watercolour over mashed potato

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,/ my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running./ So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,/ and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans.
Pablo Neruda, from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

September 2005

It all started over mashed potato. Driving through surreal landscape around the medieval city of Rustaq, I had written directions for the next batch of explorers: "You now find yourself surrounded by mounds that slowly grow into softly rounded hills with gentle furrows, like mashed potato raked lightly with a fork." I had thought at the time that this was a particularly inspired piece of writing, and asked geologist Steven Fryberger to explain the mystery of rocky features.

Steve is also an artist, and while he empathised with my descriptive outpouring, the geologist in him must have secretly shuddered at my unashamedly uneducated treatment of basic geology. He offered to take me on a geological tour, and this quickly dissolved into a discussion on everything from the history of geology to the art it inspires.

In a way, I was repeating history. James Hutton, the father of modern geology, started off by walking around identifying rocks in the 18th century. But his defining moment was when he came face to face with my mashed potatoes, on the Isle of Arran. There, sticking out of Scottish mud and grass, were layer upon layer of rock. These beds, piled over each other, were what looked like they had been raked with a fork. But what Hutton noticed was that the lower rocks were at a different angle from the ones over them. A century before, the Danish scientist Nicholas Steno had proposed that rocks were arranged in layers, with the oldest ones being at the bottom, and the newest on top. This is the same principle as tree trunk rings - the oldest are at the core of the cross section. So all this meant that the rocks that Hutton saw sticking out almost vertically at the bottom were older, and the rocks above, sloping much more gently, had formed later. Hutton correctly inferred that the geological forces that had thrust, deformed and eroded the lower layers and then slapped on the upper ones must have taken place over huge periods of time, which in turn meant that the Earth was very old. This might sound elementary today, but he was going against what was believed in his time, that the Earth was just a few thousand years old. The Scottish 'gentleman-farmer' had turned geology topsy-turvy, just like his rock formation that is now known as an unconformity.

You don't have to travel to the Scottish isles for unconformities, though. Muscat is like one big object that was pushed up and broken into pieces at weird angles. But before getting into something as complex as unconformities, you have to first understand the layers of rocks, or bedding in correct geological terms. Steve suggests we go down to the beach, where he'll dig a trench in the sand and expose the underlying bedding. He seems quite comfortable with the idea of digging up a beach in the evening, like it is the most natural thing in the world. And, like all good geologists, he has a shovel in the back of his 4WD. So, as the sun dips lower over Ras al Hamra, Steve makes a neat little incision in the sand, pointing to the clearly defined layers of lighter and darker, finer and coarser grains of sand and seashells.

"Look at all this energy in all these waves," he says, flinging a hand out, encompassing the ocean. "They're moving all this sand around. Its very uneven energy release. Every time a wave drops the sand it leaves a bed, so over time you get this bedding, the mashed potatoes. And that's a very small time frame, the time frame of a wave." And the waves come with the cycle of the tides, and the level of the seas has receded and risen with the glacial periods as polar ice caps have formed and melted. The beds themselves can be seen because their colour varies with their chemical constituents. As the wave drops its sediments, heavier particles like seashells would form the bottom layer, while the lighter particles of sand would drop over them. You can see this endless cycle build upon itself every hour, season and year, over millennia.

Being a beach, the layers of sand are formed at an angle, gently dipping into the sea. Beach stratification almost always dips seawards, so if you see bedding on rocks that slant, they might have once been sand on an ancient beach. An unconformity is when layers of bedding are shoved into an unnatural angle by geological forces, and other layers are later formed over the previous ones, this time the right way around.

Hutton's unconformity is the beginning of many things.

While on the Isle, Steve couldn't find a decent watercolour of the famous feature, and decided to make one himself. And suddenly, by accident, he fell into an old tradition of creating art out of nature. Millions have done it before him: from the ancient Magdalenian cave painters who developed the first art system in recorded human history, to modern impressionists like Monet, who would paint on up to three canvasses at a time as the light changed, just as it was now over Ras al Hamra. Steve was paying very close attention to it, especially as it fell over the limestone cliffs that rose up from the sea, tumbling into hills over which most of the PDO houses were built. "Limestone has got this distinctive softness to it," says Steve, "and can take on the colour of the day. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, its this beautiful crypto red." And over that canvas of slopes, greenish-yellow grass took root, completing the picture.

Steve took a quick digital photograph, reference for the ensuing watercolour. What that would lead to was a pleasant painting, and a geologically correct piece: the colour of the limestone, the section of cross bedding, the midlevel unconformity and the conglomerate beneath. This is where Steve's art begins to branch out into originality. But after all that geological depth to a canvas, do most people really get it? The artist is sure of it, even if his audience cannot tell the difference between ophiolite and tertiary carbonate. He quotes T S Eliot, who said, "Genuine poetry can communicate even before it is understood."

Steve insists that people can sense innate honesty and technical perfection. He's right, of course. You might not understand the thousands of dots of pure colour that Seurat used to paint bathers on the Seine, or the soft brush strokes with which Da Vinci dabbed the corners of Mona Lisa's eyes. But Pointillism and the Renaissance resulted in finished works that have gone beyond time, even if their methods and reasons have been left to interpretation. And that might just be the triumph of art.

By now, the red has faded into the shadows, and Steve might have missed a chance at another watercolour. But unconformities, on paper or staring out of rock, are only the start. There are more people about now: kids playing football on the beach, ladies out for a stroll on the waterfront. It might just be another Muscat evening, but Steve sees form, colour and life, a rich environment that he is now exploring with paint. "Most science is very lonely and isolated," he says. "Art gets you out, you get to talk to people. And everybody loves to talk about it." He might have started with science, but he is very interested in people. Art, he insists, is a way to have a dialogue with humanity, at many levels. For a scientist who started with geological sketches, this is a very big step. But whether he's painting humans or rocks, part of the draw of art has always been as much about others as it has been about himself.

"I just enjoy relating to people that way," he says. "It might be a counterpoint to science. You can talk about something serious. I've had my life filled with a lot of banal conversations, and I've just wanted to run from the room screaming. So hopefully by doing this art one finds likeminded people. That's basically the drive - its communication. A lot of what artists might say or do is in their work."

That's one of the reasons why Steve is such a good artist. He works. "Even if someone can't draw when they start out, you can fix that. What you can't give is the energy, desire, love of the medium and the brainpower that makes you get after the issues. Anybody can be an artist, you just have to work. That's how you know somebody is an artist. If they're making art they're an artist. And if they keep making art over and over and over again, then they're probably really an artist. I am taking very conservative steps, towards the next level. But I'm still a guy who makes pictures of things that you can recognise."

But Steve is already a few levels up, and this is where he is really coming into his own. His art increasingly focuses on people, and his technique and style have evolved with the subject. Steve's first paintings involved drawing with lines and then filling in the colour. This is one of the key things about his work that has evolved. Over time, he has lost the line. Instead, his forms are being suggested just by colours and shapes.

His work is leaning towards the abstract, what Steve calls the non-representational. Steve might be almost 60, but he's growing fast as an artist, and evolving. "I think you're always learning about visual language. Each time you learn a little bit more your technique is forced to change, because you realise you can't get there from where you are. You might come across perspective and try to deal with it - are you going to ignore it, crush it or work with it? And then you have to ask yourself, what am I trying to say? You might not be able to answer it with a sketch or a watercolour, and that's when you start to accumulate more tools in your bag."

Perhaps losing the line opens up art more to personal interpretation - if you have to spell it out with a border, it's missing the point.

Steve is also pushing the limits of traditional watercolour art with his evolution. The medium was originally a tool for serious oil painters, who would make a quick watercolour impression of the scene, and go back to the studio to do it in oil. In recent years, though, watercolour has emerged more as a style than a medium. But this is more a reflection of the artists' limitations than the material used. "Watercolour has become what people expect it to be," complains Steve, visibly disturbed. "It's now a shallow, superficial and dippy medium, full of cliches and cute gestural strokes. This is a corruption of what can be a decent medium." In his signature style - this mix of tremendously serious work and hilariously dry humour - Steve rebelled by painting pelicans at the Amsterdam zoo. It is done in watercolour, but otherwise ignores the most basic principles that the style is known for today. Instead of soft brush strokes that merged over each other in frameable bliss, its forms are rude, the edges sharp. "It's quite impolite, downright rude. But I wanted to be in-your-face. Some people will look at this painting and go, 'Oh, pelicans!' and that's fine. If they like it because they're pelicans that's alright, but I'm after a lot more than that. This is a critique of the medium."

Those blotches of flat colour represent the last stages of his evolution till now, as far away from the little line drawings of cross bedding, or the almost pretty shoreline of ophiolite around Qantab. He has become a successful colourist, using it to convey mood, emotions, even form. Perhaps the most famous colourist ever was Van Gogh, using it to convey a mind increasingly on the verge of insanity. From the earthy tones of The Potato Eaters to the raw hues of The Night Cafe, he brought an almost scientific understanding of colour to an outpouring of art that seemed out of control. In a letter to his brother Theo in 1888, Van Gogh said, "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green."

But Steve is not a Van Gogh, and he certainly doesn't seem to be in pain. He is, in a certain way, moving closer to the Fauves who saw themselves as autonomous - as creators of objects that posses their internal logic and significance. For such artists a work of art is something new in the world, not a mere copy. Perhaps somewhere there lies the next level of what art can be. Art history is full of hints at the future, and Steve has picked them up along the way instead of formally learning them.

"If you look back you can find people who are much better than you. You don't want to be them but you learn from them. For example: It's raining in Amsterdam, you've been to the museum, you got a Morandi postcard, you put it on the table, you copy it, you mail it to a friend. One of the best Morandi's I ever did I mailed to somebody!"

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