however, and hard to escape - the autumn leaves of red and gold.
Autumn Leaves will be included in an upcoming 3 Gables Studio release - stay tuned!