A year in review: Furniture and fittings

On 15 January I wanted to get more furniture. The day before I’d gone with Omer to Erskineville to pick up a small bookcase but since I hadn’t asked about the dimensions I discovered, to my disappointment, it was too large to fit in the car. The next day, a Saturday, I was in the city chasing an extension cord (the exchange in the end fell through) and headed in the car to Wolli Creek on the way home to pick up another bookcase, the seller living in one of the new apartment blocks near the railway line, near where I parked in a loading zone. The woman came downstairs but looked right through me – evidently she wasn’t expecting someone as elderly as I am – and I watched her dicker with a mobile phone as she stood on the pavement. She turned around, finally seeing me standing there stock-till and looking her in the eye and when she opened her mouth to speak I offered, “I’m here for the bookshelf,” or something along such lines. Evidently it was enough information for she immediately turned, went inside and admitted me to the lobby. 

Once inside I picked up the object and carried it downstairs then along the seemingly endless pavement to my waiting car. I got it home safely but by then the back of the thing’d started to come away. This didn’t unduly concern me as it was intended to store gardening implements.

I put it in a corner of the garage and a week later brought upstairs to the middle bedroom a small cabinet that’d been found on the pavement during council cleanup (see photo below) and which’d been sitting up to this point behind my car, unused. On it I placed my old living room lamp and then also spent time putting up pictures on the east wall. On the Thursday I’d hung a small watercolour that’d been treated and framed (top right in photo), and which Amanda the framer’d brought over when she visited that day to drop some things off. 

Another watercolour bought on Facebook Marketplace initially went up on the north wall in the same room. To pick it up I’d driven the year before to a distant suburb of Sydney called Kings Park where, on Madagascar Drive, I left the car for a moment outside a large suburban bungalow. It’s a pleasant street very near a main road and the motorway – handy to everything – and the man who sold the artwork to me for a small amount of money had an Indonesian name. The artist is Nancy Toovey and the title of her work is ‘Burrill Lake’ (though on the label it’s misspelled).

I moved this picture to the west wall (see photo below) after mature reflection compounded by the passage of time. This wall took more effort because of the Wi-Fi equipment that my IT contractor Tim’d installed so that I’d have good broadband coverage on that floor. Finishing the arrangement of pictures on this wall in the last full week of January required placement of three oil paintings also bought via Facebook Marketplace from a vendor out in the northwest of the city. 

These little gems among the first of the items bought this way. The hang has photos of Adelaide as well as a stunning piece of embroidery that used to belong to someone in the family – I wish I knew to whom to ascribe its manufacture – with, to the left, some items brought out at the last minute from the back bedroom where they’d been lost in an overly busy hang that was now simplified by the removal of a few items. Finding a balance between variety and elegance is difficult with decorative art, but the flexibility offered by the picture hanging system makes the job easier.

On the north wall of the same room (see photo below) I put up Adelaide’s ‘Cat House’ under a family photo of a house that I took time to identify as Grandma Bea’s place on Wattletree Road, Malvern. I asked for help getting this detail cemented down communicating with cousin Trish Allen … because thank God she belongs stubbornly to mum’s generation. 

Trish said things to the effect that it was Wattletree Road but – as for my part – I’d bravely imagined it might’ve been the previous Dean house at Glen Eira Road. She told me that, in fact, she thought not because of the building’s style: whereas she’d had memories of Glen Eira Road being built in the 20s or 30s, Wattletree Rd was from the 1890s. 

I took a look on Google and helped myself in the process of navigation by remembering how, when I was a child staying over at Bea’s place during our family visits, the commuter trains’d be audible nearby at night. I had in mind the noise of the train as it moved along the tracks, a noise that’d successfully impressed itself on my imagination when I was small and that somehow, for me, emblematised Beatrice Dean (who’d been born Kewish), a woman I loved in a special way because I loved my mother and she was my mother’s mother.

But also because of the after-school treats she prepared when she stayed at our house in Sydney. These remnant memories of a dead woman – who remained alive in my consciousness, the paths to thoughts and images cemented in place by consanguineity – practically aided me when I wanted to zoom in on a property situated near a railway line. 

So here is how it now appears in real life. Found! The hang is less simple than this photo wants to suggest, and is in fact more diverse in its effect, mixing elements having a range of different characteristics – a still life, a child’s painting, a photo of a family member, an extensively imaginative portrait showing a 19th century woman wearing a hat decorated with flowers – allowing me some peace as I arranged my room in ensembles able to communicate something indefinite but comforting to that rare person who might visit. 

The tracking had to be extended to take advantage of the whole wall, and one day at around this time I got the picture hanger to come with his ute to install more rails on part of the wall that’d been left empty the last time. A wide selection of frames – some bought second-hand in antique stores or op shops, some now out of stock and no longer offered to artisans for use in their creations, some that are fussy, some that are very simple in their design – a disparate range of subjects, a set of family associations bringing back echoing years of memories to provide me with company. 

I spent hours over the period of a week putting it all together, a process that made me indebted to fate. The result let me enjoy a feeling of vacancy with the caveat that – because I’d installed a picture hanging system – anything could change at the summons of the vaguest whim. It’d been a feeling of discontent – the merest sense that another arrangement’d do better – that’d inspired me to move the landscape to the west wall, so an inkling of a shifting desire could overturn the new design (dispensation) at another moment, in the same way that a ripple across water distributed by a flung stone can make a waterbird move on the surface of a lake.

Moods drove my body, sometimes further, sometimes hardly at all. Around this time (in fact on 25 January) I picked up another bookcase, as well as some oil paintings from South Africa. It was a day I’d had the cleaners over and the sheets were just about finished in the machine when, seated on the couch, I scrolled on Facebook to an ad announcing a deceased estate. The family had decided to give things away for free and I liked the look of what was on offer so I messaged the guy in charge, who turned out to be a handyman. As soon as the sheets were on the line I jumped in the car and drove to Bondi Junction, parking on a leafy street near Spring Street. I buzzed the apartment at the intercom but had to wait a while as at first there was no answer. Once upstairs I saw a bookcase and said I’d take it as well as the paintings I’d originally come for, so picked it up bodily and carried it, straining at the muscles, to the car. When I got back to the intercom there was another guy there, and I scooted into the lift ahead of him when the front door opened. The handyman bolstered my claim (“First in, best dressed”) and I moved down to the RAV4the paintings that I’d seen online. 

The frames came next along with a large carved wooden mirror. Back home I put the mirror on Facebook Marketplace and almost immediately got an expression of interest, despite a $65 price tag. She bargained me down and said she’d come on Monday to pick it up. A couple of days later Ming said the colour of the bookcase didn’t appeal, so I put it up against the wall in the garage near a chest of drawers I’d picked up in Randwick the year before. For the paintings I’d need D-rings put in before they could be hung and, having promised in the future to send one of them to Japan, I packaged it up on the Saturday.

Omer said that he’d take the wooden shoe cabinet that had been in the entranceway since Ming’d moved to my place, so I measured it and found it would indeed fit in the car. On the morning of 30 January I decided to put the Bondi Junction bookcase in that room, and to move the chest of drawers that contains empty bags (singlet bags, shopping bags, Ikea bags etc) further over toward the window with the pale pink curtain. I completed the shift on Sunday 6 February after I brought Omer a coffee table I’d picked up in Ultimo from a woman named Hsiung, who’d listed it for free on Marketplace. 

Omer helped me carry the shoe box to his place and on 11 February I picked up a 1m-by-1m table for Ming to use that was being given away by a business that was in the process of moving or shutting down. I matched the trip with a visit to pick up mail at Broadway Shopping Centre, the business being located in Surry Hills. Fortunate to find a parking spot in a loading zone, once at the front door of the building I phoned the staffer, whose number I’d been given, and as I was standing at the entranceway I buzzed floor 4 then went up in the lift. The young woman who met me said that the business also had a broken table to get rid of, but I assessed the sound one and guessed that even on its own I’d only just fit it in the car.

This is how it turned out. In the rain the table barely squeaked into the back of the RAV4 and having gone back to Botany I got it upstairs into the ground floor of my house without assistance. To get it up to the first floor would require another person. The next day I drove to Ming’s to pick up a small chest of drawers she didn’t want to keep in her apartment. In fact Ming’d commandeered the Hsiung woman’s coffee table to put beside her bed. Omer came back to Botany with me and the two of us got the square table up to Ming’s studio on the first floor. Another square table I picked up (from a young Glebe couple) ended up being chucked out on 27 February with council cleanup. It wasn’t stable – it wobbled if you pushed down on one side – so I rid myself of it and carried it out to the street to be taken away. 

There was around this time an influx of items found on Facebook Marketplace because people were giving them away for free, including three bedside tables that I put up in the studio to hold family photographs, a bookcase from Paddington, a small side table from Woollahra, a set of drawers from Randwick, and a small cabinet from Maroubra. 

The essential characteristic in all cases not entirely attributable to an origin in the eastern suburbs – though I limited myself to nearby areas on account of my anxiety attacks – but primarily because they’d fit in my car and were available without any payment. It's amazing what people will willingly give away: furniture, kitchenware, even art. They just want it gone, though some items are offered first for a price and if that doesn’t work are marked down to nothing. 

By 3 March I had 12 items in the garage ready to give away, sell, or to carry upstairs to use myself. I felt like Santa Claus. Santa turned out to be the name of the steam cleaning guy I’d organised to come to do two rugs that needed washing. I’d asked my cleaner to organise his visit but they didn’t give Santa my phone number so when he arrived at my house early on 9 March he went away without contacting me (my doorbell was out of service at this time due to persistent rain). He phoned me later when he was doing a job at Arncliffe (by this time he’d gotten my number from his contact) and organised to come by at 12.30pm. When he did he parked in the basement and worked on the rugs on the ground floor. The small one took a fair quantity of work to remedy because dirt’d gotten ingrained, and when he left me he left the rugs stretched out on the floor, drying with the front and rear windows open to let air in. Circulating air helped remove moisture from the rugs and when I went out I left the house open. 

Once home I carried the Nanimarquina rug upstairs to my bedroom and put it in front of my desk (see photo below) though it took until the following morning to get the orientation right so that I was completely happy.

The same day I continued a conversation started a few days earlier about a cabinet I’d picked up on Facebook Marketplace from a woman in Maroubra who was giving it away. Once I had the cabinet in my garage I saw a post in the Eastern Suburbs Buy, Well and Swap group asking for donations of furniture to help Ukrainian refugees and left a comment with an offer in a practical sense, in fact telling the woman that I had something she might like to take. In response to a message sent to me, and that I noticed in the afternoon when I was out on errands, I promised to send a photo of the cabinet. Elena told me when I did, once I got home, and when I sent details of its dimensions, that it would be too big to fit in the allotted space, so the transaction didn’t pan out as planned. She thanked me via Messenger but on 11 March I sold the cabinet to a Korean woman and her husband living in Telopea who almost didn’t take it. The woman initially said the fuel cost would be too high to justify coming to collect it unassisted so what changed her mind was my offer to meet her halfway, and on the morning of 11 March I put it in the car and drove to Campsie to link up with her on Wonga Street.

My familiarity with this part of Sydney was grounded in having for a number of years lived in the area. I parked at about 10.45am and at 11 o’clock messaged Hana, who soon afterward responded from her car saying she was on the way. But when she finally arrived – I saw her white SUV on the street as she spoke to me using the phone number I’d supplied – it turned out her baby was in the back seat so it was impossible to open up the rear of the vehicle to accept the item. In response to this crisis, and wanting a sale, I offered to drive the thing to her house for $5 more, which I did when she gave me the address. On the way north through western Sydney I suffered no panic attack, which surprised me, and I got to the quiet suburban street having gone along some busy roads at high speed. Her husband turned up not long after I arrived at the house to help me carry the cabinet inside, and we put it in a passage out of the way of the front door. The man gave me a $50 bill and I took $10 out of my wallet to make change, then I headed into town to visit my post office box in Ultimo.

The next day I messaged a woman who was in the process of getting rid of a number of household items, in fact her ad named vases but when I said I’d come and pick them up she asked what I wanted. I took this to mean she’d other things on offer so I said I’d take it all, and when she put in a set of photos for me to see, and having scrutinised them, I added that I’d take the pictured candelabrum as well.

To get to Bondi I went through Maroubra and Coogee, ending up on a crowded Birrell Street where I thanked fate for sending me out immediately as it took several changes of the Bondi Road traffic light to bring me to the main drag, on which the woman’s apartment block sits. Knowing that Bondi Road’d be crowded with parked cars I took the first unoccupied space I saw and walked down toward the beach behind a very drunk woman and a man, shorter than his companion, who was telling her off quietly and soberly. I picked up the shopping bags with goods in them, and the candelabrum, and headed back to the car, driving home through Randwick and Pagewood. 

When I had it in the garage I proceeded to strip off the copper wire wrapped around it. There were batteries as well in small plastic containers, and evidently someone’d tried to turn the thing into an electromagnet. I resolved to ask Omer about it, and put a question to a Jewish friend asking if it was a menorah but when he replied saying he thought not I didn’t change my opinion and kept a promise to myself to sell it.

My great-aunt’s photos came closer to being hung on the walls as on 18 March I visited a print shop. I’d already partially dealt with them by getting a shop on Botany Road, Mascot, to make some prints but since I hadn’t liked the quality or the size had asked my framer for help finding a good outlet that could do the work for me. On this day I caught the bus to Redfern and walked to Chippendale where Pixel Perfect sits on Abercrombie Street, and once inside the shop I spoke at length to a man who sat at the front counter with a computer and a screen ready to display edits to customers. When I walked in there was a customer at the counter but he soon left, then Sam and I decided on how to process the image files, what paper stock to use, and what size to print the photos out in. He promised to send me an email with attachments on Tuesday and I left.

In the afternoon, after getting home, I drove to Bunnings to pick up Corflute, which turned out to be sold in enormous sheets over two metres long, so I had to strap a sheet of the flexible stuff to the roof of my car. All the way on the road home it flapped up and down alarmingly, banging on the windscreen and making the rear-view mirror shudder. I stopped on one road to add a rope to the rig, then took slow roads back, going through past Mascot Station, and turning into King Street to get to Botany Road. It was touch-and-go all the way and I reflected that if I’d passed a police car they’d probably have stopped me as I was holding onto the Corflute through the window of my car as I drove the RAV4 solely with my left hand. 

The Corflute was needed to act as a folder for a poster I’d had worked on by the paper conservator, who lives in Lilyfield, and on the same day as I bought the Corflute I made an appointment to go out to see her the following Wednesday. After I got home from Bunnings I took the big sheet of plastic to the basement and on the concrete floor using a box cutter separated it into halves then on 23 March drove successfully – apart from a little heaviness in my heartbeat around Redfern – to Rose’s house. We put the poster in the Corflute folder she made with the materials I’d brought along with some masking tape she had in her studio and when I got back home I took off another 10 centimetres since the folder was a bit large to sit flat in the car. I fixed up the hinge with my own tape – plastic sticky tape this time, with a layer on both sides of the join to make hinges out of tape – even though Rose had cautioned against using sticky tape because the adhesive bleeds. 

The framer Amanda replied to the message I’d sent telling me she’d be in the city on Friday week, and I said that it’d work to meet on that day at my place. On that Wednesday Amanda and I had a video conference where we chose some materials, especially for an embroidery with a quote from the Bible that mum and dad’d conserved in dad’s records. 

I got an invoice from Pixel Perfect the same day and on the Friday I travelled down on the bus to pick up the photographs of Madge’s they’d printed for me but on Thursday I brought up from the garage a small bookcase acquired for free from a Paddington couple. It’d been picked up at the end of February but it wasn’t until the fourth week of March that I put it in the hallway on the first floor, and on Saturday 26 March I filled it with books and put photos on it, the point of the thing being to accommodate a small lamp. 

I exchanged some messages with Amanda on account of some backing cloth we planned to use for the embroidery as well as for a flag of uncle Elmer’s I was having done. 

Amanda had specifications for the cloth to be used and detailed those requirements in messages. I considered the possibility of going to Spotlight but she’d said that they don’t have a lot of suitable material, in any case it would’ve taken a special trip down to Rockdale to visit the store. In my kitchen I had a number of items for her to take with her when she came and I also had things in the entranceway that I wanted her to bring back to Richmond in her car, including second-hand frames picked up from the deceased estate clearance. In a similar vein, Amanda’d offered me one of her used frames to go with an item we’d discussed, a montage of photos I’d taken in 2008 featuring a shopping centre garage. The frame was gold and I’d selected a yellow mount for the print, which prominently features yellow in pavement markings put there to direct cars.

In the final days of March I put my grey twisted paper chairs out the front on the balcony overlooking the street (see pic below). Sitting here you have an opportunity to stay out of the rain but still stay outside, and you can see people walking on the street, cars going past, while listening to birds. Currawongs and rainbow lorikeets could be heard, and their chorus reminded me of Pyrmont, though in those days the proximity of other buildings made sitting on the balcony feel wrong. I remember the Rum Store, just across the street, where residents could look out their windows at my apartment making me shy and unwilling to use the balcony that sat for the most part unused for six years.

Once safely ensconced in Botany I could also sit out the back watching the rain (see pic below) on a chair kept under the overhang in a dry place, the wet by this time affecting the city for over a month, despite short breaks, and northern NSW was still, on the 29th when this photo was taken, experiencing high river levels. In fact the next morning there were reports of people again leaving their houses on account of the water.

I got an email from a commercial gallery on 7 April and it was about an artist whose work I’d long admired. Initially when I read the email and understood its contents I decided not to delve into my savings and buy a work because I had framing expenses coming that needed to be met, then I tweeted in the evening, “There is too much beauty .. The loveliness of things .. I will b patient and wait. Getting lots of things framed soon.” But early the next morning – in fact well before dawn, as is customary for me – I realised with a pang that if I didn’t move to get one of the artist’s works into my house at this moment when opportunity offered I’d regret it. I changed my mind in a welter of indescribable feelings and before 5am sent an email in reply to the staffer whose name had been in the signature position of the business’ initial missive sent to me the day before. I then waited, mindlessly checking my email client from time to time because I was forced to see if I’d been successful, the works so beautiful it was possible demand had precluded my achieving the goal I’d long set for myself. 

At last near 7.30am a reply came telling me that the work I’d chosen (but they are all gorgeous, so it wouldn’t really have mattered in any case) was still available. I sent my details and retreated into limbo with a sense of trepidation looming. How would my expenses turn out over the next couple of weeks and months? What if someone suddenly asked me to give them an amount of money? And what about my anticipated tax bill? I’d sent records to my accountant not long before. I allowed all these questions to swing in the wind as I relaxed with the knowledge that I’d met with the past at a point in the road that had long had its own signpost. The fact of the matter was that I’d told my accountant about my plans the last time we’d met., at that time (talking online in February using my computer and video camera), I’d actually voiced a wish for just such a work of art and now, two months later, I was filling the order. 

Who doesn’t feel a kind of anxiety when ideas become facts? When I’d refused temptation on that first day – receiving the gallery’s email – I’d compensated for resulting feelings by telling myself that, instead of someone else’s work, I should make my own, and have them framed instead. But now with the painting secured by a promise I thought about making art in the shadow of such a fabulous object. The painting was delivered at the start of the last full week of May by which time I was busily making artworks of my own which, printed in Chippendale at the same shop that did my great-aunt’s photos, sat on a table underneath Yvonne Robert’s amazing painting.

At the end of May I spoke on the phone with an artwork restorer about another work, an oil painting I’d gotten for free via Facebook Marketplace from a woman in Bellevue Hill. In fact there’d been two works picked up on one trip, a watercolour having been reframed and sent to Japan to my family. The oil is a still life featuring a cauliflower and sadly it had been neglected. Chris told me what he would do to it and what it would likely cost and I told him to go ahead with the work. On 1 June I had an SMS conversation with the paper conservator about some items I’d left with her that needed fixing and flattening but a month later still hadn’t picked them up as she’d lost a sister and was in mourning.

I met the restorer on 9 August when I drove out to Richmond to the framer’s to see about things to get done. It was a mammoth session with a break for lunch – just some roast chicken ($5) from the shop up the road – during which Amanda and I saw to 35 pictures including many that mum and dad had conserved in their records for 50 years. Some were paintings my brother made when he was small. Others were linocuts I made when I was about 20 years old. In many cases we specified frames that I’d picked up free via Facebook Marketplace. It was good to use these old things appropriately and in a way that matched the relevant images, it saves nice things from being sent to landfill.

Chris the restorer is a voluble gentleman who obviously loves art, and he showed Amanda and I a beautiful little landscape painting of a street with a horse and cart that had probably been painted in the middle of the 19th century. He’d just finished restoring it, it looked fantastic. Among the things that I loaded up in the back of my car was a landscape painting I’d bought in Coogee that needed attention, and Chris had changed the colour of the frame (the original colour didn’t go with the painting at all) so that it looks wonderful.

When I got home and the next morning I was busy putting paintings up on the walls, and it was good – I mused when I had a fraction of a second of free time – that a few days before I’d ordered more of the monofilament hooks. With all the things coming from the framers I’d need them!

Amanda also reminded me about drawings of mum that Pixie’d made when they were alive, but that had some foxing. I’d given them to the paper conservator to treat but she’d not passed them to me with the rest of the items the last time I’d been to her house, so I contacted Rose who went away and found them. On 25 August I reminded her to invoice me for items already picked up and she said she’d do this as well as adding the final two drawings.

Amanda the framer came to my place with a bunch of stuff to deliver on 5 October at the same time that a TV show pilot’s lead actor arrived to stay for three weeks. Amanda didn’t meet Saya but she met John, the friend who was organising the film shoot. I actually went to Rose’s house the same morning to pick up a newspaper clipping my grandmother’d kept in her records and that needed flattening because it’d been folded twice before being placed in an album.

The set for the TV pilot was in my front room on the ground floor, John and Zsolt removing all xthe paintings and drops/hooks from the walls and bringing in some furniture to make the room look like a hair salon. Because on one day a scheduled actor couldn’t make it to Sydney (due to the rain) I even took one of the parts, a man who comes to get his hair cut so he can look like David Beckham. The film shoot took ten days to complete and I learned a lot about filmmaking which would make viewing TV more enjoyable.

On 30 November I drove out to Amanda’s studio to pick up more things and to select materials for new items she had already taken from me as well as the new batch. 

Tomorrow I celebrate Xmas

We each live in a dream-state because there are two worlds, one we make that revolves around our memories, our desires, our individual bodily imperatives, our loved ones, and our friends. This world is private and hidden, it is the secret world that appears suddenly on our TV screens at night when we settle down to relax at the end of another day of hatred, struggle, and toil because of the other world, the world of financial statement, holidays, employment (another word for wage-slavery), and sporting festivals. Religion can sit on the border between the two because it is in any case by definition something that can be shared widely, we “observe” a religion so it sits outside out bodies, external to our minds, it is a refuge in the second world where our internal world can feel something like familiarity.

Our lives in this dream-state are challenging not only because of whatever physical challenge we deal with (many of use deal with more than one) that drags our private world out of shape, bends it to the will of others (doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, receptionists, healthcare practitioners and administrators of every kind, especially the ones who oversee the payment of Medicare rebates that we wait for expectantly after a GP visit), and offers us a routine procession of small barriers to mind-peacefulness at the event of every consultation, blood test, or RAT. They’re also challenging because of the persistent shame we feel when our courage is not up to the task of defying the machine we’re born to serve.

The ancient Fortress Capital of great renown that gives us the opportunity to have enough to eat but barely enough to find shelter. What we’ll never have inside this fortress is time to indulge the demands of the first world.

This Fortress is celebrated every year in Sydney when the authorities (those responsible for paying the wages of the people who process our Medicare rebates) spend millions of dollars on pyrotechnics they place on the exoskeleton of the Beast, not only on the Harbour Bridge but even on office buildings and on barges in the estuary surrounding them, so that we can experience the night sky as if it were a Christmas tree, the large blobs of burning red, green, and  blue like fragile stars on its peak. Those millions might otherwise be spent on making messaging that contradicts our endless striving to distract each other from the burden of the never-ending task of getting up each morning to get on the commuter train with dozens of other wage-slaves, facing a workplace that fills us with loathing if not fear (will we be sidelined, will our contract be renewed again next year, will we be the one to get that coming promotion or will it be someone who hates us), and that leaves us exhausted at the end of the working week so that all we want to do is drown our grief at the death of possibilities by getting drunk at the pub or at home on the couch in front of Netflix.

The cultural products we consume in this dream-state are like drugs. Many (we know how many approximately by the constant sequence of busts the police publicise on nightly TV) use actual drugs, not even including in this word alcohol, to compensate for the feelings of frustration, confusion, and despair that the dream-state leaves us in. But we lay the tribute of our obedience at the feet of the Statue every year and we’ll do it next year because we’re afraid of the shame we’ll feel if we fail, the shame of failing in the eyes of our peers, our families, and our loved ones, people we hide the truth from most of the time.

So let’s make 2023 the year we say “I can’t take it anymore,” when we cut loose from the bonds that tie us down, when we acknowledge that time is limited. I was talking the other day it was before Christmas, anyway I was talking with a very young man who wants to be an actor and we shared ideas about work and I want to be able to replay that conversation because he seemed to me to be, at twenty years, the sanest person I’d come across in 2022 for the first time. I met some great people in 2022, people you’d want to spend time with, who keep their hearts open, who say strange things, who have seen what the first dream-world looks like (even if only while asleep), who you know you can trust because their hearts are in the right place. I wish everyone in the world could be happy like they were when we spoke, looking for ways to connect, ignoring the outward trappings of the second world, the things and semantic markers we attach to ourselves when we can’t acknowledge our fear (because it would make us look weak). I wish everyone would say “Happy New Year” every day. Tomorrow I celebrate Xmas.

Collage in Japanese

It’s been a week since I started playing with line and Posca pens. A Mitsubishi product, Poscas are like a cross between a Biro and a paintbrush, delivering a heavy, colourful and permanent mark on any surface. I was kindly introduced to Poscas by Sophie Gee, who took one of our Esag classes, she even gifted me several for me to use but I’d already gone to buy some so had a selection of colours to work with. I showed Sophie what I’d done and she was enthusiastic, something very nice to hear. 

Basia, another friend, also liked the paintings and I did two using Japanese sayings given to me by my family in Japan. 

I wanted to use Japanese for several reasons, partly because you can fit more text in the same space with Japanese. What I found as well is that it’s a lot of fun to make the complex Chinese characters that Japanese uses, I find being successful at executing a clip without damaging the unit’s integrity (though as Basia said you can always glue it in place even if you rip it) as much fun as making a good couplet when writing poetry.

It's a matter of skill.

I had by this time come up with a process that starts with identifying the saying to render. Once this is done I can think of what image I want to make to accompany the script, then I draw it on two sheets of pre-folded A4 paper so that just using pencil I can make a model of what I’ll paint with water – even before I’ve wet my brush.

I get a sheet of A5 paper ready and paint in the outline required to make the shape I want, using plain clean water. I then apply colours to the wet patch and repeat the process on all of the remaining sheets.

Now comes the time to wait, as the water has to partially dry before I fill in the body of the image I’ve outlined in negative using bright colours, often including gold. In about five minutes the paper will be ready for the second coat, applied with the same brush to the remaining (empty) spaces, with me making sure to keep some of the white still visible so that the existence of the object isn’t completely obscured.

I then let the sheets dry, soaking off excess water and mopping the table with a paper towel. After the stickiness has gone I weigh the sheets down with heavy books to make them flat, but you have to be careful not to damage the pigmented areas.

Once dry I go through magazines looking for areas of picture that are of the right colour to make script, and I cut all of the elements out before any gluing is done. I lay elements out on my paper sheets then glue them in place. After this process is complete I use Poscas to draw in the outlines of the required shapes.

For the kite work I had to try three times to get the top-right panel correct as initially I didn’t get the seam matching properly. The image continues from frame to frame and the work has to have integrity when all frames are in place, so making the borders agree is important. The object on the top border has to sit right with its continuation on the bottom one.

'At a loose end' (Kite on a broken string)', 2022.

'Birds of a feather' (Being the same summons friends)', 2022.

Having done these two Japanese works I find myself a bit marooned. To add contrast I wrote a poem in a mode I haven’t used since starting to make art in April. 

The theme of the poem is dislocation because I feel as though I am travelling from one place to another. I worked at a desk all my life from the time when I was a child, so writing poetry is closer to my sunrise. Since the 1970s at school, through university in the 1980s, then at work from the 80s to 2012, and afterward writing poetry at a desk, I’ve spent so much time at a desk that it feels awkward to instead sit at the dining table making watercolours.

I started making watercolours in November so it’s only been two months of trying but I’ve arrived at a situation where it seems necessary to look back to check the route of the journey thus far. 

The opposing shore has its own riverbank.

Here’s the thing: I should be going full-steam ahead but rather than start the next work I want to take a break. It’s almost as though I’ve tried to reach a goal and, having reached it, I chuck it all in and look for another goal to pursue.

Is it just me or are humans never happy?

A friend of mine said that this is where an artist differs from an artisan because where the latter makes perfect works without stopping, making them to order for example, the former wants to find something new all the time. This friend is an artist herself and has spent the past 30 years making art. We talk from time to time and exchange emails, it’s useful to stay in touch with peers because this journey is singular and not everyone has the ability to make it.

Some people are satisfied with the rudiments like a house, enough money for three meals a day, some associates to share a drink with once a week, maybe a night out at the movies. A new car every ten years. The occasional ticket to see football, soccer or cricket.

Then there are the outcasts.

Of course it could just be the holiday season with its particular burdens, the chore of trying not to spend time alone, the obligations of friendship, celebrating and the like. It could be that there has been so much water under the bridge that it got washed away without my noticing. I’m crossing the river by feeling the stones with my feet.

Making 'Tick tick boom'

On Sunday I started using Posca pens (made by Mitsubishi a Japanese company) which are sort of like a cross between a Biro and a paintbrush, laying down a thick impasto when used on paper. They allow you to run right over bits of collage, even newsprint, leaving a heavy trace to see.

I’d collected in my phone the phrase “tick tick boom” and when I was watching the news about Nathaniel Train I decided to do a work including his face. As a result of all these ideas I made the watercolour panels and when they dried as usual I applied the collage letters.

Then I stopped.

I finished the letters one evening and decided to leave the Posca marks until the next day. When morning arrived I still hadn’t made up my mind to start, I was a bit worried about making a mistake, but the delay meant I could think about the colour to use for the Posca marks, and I settled on blue and white to point to the police. I emailed a friend talking about my quandary but in the evening I settled in to do the marking anyway even without her feedback. By the time her email arrived I’d finished (see below).

My friend said the best way to deal with this sort of fear is to confront it. “What are you afraid of anyway” If I wasted a sheet of paper, so what? I had written:

Have started a new work, 'Tick tick boom', but I'm a bit scared of the Posca stage. I put down the collage y'day afternoon so now I just have to draw in the figures and other objects but am thinking to try first with a pencil. I've done two of these Posca-ornamented works so far and both turned out OK but this time there's a face and I'm a little bit scared of doing it wrong and making a mistake.

After I read Basia’s email I wrote in response:

The face is in top left panel, though the beard continues in bottom left. I think it turned out ok, but it was supposed to b on a bigger angle and the ear is too large. I sort of like how it looks a bit like something from ‘The Simpsons’.

When I conceptualised the painting I didn’t know it would turn out looking like a character from ‘The Simpsons’, I wonder who it might be, but I had put down the yellow and green obviously (Australia’s sporting colours) to get to this stage of uncertainty. 

I might’ve done a better job if I’d used Pencil first (and rubbed out the residue later) but the cartoonish aspect of the figure would’ve been different perhaps.

For the next work I did the execution differently, taking more time with the drawing BEFORE the painting, and mocking up the figure on two sheets of folded A4 to start with. The process evolves as I progress, coming up with solutions to technical problems as the idea settles in place and clicks.

Using better paper and Poscas

I’m a bit at a loss because I didn’t record precisely on what day I started using the better paper, the 320gsm stuff bought at the store in the National Art School, but I went down to the Rocks on Friday to buy more of the same paper from Parker’s.

The new paper changed my life.

In the last blogpost I wrote about my art practice but the images that I put up were all of paintings made on the poor-quality paper that curls when it’s dry. It’s hard to frame because when you flatten it it buckles (“cockles” says Amanda, the framer) and looks bad, so I took a chance with the $2-a-sheet stuff made in India from recycled clothes, which works brilliantly because even though it curls when wet by the time it’s dry it’s flat.

On Saturday I went to see a show with Sophie and while there I showed her the new paintings. She made some comments that made me think I wasn’t adventurous enough. Because of the way she spoke I thought that the paintings were not quite the thing, and she’d given me some Posca pens to use (I’d also bought some a few weeks earlier) so when I got home I used Posca pen on the watercolour-collages to see what effect it would have.

The Poscas made all the difference.

Using the pens, which lay down a thick impasto but in a controlled manner, like a combination of a paintbrush and a Biro, I can outline shapes suggested by the watercolour, and the pens let me glide right over the boundaries of the cut-out letters as well. 

The result is a more convincing image.

'Around Sydney', 2022.

'Double Africa', 2022.

This model of proceeding involves more risk because you might stuff up the drawing and ruin a day’s work in an instant, but doing something risky is sort of the purpose of art, it allows taking risks with less physical danger, so what the heck.

Using better paper and drawing with Poscas have made it more interesting and satisfying to manufacture things. Accidents can be good for us, what the world serves up as a surprise can help us by offering different paths to walk along in our dream-state, what one person thinks coming via language to our skulled brain. 

A bolt of lightning, a shock of new like a new hairdo.

I’m still at a loss but who cares? If I go around wondering/worrying it hardly makes any difference to the world, which carries on being mad without my involvement. All I can do is wait for the courage to take up the pen and start.

Making more watercolurs vs Dexter from Accounting's email

I’ve been making more collages, a process started about a month ago, although probably more accurately it started on the last day of October with the collage-watercolour class of Eastern Suburbs Art Group.

I'm coming from, 2022.

Ripe darkness, 2022.

Vera Stanhope, 2022.

Whatever the time distance at play it’s enjoyable to spend hours doing what I was born to do, and I think about my father and the lost years every day. The lost years making money for someone else. The lost years of hard graft sitting at desks doing jobs that took all my concentration but that had nothing to do with me, with my ideas, with my thoughts.

I’m not a big fan of ‘The Matrix’ however.

It’s a funny film franchise, the corniness equalled by how badly it’s developed over time, the first one just silly and the most recent one completely incomprehensible. Yet its durability is testament to the dissatisfaction so many feel at how the world is organised.

My father was a leading player in the Matrix.

I worked in a range of different organisations. I worked in companies, in the public service, and at a university, so I have a wide experience. I’ve also freelanced. Work is deadening. It crushes the Will, that vital essence that makes the world come alive. People complain of cost-of-living pressures but the supply of recreational drugs continues day by day, casinos are used to launder the proceeds of crime, and we all tune into the latest show about one Mexican cartel or another eager to feed our abiding appetite for escape. 

Why escape when you can make art? For my part I’ve got other problems, mostly to do with my creative practice, I’m used to its demands. 

For example paper. I started out using 200 grams-per-square-metre (gsm) watercolour paper but it cockles (a term my framer taught me), in other words once its dry and you flatten it out to put under the mat preparatory to framing, the centre buckles up away from the backing material. Cockling can mar the appearance of the finished object, and I’m very interested in framing so it bothers me.

To try to fix the problem I bought heavier, 300gsm paper but it still didn’t do the job. Then the other day I was up at the National Art School looking at the Grad Show and I popped into the supplies shop on campus. There, I found even heavier paper (320gsm) and when I got home and found some time to do painting I used it instead of the Reeves paper.

It started out not so well as for whatever reason the watercolour washes I use dry faster on the new paper. Because of this I had to throw away some sheets (which cost about $2 each) and start those panels again. Once I’d finished the requisite four panels I went out to a poetry reading and when I came back home later saw that the paintings had dried flat.

One problem solved meant another one arose, viz the problem of what words to use for the composition. Each of the four panels shows part of the continent of Africa, in different colours, and I normally use either 10 or 12 letters to make the collage, picking the paper out of magazines. In the current case it’s either “Rain in Africa” or “Double Africa” what do you think? The map is bright and uses a range of colours, for example blue and green and orange. I think “Rain in Africa” is good because it’s got the pop culture reference to the Toto song, but “Double Africa” has the idea of multiples, either in the sense embodied in the multicoloured South African flag or else in the sense that all people came out of Africa so that continent was effectively doubled.

It's a small problem but it’s my problem. Sure beats worrying about what Dexter from Accounting is going to do, how his email might impact my boss’s boss, and how that decision might filter down to my cubicle. Humbug!

TV review: 'Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story' (2022), Netflix

It’s not often that I watch anything on Netflix but a friend recommended ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’ to me so I made an exception and logged onto the OTT service to catch the drama.

It turned out to be revelatory, and I’m not entirely sure if this is because I normally spend time with reruns like ‘Poirot’ and ‘Midsomer Murders’. ‘Monster’ is really excellent and takes the viewer on a journey that has some surprising twists and turns but more importantly has meaning. This is not just an edge-of-seater, it raises really interesting issues. 

And it’s not just about one man. What is actually at stake in the show is contemporary American society (though serial killers also exist in other countries, as we know) and its unwieldy values, indeed at times you are drawn gently to reflect on larger things including history itself, and the Western legacy.

Running to ten episodes, ‘Monster’ uses a range of characters to make its points, though Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters) stands or sits (like a spider) at the centre of the web. No, that’s not right. Peters creates a compelling villain and the writers and director have given the main character multiple facets that refract the major issues – independence, escape, transcendence, mortality, consumerism – in a variety of ways. Peters’ Dahmer is mercurial, bumptiously charming, forceful though restrained, determined and inventive. 

The authorities (and, by extension, modern America) come off looking remarkably pallid, slothful, lazy, biased, and ineffective. The police, especially, seem to have almost conspired with Dahmer to make sure that more victims appeared, witnesses and families being brushed off as inconvenient as Dahmer went on his sustained crime spree frequenting gay bars where he picked up unsuspecting Black men.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s father Lionel (Richard Jenkins) is also very well done, he plays a key role in cementing Jeffrey’s place in middle America, rendering him as a nice boy from a normal part of the country who went haywire. The filmmakers make sure to emphasise the serendipitous nature of Dahmer’s psyche, and avoid make pat conclusions so that the show finishes being open-ended and suggestive. Was it education? Was it is mother’s (Penelope Ann Miller) use of prescription drugs during pregnancy? Was it the hobbies Lionel encouraged where Jeffrey cut up roadkill in his spare time?

Heaven knows, but given that serial killers continue to emerge perhaps we’re failing to learn lessons early exponents like Dahmer give us for OUR education. Given this gap perhaps Dahmer should be talked about more. Perhaps it is being talked about but I don’t inhabit those parts of the web, and in any case there’s always something on OTT to fill in for what’s just been trending.

Watercolour-collage 'Sunset garden'

I made the watercolours for ‘Sunset garden’ on Saturday during the Eastern Suburbs Art Group painting session organised for the afternoon. It was fun to sit around inside making little paintings of the dark green colocasia leaves, the reddish-black stems, and the white pebbles of the light well. 

There were three of us there and we all had different solutions to the problem of representation, a topical issue as on the day there was an election in Victoria. Figurative art never seems to go away though for a while there it seemed that high art had completely abandoned figuration – there’s an exhibition on at Chau Chak Wing Museum at the moment of 70s and 80 abstract art – but artists in 2022 have it available if they feel inclined to work out ways to extract the abstract from actual views of the world.

I went to see a show on at Damien Minton’s little gallery in Waterloo where Sidney Teodoruk’s lovely paintings – some oils and others collages combining cut-up paintings, words, and colours – inspired me to continue a trend in my own work that’d started a bit earlier when I was making colour-field paintings and sticking collage on top.

Yesterday I took this idea further by combining it with the figurative play of the Colocasia paintings, helped by my iPhone where I’d been noting down words with six letters. I chose “sunset” and “garden” then decided what source material to use for the collage. 

As usual I didn’t think too much about this part of the exercise though I’d already decided to use a waste paramontage that features a poem written on 11 March, and 15, 23 and 26 September 2021. The Bondi photos were taken on 9 March 2008 just before a major episode that I did survive and the poem features an historical subject, the idea that major political centres often get established on waterways, I was thinking when writing the poem of how the Vikings settled beaches then towns grew up around the resulting entrepots.

The reason why the paramontage was waste is because it’d been printed at the wrong size. I started making paramontages in April and got the grid-form ones done early in the process, the type-6 paramontages eventually being rejected in favour of works with different-sized photos in them. This type 6 is titled ‘Oswald eats a peach’ and it has a poem that goes like this.

Archers and melons make suitable sport

for these ambitious sons, fixing to sing.

A model once formed is a new resort

from the loathing and fear twisting the ring 

as immigrants fit our linguistic rules

and letters in books that land on the beach

infest our guts so that His very stools

nourish crops nourishing men within reach. 

Strict recitative fumbles a button

while priests magnificent with verbal tools

inscribe His reluctant fiat upon

the warbands scrappy as next-morning fools. 

When streets are laid out it becomes a port 

once a warrior’s seat – becomes a court.

Here is the set of watercolours and I’ve decided to get them framed when I go to Richmond for that purpose on Wednesday.

'Social animals' series of collages

In the past few days I’ve been doing a lot of works in the ‘Social animals’ series that is developing alongside other works as the inspiration takes me. It started with several iterations of Television Man then came four exemplars of Flip-phone Dog and finally Computer Mouse, the theme connecting them all is our symbiotic relationship with machines, we seem to be tied very closely to these complex manufactured items and we surround ourselves with images and sounds that come from them. 

Television Man

We use machines to transport us from one place to another, achieving in minutes what in an earlier age took days to accomplish. We spend hours each day watching a device play content manufactured for our use by people on a different continent, people we’ll never meet or communicate with apart from in our own minds.

Flip-phone Dog

Science fiction 100 years ago never predicted what we throw away nowadays as rubbish when it no longer works. We leave discarded devices on the street kerb to get wet in the rain and count it lucky if we don’t get fined. We give away items that once would’ve been considered magical if they no longer serve us, or if we decide to go to a different continent (the journey taking a few hours) and need to empty our house quickly.

Computer Mouse

Documents that we’ve made when we got up at dawn to write are now stored for safekeeping in machines located on that distant continent, the storage achieved without our even concerning ourselves about it. We’ve eclipsed the old shamans and their spirits in our service to mythical objects that are advertised while we’re plugged into the news of the day streaming at the speed of light through the atmosphere.

The spirits of our ancestors beckon us but we’re too busy watching Netflix or Prime. We’re the odd angle in the tree of evolution, we are breaking new paths and editing the material of descent with new machines that our elected representatives haven’t yet understood or, for that matter, bargained for. 

The world is changing in the Anthropocene.

Watercolour- and collage-making

A few days ago I started making watercolour collages starting with flowers, something simple and happy, something not too demanding, something fun. I was drawing on the Eastern Suburbs Art Group session of 29 October, when we did something similar together in my front room overlooking the street.

I made about five or six flower paintings with magazines I’d picked up for the group, there are women’s magazines, New Scientist, a stack of motoring magazines, a whole range of things salvaged from landfill. When I was talking to my friend Basia – who’s always been very supportive of my artmaking efforts – and as I was outlining the reasons making collages is so much fun I mentioned this aspect or collage-making, the fact that you’re recycling and giving a new use to something most people would see as rubbish.

The next series I made had rockets in them. The photo above shows one of these, and it’s one that Roger, who I went to school with 45 years ago, identified as his favourite from the set. He liked the humour, and I guess that collage lends itself to making fun because of this reuse aspect.

Although the watercolour part determined the use of rockets because I wanted a theme to use the bleed in the centre, where the excess liquid has damaged the pristine line, infiltrated the swatch of paint, it’s impossible with collage to anticipate exactly what will happen in the creative process. I look at magazine pages and just pick out things that appeal to me, then when I’m assembling the collage I just pick things up off the table top and glue them down in a seamless movement. 

There’s thought but it’s all done on the fly. The next series I did was cars, and I used a square of water from the beginning to get the TV-like shape in the middle that’s filled with bleeding colour. The car series are quite self-conscious in this way and I got images of cars out of the motorsport magazines to link to the cut-shape cars I made with scissors. There’s a good deal of skill involved in making these figures, you have to know where to turn the paper to get the right outline.

After the cars I turned to the theme of death because I’d been talking with Basia and she had shown me photos of dead birds she’d made in the 80s. The colour is still joyous but the works’re getting more serious, more contemplative, more difficult.

I returned to the TV-shaped bleeds in the television man series, which’re just silly little things with a subtext, I like the way that they make fun of themselves, the electric zaps at the top were quite hard to do and the hands often wouldn’t stick down the first time. Unlike one of the birds I didn’t tear any of these.

Doorbell/intercom breaks down again

Ok so after Dan the electrician got the Akuvox doorbell installed on my house the thing worked for exactly ONE DAY before it broke down. I got it to buzz reliably on one occasion and then when a friend came to visit he had to call me from outside on the pavement because I wasn’t answering. 

I wasn’t answering because the doorbell didn’t sound. This was because it had broken down again. I was back in groundhog day, sort of like enjoying sunny days in Sydney in November 2022. For a few hours the sun shines and then BANG the clouds come overhead and it starts to spit.

My doorbell is raining on my parade.

Dan came and tinkered around in the ceiling, then tinkered around in the wall, then did something with a bunch of wires. I asked him at the end about what the problem was and he said something about the wires pulling out of their contacts because of pressure. Apparently he’d combined all the wires into one strand or something – who KNOWS?

When I worked for Yamatake-Honeywell in the nineties we had the sales company and the service company and now I know why they have a separate arm just for service. Because you KNOW that as soon as there’s an opportunity for something to go wrong it’s going to go wrong and it’s going to inconvenience the largest number of people. Just by writing this post I’m jinxing the machine, the machine is watching it’s got an AI component reading every blog in the world and it’s going to see what I’ve so recklessly written and start plotting to take out my doorbell so that my life falls apart.

I still haven’t worked out what to do with the old parts from the previous doorbell/intercom. They’ll probably sit on my bookshelf for 10 years and then get thrown in the garbage. Life is like a box of junk, you think it’s worth something but it turns out the valuables are just taking up space.

Getting a new doorbell installed

When I scroll through WhatsApp to find conversations I can see that on 20 September I asked my neighbour the builder if the electrician would be coming to fix the doorbell. Dan got in touch with me after Joe nudged him and Dan said he’d come to fix the doorbell but I had a crew filming at my place so had to delay replacement until 24 October. I’d first contacted him on 5 March because the doorbell wasn’t working properly and in fact it entirely stopped working on 9 July.

I now have a box full of unneeded intercom panels and some sort of hidden power supply so if anyone wants these they can have them. For the moment I’ve put the box down in the garage on a bookshelf.

When you have no doorbell it’s difficult to enjoy a normal life. I know this sounds like a first-world problem where comparatively Ukrainians are being asked to go without heating in a European winter, or being killed in their homes by guided missiles. But I’ve had people visit, buzz me, and – not hearing any response – simply walking away. This happened with one person coming to my place for the art group as well as a man who’d been asked to travel from Ryde to help tidy up the place after the filming ended.

Dan had a whole day of fine weather yesterday. He’d had to change the day for his visit due to rain (of course) and then got to work installing the new equipment. Then something wouldn’t work and he couldn’t get onto the distributor by phone. He struggled with the device, tapping his foot and scratching his chin until he got onto the representative for the second time in the afternoon, and eventually worked out that because I’d opted NOT to have the gate strike operable via mobile phone the remote configuration had to be redone.

Sigh.

Technology is unbearable at the best of times because it’ll always break down. God knows how the Mars voyage will end up if travellers are unable to get a spare part en route to the red planet. Technology is more unbearable when it is involved with something as essential as being able to admit someone into your own home. Being unable to unlock the gate from June to October was bearable but I was forced to constantly tell people to “message me from the street when you arrive” in order to go about daily business.

I told Dan that I wasn’t interested in the doorbell communicating with me via the cloud and he seemed ok with that, but apparently if you’re an electrician and you want plug-and-play your customer has to want all the bells and whistles. Akuvox seemingly thinks that all customers will want internet connectivity and whatnot, everything in the world accessible from a mobile device, they’ll be landing rovers on the moon from the White House next it’s mad.

It's a mad mad mad mad world and we’re caught in the digital matrix. When I worked in Tokyo in the 1990s the buzzword that never seemed to get off the ground was “home automation” but now you get electricians struggling to install a freaking doorbell because you’re SUPPOSED to want it. I don’t care about home automation, I need my home to reliably do a few simple things that save me time and money, or that improve my quality of life like the pool chlorinator cell running on the pumps. I don’t care about seeing if a burglar is about to try to open my front gate. I trust my door to work to keep the bad guys out. I don’t trust the intercom to allow friends to come inside the house.

Search for flowering crocus continues in Earlwood

Last month I wrote about finding wild iris in Botany, but alas my quest in search of crocus continued. I had a tip-off that crocus could be found in Earlwood and even had an address, so in the afternoon one day at the beginning of this month I drove over there in the car and near Wyatt Avenue, on the corner of Bexley Road, I found a parking spot. At certain hours it’s a clearway but I was just inside the limit so I dashed across the road and snapped some photos of the pink flowers.

On arriving home I did a Google Lens search using the photos I’d taken but the name that came up was different from what I’d hoped, these are watsonia.

I think the season for crocus has ended this year so to make my paramontage using the poem written all those years ago will have to wait at least until next year.

The Japanese have a word I think for that sadness that is only inspired by temporary things, such as youth. And such as life. I don’t remember what it is, but the Japanese for sad is “sabishii” and I guess that’ll have to do for the purposes of this post. I feel a bit sad because I haven’t found something that only lasts a few weeks, a crocus flower.

Failure to find crocus flowering

For the art group I was in town yesterday and because the Art Gallery of New South Wales is situated in the Domain I popped into the Botanic Gardens to see if I could find some crocus flowering.

I took photos of what I thought were the right type of flower but when I got home and checked on Google I found that what I’d photographed were daffodils.

Crocus are central to a poem I wrote on 29 January 2014, titled ‘Mother’.

If I should die tonight then it’ll be
this that settles accounts so that you can
know the burden of this sickness for me
retarded time to a moment of pain

enduring in the heart of the havoc
of intemperate wind snug in the stays
of a barquentine surging through sea wrack
as it comes home to the harbour of days.

Someone will find me immured in my bed
and my memory shall be like a wound
that weeps perpetually (saffron heads
of crocus that preen their stems aboveground).

Candle an orange with goodwill like cloves
and perfume the date that bespeaks my love.

I’d this month started a new series of paramontages that are square with a sonnet featuring at the centre of each one, but my failure to find crocus so that I could photograph them has put pause to my efforts. On the same trip I’d popped into the print shop in Chippendale to drop off more files for processing, and I’ll get those images back probably early next week. In the meantime I still have to find some flowering crocus so if anyone has an idea, I urge you to get in touch. If I don’t find the things soon I’ll have to wait another year to get the photos.

It's not clear to me now why I chose crocus to mention in the poem, I suppose it could have been any kind of spring-flowering plant. I guess thinking back that it was the sound of the word, but I also think it was a misapprehension stemming from a failure to correctly identify the plant on a drawing pad I had when I was young and that I used to use for sketching. On the cover of the sketch block was a stylised flower, I seem to remember but memory is so hazardous that I cannot be sure from this far off in time. I used to keep my sketch blocks in a drawer in my closet at home in Vaucluse growing up, a drawer that also contained model aeroplanes build from kits and that were carefully painted with enamels.

There is a mismatch here – another one, to add to the several I’ve already drawn readers’ attention to – between the fickle nature of recall compared to the iron logic of the manufactured model, which demands specific parts be assembled in a specified order. If you connect the wrong part in the wrong place you’ll get nothing like the plane you thought you’d bought. 

Growing up I never considered it possible for a moment that my parents could steer me in the wrong direction, and I played along wanting above all else that peace reigned in the household. Like gluing small grey parts together I stuck bits of my experience together to create the sonnet you can see above, a poem that reflects on the mistakes of my parents dealing with someone like me.

Notes of an old Cranbrook boy

The older I get the more clearly I see things, I never understood when I was young – barely a teenager, then barely a man – how unhappy life made me. Now that I’m a pensioner I search for ways to alleviate the pain of existence of a world where there is little effort made to know why events unfold the way they do. It seems to me, now, that there is an unending supply of suffering and that everyone is putting all their effort into alleviating the resulting pain apart from the obvious, which is to be kind. Why we cannot do so seems to lie squarely in the lap of the gods.

We fear them so we don’t risk being kind to those around us, it’s too dangerous to put on the line the small guaranteed source of pleasure we might have at any given moment. Better to seek out more pleasure, even more, even more.

Even now life gives me reasons to hate it. When I was young I was an actor, trying to fit in because, having seen what life had done to my brother, who was bullied at school, it was safer to run with a pack. I was so good at deceiving those around me that, when I not so long ago said how unhappy I was when I was at school, someone from those days unfollowed me on Facebook. 

Is that the right word, “unfollowed”? Is it not “unfriended”? I don’t think either word is accurate, there is nothing remotely friendly about social media, the way that people conduct themselves, although it has helped me to understand the species. It frightens me.

In fact James was once my friend but on Facebook he was something else, just a participant in an endless evolving costume drama where we package ourselves for public consumption like directors on a fashion shoot. Our public personae have little to do with our real selves, so Facebook is profiting from the same fear that caused the Cranbrook boys to mercilessly persecute my beloved brother – who was always to good to me – and that causes people on Twitter to say the most appalling things about journalists, people they don’t know but whom they patronise inexcusably when they don’t say the right things. They want the reporters, show hosts, weathermen, interviewers, and other professionals, people with years of experience, to be performing monkeys mouthing platitudes that satisfy a community grown accustomed to the mediocrity of Netflix and Stan. They don’t want the truth, they want the same comforting lies that make people post pictures of glasses of wine, on a table, in a restaurant, with a pleasant backdrop framing the whole. Along with the quick line of carefully composed text the image says, “Envy me.”

I didn’t go to the recent school reunion (delayed by Covid, it should’ve been held two years ago) partly because of James’ actions but also because I didn’t want to stand in a room full of loud men – grown up children, really – boasting about what they’d achieved in life. 

I have better things to do with my time so in my old age I am devoting my life to the thing that was taken away from me when I was 17, which is art. I have time now to do what I want, time that I should’ve had during the 25 years I worked in offices, but that my school and my father – both of whom should’ve known better than to tempt fate, because their actions almost destroyed me – deprived me of, out of a sense that the world doesn’t care about art.

I think it does but it needs to be told what is good, whereas I have never needed such instruction, having an innate curiosity that enabled me to understand what was good and what was merely fashion. It’s even better now that I’m ageing. Old enough to start forgetting why I entered a room, though not quite old enough to go out without my socks on. Still young enough to fear.

Farewell Elizabeth II

Because I was busy making things and because I’ve been busy making things all my life – including making trouble for various people – I put together a successful type-2 paramontage back in May featuring the Queen. I think the reason for the success of this type 2 is that the colour red and its lighter similar, pink, are so prominent, repeated in image after image like a bass note in a pop song. Thin Lizzie finally met her end and we’re all about to find out what it means to know ourselves.

QE2 wasn’t the most successful queen, according to one Japanese person I know but then again Japan’s royal family has its weaknesses, including a tendency to exclusively favour men over women in terms of the succession. I’m not sure how the succession will go in Australia, Charles III has a faint ring of autocracy to it due to the way the first Charles died (killed by Parliament) though my father always liked Charles II on account of his returning to the throne.

I became a staunch monarchist when Donald Trump became US president, it seems to me now a no-brainer that the symbolic and executive functions of leadership need to be separated in order to have a successful polity. The ways that people identify with the former can get in the way of the operations of the latter so that by keeping people’s minds focused on one thing at a time you allow them room to make mistakes without bringing down the whole house of cards. We’ll see what happens on account of the contents of Trump’s safe in Mar-a-Lago.

My mother was about the same age as QE2, mum was married in 1955 at about the time of the queen’s visit to Australia. Mum was given away at the altar by her brother as my grandfather had died of cancer of the skin, mum for her part had fond memories of the visit and talked about it sometimes in a way that made me realise how much QE2 meant to her personally, and this is the thing you cannot fabricate such links, they happen despite interventions and I feel sorry for the British peoples now in their moment of reckoning.

In Australia the media coverage is going to be saturation-level for a few days but we’re sheltered from the worst of the negative feelings because our vice-regal body is appointed by the government and is not a true son of the blood. No doubt we’ll see the governor-general talking on TV at some point and I welcome the intervention hopefully it’ll give people something meaningful to latch on to as they process their grief.

I have no doubt but that many people will feel the passing of QE2 keenly. It occurs to me that death has profound repercussions for those who remain alive, and this is why we have rituals when faced with death. Death is a pervasive element of popular culture, along with love, though you could say that the existence of the latter makes the former more potent, and losing love might be traumatic. The loss of a loved one is doubly so. 

Farewell QE2.

New type-11 paramontages started

Some time in the past I made a new type of paramontage, a type 11. See photo below showing the framed item near the centre. I’m using the photo because it was taken by a wonderful friend of mine named John who organised a get-together at my place. In fact he took this shot while the party was happening, I was elsewhere showing people around the art.

These small works of mine were printed at 28cm square and I got them framed in Alexandria at a place on O’Riordan Street in a large complex full of homewares stores, my usual framer had been incommunicado due to health problems and the floods so I went somewhere else for a change, they did a good job and I was happy with the results.

I picked up the items on 5 August and it just so happened that I drove out to see my regular framer four days later. I hung these items up on the wall on 6 August and at the same time brought down from my bedroom the James Drinkwater painting (the scary-looking one) to put above the Ari Athans. After the party one woman, named Cristina, said how much she liked the second of these works Athans trained as a geologist so has the knowledge available to her for the purpose of painting something that looks like a crystal.

Normally under the paramontages there’s a red plush chair but someone was using it when the photo was taken, the red of the chair goes with the Athans and the Drinkwater, it also goes with the couch, which is like a plum colour.

There are eight items in this small hang, one of which is different from the others. Seven of them are made with a set of photos overlayed as well as a short, 6-line poem, but there’s one with a sonnet, and this forms the impetus for my new series of paramontages, which I call type 11.

‘Bad dreams III’ is made with a photo inherited from mum, it’s one of my Dean forebears and because of how my family operates I have no idea who the subject is. This is a dismal shame but the Deans are so unfussy and unpretentious that they’d prefer to let a memory dissolve into obscurity than be accused of hubris.

The poem was written on 6 September 2013; 3, 6, 7 and 23 December 2020; 29 January 2021; 3 July 2022. It dates in its inception to a time when I was living in southeast Queensland in a small town. I would get up early in the morning – as I do nowadays – and work writing at my desk. The apartment I lived in looked over a park where in the afternoon men would come to play sport. On weekends games of rugby took place there.

Between 2013 and 2020 I dealt with my mother’s passing. In March 2014 she was diagnosed with dementia then later that year, I think it was in September, she was diagnosed with a serious blood disease. In December 2014 I moved her to a nursing home and she passed away 18 months later. Along with dealing with my own health things got in the way of me working on the poem until December 2020, at a time when I was between homes having sold my apartment. Being on the road and being virtually homeless was nothing compared to the sorrow that was associated for me with my mother.

The other photos used in ‘Bad dreams III’ include a shot of trees taken in 2010 when I took mum to visit her niece. We drove there in my Aurion and for her it was a trial, I remember on the way back to Maroochydore we stopped at Tweed Heads to stay overnight, breaking the trip into two sections, my cousin lived in New South Wales north of Newcastle.

‘Bad dreams III’

Unconscious disquiet – the proximate sound

of the waves relieves the burdens of sleep,

seeding ideas before dawn comes around.

I was wrong in some ways and harbour deep

reservations about my past conduct

so scrutinise memory for guidance.

Can yet-unformed commodities deduct

from the heavy cost of memory’s chance – 

dead leaves and whirligigs of dust and sand,

silent shards of mirrors, unceasing pain,

and joy like gouts of music overland,

or pulses of moonlight, or bouts of rain?

Are they still unaware of what transpired?

Regardless, the market’s robust. You’re fired.