'Spend yourself...'

Tonight I finished reading Gauguin's 'Intimate Journals'. What an interesting read that book has been over the past weeks. Extraordinary life and intelligence. I rather loved him when he said 'Let me get my breath and cry once more: "Spend yourself, spend yourself again! Run till you are out of breath and die madly! Prudence ... how you bore me with your endless yawning!' A sentiment with something in common to that of Dylan Thomas: '...Rage, rage against the dying of the light....'

It pays to be persistent - and not to worry

My Marquesas Island skipper had warned me Tahiti shuts down for Sundays (and I arrive in Tahiti late Sat night and I leave almost before sunup on Monday. I checked with my Tahiti hotel whether I could get an around day trip tour on Sunday (I want to see the Point of Venus and stand in the shoes of Captain Cook and Charles Darwin, and I want to at least pass through the two towns where the French artist Paul Gauguin lived. The hotel said no and confirmed nothing was available on Sunday. So I sent off many emails to all the tour providers and I am now booked on a round trip for Sunday which will take me where I want to go (well that is what I am led to believe) and much more.I now suspect some of the other 'nos' from the hotel may in fact turn out to be yeses- well that's to he hoped for. Especially since one is the necessary data sim card so I can write and send you my blogs! But what will be will be. ...I refuse to tell you I am counting the sleeps to go before I am in Gauguin territory.

Quests for paradise

The words in my last blog describing a common goal between Gauguin and Buffet, were tantamount to a gift. A certain amount of personal reflection has been the result. Am I on a quest for paradise? Why am I really travelling to French Polynesia and then leaving Tahiti for more remote islands after only one day? I know that I have the belief that I will never return to French Polynesia and this has prompted me to explore some outer reaches so I can compare and contrast the well trodden tourist route with a less well trodden route. I guess I believe the journey will put me in touch with at least some people who have little or nothing to do with tourists normally, and in this way I am expecting the experience to connect me with something more authentic. In case you are wondering, I realise there is a difference between authenticity and paradise. Well I know what the former is, but the idea of paradise is somewhat elusive. For certain I am very happy with my life and I live in a place which offers paradisal visions and experiences often. Hobart usually looks marvellously stunningly beautiful, whatever the weather. Sometimes just being here arouses feelings of joy and profound happiness. Some would say this is paradise. In Biblical terms I think there is talk of only one paradise,but if there are parallel universes surely there can be more than one paradise. So - am I on a quest? Am I looking for other examples of paradise. No, its much more pragmatic than that - I have a holiday break and I am not staying home. Meanwhile, back to the comment from yesterday's blog. I think Joey has interpreted the situation incorrectly between the artist and the musician. Gauguin wasn't seeking paradise, rather an anti-authoritarian, non-rule bound society where he felt free. In the process, I think he found paradise. I don't think Buffet was on a quest for paradise either. His manager booked him on a gig in Tahiti, he travelled south from Honolulu, loved the experience, and couldn't help but return a number of times. But he didn't stay and live permanently. Because of that reason, I am sure he loved visiting but did not think French Polynesia was paradise.

How about a connection between Jimmy Buffet and Paul Gauguin? Does it exist?

A connection has been made at http://joeyveltkamp.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/my-favorite-things-buffett-gauguin.html by a Seattle artist in respect of an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum - with the following to say in respect of his giving a guided tour of the exhibition: "Tonight's My Favorite Thing Tour was great...such a nice group. We spent the tour discussing the connections between Jimmy Buffett and Gauguin and their very different quests for paradise. When I first saw the Gauguin exhibit, a soundtrack of Jimmy Buffett began to play in my head. At first, it seemed highly inappropriate but the more I thought about it, the less strange it seemed. Born a hundred years apart (technically 98), they share many superficial similarities but the most important is that both were/are driven by a desire to find paradise, free of the constraints of Western mores. For this tour, I handed out some suggested pairings of Buffett songs to go with some of Gauguin's paintings based on complimentary lyricality. I don't think even a handful of people on the tour knew who Jimmy Buffett, which added an extra layer of ridiculousness to my premise. Guaguin's Coastal Landscape from Martinique paired with Buffett's One Particular Harbor Gauguin's Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)paired with Buffett's King of Somewhere Hot Gaugin's Female Nude with Sunflowers (Femme Caraïbe)paired with Buffett's Cheeseburger in Paradise Gauguin's Women of Tahiti (Femmes de Tahiti)paired with Buffett's Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw?

1888 - Robert Louis Stevenson and the Marquesas Islands. Where was Gauguin?

I love the fact that so many of the world's renowned people have visited the remote French Polynesian islands, and gained a great deal from the experience. It seems everyone starts at Tahiti and then moves onto other islands. Even my trip will start there before I travel those 1000 odd miles north to the Marquesas - I have no choice because all international flights arrive and depart from Tahiti - but what reason do ships and their sailors have for always starting with Tahiti? We know Robert Louis Stevenson spent some months in Tahiti, before visiting the Marquesas in 1888. He wrote about his experiences and impressions there, in a 1900 book called ‘In the South Seas, Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotur and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises, on the Yacht Casco (1888) and the Schooner Equator. 1900. You can read his words at http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/rlsteven/southseas.pdf. Robert Louis Stevenson's first landfall on his voyage was at Hatiheu, on the north side of Nuku Hiva, in 1888. Meanwhile half a world away, in the second half of 1888, Paul Gauguin joined Vincent van Gogh in Arles, but the two quickly parted ways. Gauguin left France in 1891 and settled in Tahiti. He returned briefly to France but abandoned Europe permanently in 1895, having failed to sell many of the works from his first Tahitian excursion. He moved to the Marquesas Islands around 1898 and died on Hiva Oa in 1903. There is no record of Robert Louis Stevenson ever travelling to Hiva Oa. And there is no record of Paul Gauguin ever travelling to Nuku Hiva. I wonder if their personal and professional worlds ever allowed for them to know of each other?

Why do I care about Gauguin?

Last June at The Hermitage art museum in St Petersburg Russia, I had a revelation. For certain, I had looked at a room or two of Gauguin's paintings in Moscow and been bowled over by the sheer volume of art works by single artists in each place. But it was one room in the Hermitage which stopped me in my tracks, and made me think about what I was seeing. This was the room of paintings which Paul Gauguin had produced in French Polynesia. Back last June, in my ignorance, I remembered from my art teacher days how I had him working only in Tahiti. I didn't know Gauguin spent time on the island of Tahiti before moving to the northern most group of French Polynesian islands - the Marquesas Islands. Unfortunately now, I do not know which paintings at The Hermitage are from which locations. They might all have been from Tahiti, all from the Marquesas or any mix of the two. I may find, when I reach French Polynesia, that Gauguin lived on and/or visited other islands around about. That room in St Petersburg was unusual to my eye. All the pictures which had been painted in a lush tropical environment were lacking a pulsating richness of colour which art historians have described as a key aspect of Gauguin's work. For example, "His bold, colorful and design oriented paintings ...", "Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through colour" and "Gauguin discovered primitive art, with its flat forms and the violent colors belonging to an untamed nature." In St Petersburg, I did see bold and design-oriented paintings with flat forms. But I did not see intensely colourful or expressively colourful paintings nor did I see violent colours. I saw a strange sort of gloomy dullness. And as I sat on the window ledge at the Hermitage occasionally looking out to see if the torrential rain had stopped, I mused on why what I was looking at differed so much from what the art history books had to say (and I realised with embarrassment that I had taught countless classes of students the line the historians had taken, and I could see they were wrong and therefore I had been wrong.) Then in a flash I had an alternative way of understanding those pictures. An American woman sat down next to me and I loaded the idea to her. She, like me, found it plausible and at least worth further consideration. I have lived in and travelled through tropical Australia for many years (not to forget other tropical environments around the world). My recollections of the effect of tropical vegetation canopies is that colours are distorted beneath. Further, colours lose their clarity and brightness. I wondered whether this could explain Gauguin's use of colour and the overall effect of his pictures. I looked closely at the Hermitage pictures, and determined they were not in need of conservation cleaning. Therefore, it was not as if years of filth had clouded their purity. Rather, I felt ... and now I want to find out ... that Gauguin deliberately chose to paint his colours realistically based on what he saw out of direct sunlight. If you go to http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/08/hm88_0_2_69.html, this is the Gauguin Room at the Hermitage and as the virtual tour swivels around you can see the curtained windows. I sat on the ledge of the left one - the curtains had been raised because the day was not very bright outside. It is interesting looking at the paintings on this website because the photographed and well-lit images seem so much brighter than they did on the day when I was there. I remember, from the days when I was working at the Australian National Gallery, that works of art once reproduced as a photograph always appeared crisper, cleaner and brighter - the effect of 'professional' lighting.

What can one do? What should one do in French Polynesia?

Hours of Googling, and thorough reading of the information presented by the Lonely Planet and the Trip Advisor websites, demonstrate there will be some challenges. Clearly the cost will be a consideration at every turn. Nothing is cheap. Not accommodation, not food, not internal travel on any island, and not travel between islands. Perhaps if my time wasn't tight, I could wait until I could bum a ride on a fisherman's boat or a lazily wandering yachtee. To fly to and from the Marquesas and between the Marquesas islands will be a constant and large money drain. And I must make the decision soon as to where I will go, so that I can book accommodation. Already I am resigned to being in accommodation that won't suit me in some ways, but I cannot fork out $1000 a night - even if those over-the water-personal-bures are so fabulous in concept, privacy and look. Unless... my lottery ticket tonight comes up trumps. What to do - well ... there are archeological sites, there are extraordinary panoramas which can be walked to or reached by 4WD along tortuous mountain tracks, volcanic amphitheatres, there are sites devoted to local and regional history, there are some local food specialities, traditional villages where traditional crafts are still practiced for everyday living, long dropping waterfalls, islands where few tourists visit, helicopter rides to the inaccessible (few roads,)the water everywhere, and the opportunity to scuba dive and snorkel, and then there are sites associated with Gauguin. And on the Marquesas Islands, I have discovered there are guides I can access - so more research required about them. And then I need to research to see if the same opportunity exists back on the island of Tahiti, and nearby Moorea. Internet access is limited. So maybe less of my story can be blogged regularly. But it seems like the story will be rich and complex.