plein air Archives - Sid Sledge

Uncertainty and all its minions (comment on my painting: Imperial Hotel Mt. Victoria)

While painting on the street.. I am just painting.. putting paint down on the canvas.. like a recent cold morning on the highest part of the blue mountains.. Mount Victoria.. I was painting the Imperial hotel at 6am.. afterwards I looked at the painting and I could see all the things that are on my mind about how we live and who we might be.. and all the things I think about that give this world its energy and make it unbounded.. I think about the things that excite me.. ideas about resolution and its counterpart… incompleteness.. I think about the fact that we love things to get resolved but resolution is an impossibility a constantly yearned after place – eden… yearning is itself.. a creative force.. as things ride that ever diminishing asymptotic wave to completeness.. but we never get to that place.. death is the closest we can come..

I also see in my painting the struggle between order and chaos.. we like order… it is safe for us.. chaos suggests death.. life is the fine balancing act between order – indifferent death.. and chaos – wild death on the other side.. it is interesting that life exists on a narrow plane between the these two forms of death… this plays out in the painting where things are vacillating between holding onto a form / structure.. or giving into an unresolved sense of form.. but not holding on to that idea too tightly.. not giving in to the safety of death…

in the painting.. as in life the other great force is a synthetic force.. and this is pitted against an entropic destructive force… both are necessary for the painting… things are never created cleanly there is always destruction in the midst of creation you see this in cellular systems.. for structures to emerge in complex organisms cells need to die – usually in a controlled way to yield a functional form..

The phenomenon that governs these forces is Uncertainty.. no structures are certain… the edges of things don’t exist in any real way.. Cezanne seemed to discover that in his paintings.. when you get up close to one.. you get a sense that all the colours or possibilities are somehow contained in the finite space held by the form.. we are fooled into a sense of certainty by the way our brains interpret the data presented to them by our senses… in this case the eye… but in truth things are not as they seem and when I feel a painting has worked it is usually because it has given me some insight into the possibilities about how things really are or might be.. and I find that exhilarating..

the illusion of definition

plein air painting has become a way for me

to see past the deception of

the eye..

which we interpret as a photographic thing

but the eye shuttles rapidly

between objects overlapping things

thrust forward

held back

the brain with its neural networking

assembles the visual data and interprets the

information

gives it edges

gives it definition

when I paint and

am in the zone

and the canvas is heavily

textured

denying me edges

I start to sense what the eye is seeing

by my interaction

with the canvas

and what I see

and

as my eye

scans the painting

and the edgeless

night

so for a while

the illusion of definition

is lost

fish flying (or this sky rained frangipanis)

this guy Michael came over to me while I was painting last night on Oxford street he asked me who I was I said Sid

As in Sydney?

No.. it’s my initials

you should always introduce yourself by the name your parents gave you

(he may be right)

Your accent sounds

jewish

South African

double whammy I thought

(what am I doing here then?)

but he was kind and gentle

Michael and he lived on the street

and one of his parents was born

in a Portuguese part of Western

South Africa

he stayed to talk.. he showed me the frangipani he planted the other night

he gave me a sip of port from his hip flask

Sid the sober painter took it and said thank you..

he went off

but just for a while to get dinner

came back and showed me a box of wet wipes he found

said he finds everything he needs right here on the street

then he went off and came back 10 minutes later and rained frangipani

blossoms around me and my painting

we said goodbye

touched elbows

(my hands were full of paint)

and he left

for the rest of the painting

I had the gentle sweet smell of

frangipanis drifting up into

my nose

not the usual smell of that

place at that time

thank you Michael troubled

angel of the night

looking for beauty

looking for love

not the thing you often bump into

out there

but when you do

it is magical

we were like fish out of water

dancing

Painting Cacophonia

when I go out painting at night

I am painting

with my nervous system’

when I go out.. and be

Sid Sledge

in the day Steve is looking

after the kids

making dinner

talking to my wife

Being the suburban man

but at some point I/He be Sid

and he can paint on the street.. but

while he is doing it

he knows.. Steve

is watching

and then grabbing the brush

then hE ?i takes it back

going What!?

We makes me nervous

and I use that for my painting

—–

last night was easy.. I had just heard Vieux Farke Toure.. son of the late great. Ali Farke Toure at the Basement in Sydney… and even though the night club down the road I found myself painting outside had no soul… the strange wild blues of Vieux and his beautiful band were still in me…

Thanks Vieux.. and happy birthday!