There are some famous artworks that I’ve made multiple interpretations of, painted over and over again for years, almost obsessively. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, some compositions are perfect in my eyes. They're familiar. There’s an element that feels safe, or perhaps reliable about them. So much of the heavy lifting has been done for me. A great composition gives me a scaffolding that I can throw paint at, and each resulting painting turns out differently.
Hokusai: Mastering in the delicate art of carnage
Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa is operatic. It’s a magnificent image that depicts the violence of a storm-tossed sea in the process of annihilating three boats, along with at least twenty-two seafarers. To balance order and entropy, drama and understatement (the print is just larger than A4 size) with such elegance and with an almost art-nouveau beauty is breathtaking. It’s unsurprising that Great Wave is possibly the most reproduced image in the history of all art. Every time I commence an interpretation of Hokusai, within an hour I question my life choices. Each and every fractal-finger-tendril takes momentous effort to look effortless. Hokusai created it in his early 70s. On his deathbed at the age of 88, he famously stated "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years ... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."
When the meds don’t work, paint one hundred and forty-four sunflowers.
Over a six-month journey in 2017, my fascination with interpreting Van Gogh's Sunflowers blossomed into an obsession. Sunflowers are unadulterated joy. Van Gogh obviously loved paint. But he LOVED yellow paint. I only intended to make one painting of them, but they wouldn’t stop coming. I never ever knew how each painting was going to end once I’d begun it. I still don't. Over the past few years I’ve designed drawings digitally, which I then project onto each canvas. After that, anything can happen. It’s difficult to describe how exhilarating the journey is, but I'll try. Perhaps it’s like having the bare synopsis of a film where the performances are all improvised and you’re unsure of who the actors are until they appear on set, and the genre works itself out. There are so many twists and turns, dead ends, surprise cameos, and sometimes you may need to re-shoot completely. But you work through it over and over again until it all comes together. It’s a collaborative process, where control is ideally relinquished. Every painting goes through a process of vacillating between incoherence and coherence indefinitely until it lands, and its landing only becomes obvious when it’s happened. That’s where magic happens. Time disappears. It’s flow. When painting my sunflowers series, there was a lot of tough shit going on in my life at the time, so the paintings were a great escape. Though I didn’t consciously think about it at the time, the end result was quite extraordinary. When viewed together, you could use them as one of those “how are you feeling today” memes. You can see my whole Sunflower Series in depth here.
Watch two weeks of creative misadventures unfold in just 40 seconds:
My link with Irises: The Agony and the Ecstasy
Van Gogh’s Irises is one of my favourite paintings, and one that I intended to approach for many years. It’s a joyful painting, but not as straightforward as Sunflowers. It leans towards chaos and drama like Hokusai’s Wave, but it lands harmoniously in an unpolished, almost accidental way. The irises are bold bellows of unapologetically blue joy emerging from and collaborating with green entanglement. Once again, a perfect composition, held fragilely in place by that single white iris at the top left, and the jarring, rusty earth at the bottom. I've always admired Van Gogh’s approach to painting. He was clearly in love with paint, and he painted what he wanted how he wanted. Maybe his resignation to commercial failure afforded him this creative license. He wasn’t painting towards an audience or a market. He wrote to his brother “I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove".
My iris series has taken a different path to my Sunflowers or Hokusai paintings. I've put much more attention into the initial designs. I've used AI to manipulate the original drawing as a way of envisioning various possibilities. Then of course, as soon as the design goes up and paint touches the canvas, all plans go to shit, and the adventure really begins. It's where magic happens.
2023 was the roughest year of my life. It was during my second psych ward hospitalisation that year that I started conceiving a series based on Vincent’s irises. It was a lovely psych ward with beautiful gardens. It wasn’t until I’d finished most of the series that I learnt the origin story about this beloved painting.
Van Gogh completed Irises a month after his admission to the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in May 1889, painting in the hospital garden. For him, painting served as sustenance to keep him alive through tough emotional terrain. He described painting as "the lightning conductor for my illness” and felt that he could keep himself from going insane by continuing to paint. In one of his letters to his brother, he stated that “art is to console those who are broken by life”.
Hauntingly, he died by suicide the year after Irises was completed.
Vincent van Gogh. Irises. 1889. Oil on Canvas. 74.3 x 94.3cm. Getty Centre, Los Angeles.
Haunting Shadows of the Familiar
The whole tortured artist trope is everywhere, and I can't help but think about it a lot. I've looked into research on whether creativity and mental distress are connected, and it's a mixed bag. There's some correlation, especially between bipolar disorder and visual artists, but it's not a clear-cut cause-and-effect deal. It seems to me that Van Gogh was the quintessential tortured artist, who lived a short life, and died by suicide, and that this has been commodified. Very quickly after he died, his paintings were selling for lots of money and now they're some of the most valued paintings, financially and emotionally, in the world. They have both enriched and saved my life.
We can deduce several things from his life and his letters to his brother. Vincent’s inner world was rich: a vibrant and textured tapestry, filled with electrifying highs and unimaginable lows. He had the capacity and courage to experience emotions and sensations well beyond the bell curve. He had big feelings, big enough for him to lacerate his ear and eventually die by suicide. But he also experienced great joy. He was deeply enamoured with nature—ever since childhood, he had a profound affection for bugs and flowers, going so far as to learn their species by name. “Nature here is extraordinary beautiful,” he said of Provence in 1888. I can see the exultation he found in paint, and his glee brings me delight. Vincent had a broad and rich palette to work with. He felt joy, he felt despair, and he felt every hue and shade in-between.
A rich and solitary life
Writing this has taken me months. It has been a journey where I’ve contemplated my demons. I feel like I sit alongside a seemingly endless population of artists who have had difficult relationships with drugs or destructive moods. For me, making paintings alleviates these internal shitstorms. For others, it could be gardening, or TikTok, or being chronically busy, or whatever else you’re into. But the notion of the tortured artist doesn't quite fit, too. For me, painting requires sobriety. I can’t get into flow state if I’m shitfaced. I can’t paint during a depression either. So If I’m making art, no matter how gruesome the painting may be, I’m fine (or at least good enough). I may be wrestling with demons, but at least I’m out of bed. However, sobriety and keeping my head above water is a perpetual struggle. This self-portrait was painted during this series. This was a painting that demanded to be painted. One evening in after a day of screwing up everything I touched, I primed over a completed painting (I won't tell you which one) on a very large canvas and painted myself in five hour marathon. More accurately, it painted itself - I just held the brushes. Whatever needed to come out, it did, This is the Leon I most recognise.
The idea of being a cliché is gross. If I am tortured, I’m tortured in my own unique, irreparable ways, not anyone else’s. But here's the catch: while I draw some comfort from this comparison, I can't shake the nagging suspicion that my suffering somehow ennobles my art, because it feels both validating and incredibly convenient. It allows me to view my pain through a lens of purpose and meaning, to believe that my struggle is not in vain but is instead the crucible in which my creativity is forged. I desperately want the shittest parts of my life to be at least useful for someone else. Otherwise, they're just meaningless agony.
Maybe there are parallels: Van Gogh and I have both been overwhelmed by big feelings, we’ve both been financially challenged, spent times in psych facilities, and had an intimate relationship with self-harm, drugs, and suicide. Van Gogh always painted what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. That’s something I strive for, to work on my own terms. Just getting back to that love for yellow paint. Like Van Gogh, to seek out light in shadows.
These irises absolutely come from flow states. Sometimes, the paintings hit a brick wall and sit in places unresolved for days, weeks, months, and I feel I've painted my way into a corner. In fact, I've built a high shelf where they sit face to the wall to give them time to take a good long hard look at themselves. Spontaneously the corner erupts and other times it doesn't. But yeah, painting these gets me into flow states.
And they're the best states I know.
Finding Light in Shadows:
Irises Reimagined
1st - 29th August 2024
Works on display all day every day
Downing Centre
143-147 Liverpool St
Sydney
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