"La Peinture post-exotique"

Roy Forget, "Paysage post-exotique", 2017, Oil on two wood panels, 60 x 100 cm

Dear D-,

     I am six hours ahead of you time-wise here in Paris, so you are just waking up now and perhaps having coffee and getting breakfast ready.  You ask an interesting question -- "Is life still worth living?"  Perhaps it was a joke in reference to your yard man leaving and thus you having to do all the weeding by yourself in the garden.  But in fact, your question is so pertinent, especially because it is the same question that inspired that "moody violet landscape."

     Here is a better image of the painting that I took this morning -- with north light . . .

     I entited it "Paysage post-exotique", which would roughly translate to "post-exotic landscape" in English.  The idea behind the painting was based on a passage of Proust I read back over the early part of January.  I always re-read Proust when things are going rough in the studio.  Somehow, it gets me out of the rut  I am in, at least usually.  Anyway, at the end of his very long seven volumes of "In Search of Lost Time," after years of wasting time and wandering, losing loved ones and losing himself in the quagmire of time, he finally receives his "eureka" moment, having tripped on a cobblestone at the entrance of the Hôtel des Guermantes, the narrator of the novel finally finds the reason, or at least the inspiration, behind his life-long desire to be a writer.  There, at that moment, along with other long reflections that the moment unleashes, he describes himself as a painter who is walking up a path that drops off into a lake, which up until then had been curtained and veiled off from view by a screen of trees and rocks.  But through a break in that screen, the painter catches a glimpse of this lake.  In fact, he has the lake completely before him.  So he takes out his paintbrushes to paint the scene but it is already twilight and the night in which one can no longer paint has arrived and it is the kind of nightfall from which daylight will never rise again.

     When I read this description I felt a real resonance.  So back in January, I decided that I would use the text as the basis of a painting, my first completely new painting since moving out of the studio in which I had worked up until last October.  That is the idea behind this moody violet landscape.  

     I didn't want "night" to be black, it would be too obvious and it is the work of us painters to find equivalences to ideas, rather than to simply reproduce what a photographer could simply do with a click of the camera.  I guess it is similar to what poets do with words, finding equivalences, but we use color and composition and they use words and sounds.  I felt that of all the colors available to us, violet would be the kind of color that would translate the idea of the light at the end of the day, the arrival of night, best.  The colors I used were rooted around a tube of Old Holland Ultramarine Violet that I have had for many many years now.  Around that, the other violets I used included a Williamsburg Egyptian Violet, a Williamsburg Ultramarine Pink, and a Holbein Cobalt Violet light hue.  There is also a certain amount of Old Holland Cobalt Violet Deep -- yes, I splurged a while back (a 60 euro tube of paint well worth it though).  All that with my very large palette of greens and pre-mixed gray adjacent colors that I love.

     The photograph of the painting has a lot of reflections in it.  Dark paintings are so hard to photograph.   In reality, the painting is actually a bit darker than the photograph makes it appear and the lake is a lot more gray--it is a chilly gray, the kind you would associate with goosebumps maybe, the goosebumps one gets when the warmth of the sun goes away.

     I entitled it landscape "post-exotic" because there is a writer here in France, Antoine Volodine,  who has written about "Post-exotic literature" and I found his stories about Post-exotic writers very inspiring.  Painting has been pronounced "DEAD" for so many years now and by so many people; what Volodine says in his book, "Ecrivains," is very apt  and à propos.   He writes that Post-exotisme is "a last useless and imaginary testament, made by those who are completely worn-out and weary, of if you will, made by the dead for the dead."

So that is my very long-winded explanation as to the ideas behind the painting.  Like I mentioned in an earlier message, there is also a bit of Patinier and Braque in the painting, they are the lake behind the veil of rocks and trees in the painting.

All right, I hope this finds you well and enjoying weeding as much as possible.

Big hugs,

R