Studio Love

Sometimes the studio is a difficult place to be.
Right now, however, after a long Winter, I am loving this room of my own, and the freedom, security and nourishment it gives to me and my work. The monkey was a surprise discovery (and reward for looking up!) as I approached the studio today. The wildflowers (reward for looking down) were nearby, leggy and abundant by the railway fence.
Happy, happy girl.

Sugar's Catch

Sugar

This lithe being, a creature simultaneously intelligent and absurd in the extreme, is Sugar, the Hungarian Viszla. I have known her for almost four years, but only realised this week that that knowledge goes right out to my fingertips - what a joyous discovery!

An Unexpected Visitor

When something difficult happens, my mother encourages me to look for the gift in it.
I have lately been living in the company of sorrow, anxiety and doubt, and struggling to break free of them and return to my normally happy and peaceful state.

Am I normally happy and peaceful? Well, I think of myself that way. I didn't always. As a child reading Winnie the Pooh, it was the doleful donkey, Eeyore, with whom I most identified, not the bumblingly comfortable Pooh, nor the trusting, curious Piglet, nor the irrepressible Tigger.

But in recent years, some shift has occurred in me, and I am conscious of living with contentment and gratitude a lot of the time. I feel present, vital and resilient.  It isn't only circumstantial - even in profound grief, I have been surprised to find, at my core, an essential optimism. Looking for the gift in things has become part of my way of life.

Even so, the last weeks have felt heavy.
Oh, I could identify a number of triggers. For instance, a degree of disappointment in my exhibition, and the subsequent weeks of aimless pottering in the studio, trying to be present for a transformation I feel sure must come, but still has not. Or, for example, trying to remain chipper and philospohical about not winning art competitions, or - harder - not being short-listed. This latter wound I bore for my poor, overlooked cocktail umbrella. My pride and joy, shaken adrift even from its high perch in my impressionable esteem. I think these blows are actually easier when one does not try to be too chipper. I might have done better to curse and kick something hard, get it out of my system in a rush of disappointed tears.

The thing is, they don't feel like big hurts until much later, when I catch myself feeling contempt for my drawings and my ideas. And then, sensing an inhospitable space, new ideas and new drawings don't emerge. Finding what I seek through art requires faith in meanings and dimensions insupportable in rational terms - and not crying and kicking things hard demands rationality.

In particular, I have experienced something of a crisis of self-doubt. What is my value in the sphere of Art, and, while we're getting uncomfortable over that thought, what is the value of Art at all? Am I flailing toward excellence in a useless occupation? Here, my rational mind can be helpful, but my spirit falters.

So, that sort of thing, and other things, either too private or too complex to mention here, have sat darkly in my heart for some weeks, and I have felt too despondent to go searching for any redemptive gifts in them.

***

On Wednesday night, another sort of darkness entered my world with a crash.
I blinked open from deep sleep, and listened. My sister, who lives with me, has been having sleepless nights, and often makes a hot, midnight drink in the hope of soothing her galloping mind and restless body. I thought she must have dropped a glass, and I called out to her, "what was that, honey?"
To my surprise, she replied from her bedroom, "I don't know."

Sometimes I have wildly irrational fears. On this night, they did not even occur to me. I was not even mildly afraid. I hopped out of bed and padded out in my socks to see what had fallen in our kitchen. When I turned on the light in the living room, everything seemed normal. I peered towards the kitchenette, and saw nothing amiss. Then, there was another smash. Now, Ellie was coming up the corridor behind me. I walked towards the kitchenette. There was the sound of scrabbling - a sort of fevered scratching, such as the cat makes when negotiating the cat-flap - but then more splintering of glass, and the sound of a struggling creature in our laundry, which is a small alcove off the kitchen.
"I think an animal has come down the chimney," said Ellie.
I thought so, too - it has happened before. I advanced toward the sound, a little wary now, reluctant to scuffle with an anxious possum or startled bird.

What occurred next was so unexpected as to be at first totally impossible to comprehend.
A dark figure, very tall, stepped out of the laundry and stood facing us, without a word.

My first impression was madly illogical. The figure, who appeared in absolute, pitch-black silhouette against the window, reminded me, in height, build and posture, of my old friend, Julian. My brain was clearly seeking alternative ways of computing the facts before me. I was readier to believe that a friend had dropped in for a visit, climbing through our laundry window at midnight in the hope of a cup of tea.

But the figure was also unavoidably spooky. It didn't move, nor speak.
I said, "who are you?"
I heard my sister's voice, an echoing, "who are you?"
The voice seemed to come from the figure. Aha! said my grateful brain, It's only Ellie. I looked behind me - Ellie was still there.
Somewhere around this point, my brain relinquished the possibility of Julian, and coldly admitted, there is a very tall, strange man inside your house in the middle of the night. Dizzying waves of alarm washed around me. He either wanted stuff, or he wanted to harm us.

The next thought, clear as a bell, was for my parents. They must not lose us both.
"Get out, get out!!!" I barked to Ellie, running back towards the front door.
To my surprise, her calm voice said firmly, "It's okay." she hadn't moved. She is a primary school teacher, and usually her authoritative pronouncements are as effective on me as on her young charges. But not this one. I was at the door, "it is NOT okay. Run, get out, get out!!"
She was behind me now, and we ran out onto the empty street. I was ready to run all night in my socks and long johns, but she stopped and peered back through the house. "We're safe out here," she said.
Then I heard her say, "oh, no - he's coming!" and I screamed for help and started running up the middle of the road. Ellie banged on the door of our immediate neighbours. While we waited for an answer, our intruder appeared on our porch. I screamed for help again. It seemed he was indeed after us. What if no-one came? I kept apart from Ellie. I didn't want us to be trapped together. The man now looked towards me and took a couple of steps forward. He had a fine-featured, African face. I ran several paces, screaming, then turned to see him running the other way. Our neighbours were at the door now, and Ellie was explaining the situation in a rush. I watched the man sprint down the road and out of sight. A fine runner. Phonecalls to police, tea, neighbour's jackets over our shoulders. I noticed my little toe was broken.

When the police came, we went back with them into our violated little home. Both our computers were gone, and with them, countless hours of work, photographs, documents, memories and ideas. Ellie's handbag was gone, too. But mostly, our sense of safety in our own home was gone.

***

There is a Rumi poem that I like, called The Guest House.
It speaks of the feelings and thoughts that enter our consciousness like unexpected visitors, and urges us to welcome and entertain them all! even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture...

Last night, a world away from the morning's adventure, safe in a warm cottage in the bush with my Mum, and lying in a hot bath, I thought of the crowd of sorrows lately troubling my heart, and I saw again that unshakeable image of the dark silhouette in our laundry, featureless and silent.

Sometimes, irrational thought itself is a gift.
In my mind, it suddenly seemed that the dark figure was for me - my crowd of sorrows, embodied in one looming form, living and breathing before me, scaring me for real. Some tiny spark of gratitude flickered inside. I don't fully understand the thought, but it slightly relieved both the terror of my recent memory, and the burden of my current struggle. Embodied, my inner darkness stood apart from me, and I could address it. And the intruder, made figurative, stood within me, and I laid a hand gently on his forehead, called him Habibi, and offered him a cup of tea.

***

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- Jelalludin Rumi
translation Coleman Barks.

Ellie in Frannie's Hoodie

You've Read the Blog...

... Now you can see the show!

This Little Light of Mine

The Nest

Hard Truths

Yesterday was a big day, and I am struggling to dispel its heaviness.

My beautiful cousin, Francesca, would have been twenty-one. It’s impossible to encompass the sadness and sense of futility and loss attached to that day in words, or even thoughts, but my cousin Isabella came about as close as possible to it in her amazing birthday letter to her sister, which you can find here. 

Surprisingly, that anniversary was not what was most difficult in my day. It was the saddest thing, but not what left me the most troubled – Francesca's death is a grief we have lived with for almost two years, and in that context, her birthday was almost a ray of light: it marked the day she came into our lives. 

The outpouring of emotion, the renewal of memories and the emergence of unseen photographs were, in a way, wonderful. It was a relief to sit alone in the studio and cry my heart out, with no tissues: a copiously snotty animal in animal pain, released suddenly from all the cottonwool protection of philosophical thoughts.

For just a moment, I felt the whole, breathing, warm presence of the living Frannie, and saw the wonder of her existence and the full pain of her loss side-by-side. It may sound strange, but these two wires are rarely connected in my mind – the terrible shock that sparks when they connect is too strong to live with all the time. But to feel it on these rare occasions is also to be closer to Frannie again.

I didn’t get much work done.

I began a new nest.
The first one (below) has been cast aside for now – my week’s cross-eyed labouring over it served only to produce the one thing worse than a total catastrophe: a near-miss.

I felt that awful thing that I think all artists feel from time to time: am I actually any good at all?  

The work was clumsy, and solving it seemed beyond my resources.

I haven’t exactly given up on it, but I can’t afford to lose any more time at its service when I have only days left to complete all my work for the show.

But I have persisted, as is my way, and made two small nest drawings that are full of good things. I discovered a new way to approach them, drawing the twigs in heavy, thick black ink, then washing over them with water before their core is quite dry, so that it falls away leaving a delicious outline. I then layer paler washes of ink over the top, erase the highlights and negative spaces and repeat this process until there feels to me to be a vibration of sorts, and a good, dark depth between the twigs.

Yesterday I began a new large nest, full of self-doubt, and fragile from the emotion of the day. I did enough to feel it was underway, then packed up and set off for home.

At home, I returned a phonecall from a family friend and loyal supporter of my work. He had left a message to say he wanted to talk to me about one of my works. I imagined he wanted to buy one.

As it happened, he wants to resell one he bought about five years ago, and wanted me to help him. This is a difficult matter. The drawing, he explained, is riddled with unhappy associations to do with his own circumstances, and he can no longer bear to even have it in the house, much less look at it. He hates looking at it. He wants rid of it.

Notwithstanding the delicate and difficult circumstances that prompted his feelings, the assault on my spirits was quite violent. I feel heartbroken for the drawing. It meant a lot to me when I made it, as it was the work that marked the turning point of my three-year artist’s block. It is a brave, fighting, raw drawing, and somewhere in it is a part of myself.

The confrontation was a double-whammy. Not only was it surprisingly hard to hear of the work’s being so passionately unwanted, but I was also obliged to confront and explain the probability that it would be hard for him to sell it. It is hardly, after all, one of Picasso’s formative works!

As an early work of a still-emerging artist, its monetary value still lies in my potential. This shabby reality played some havoc with my sense of the work I am currently making, the purpose of it, and the uncomfortably complex issue of its value and the value of making art at all.

Mostly, I like to think my drawings are bought because they are loved. In that case, their value is not quantifiable – an artwork one loves is priceless.

But what happens when a work ceases to be loved?

The conversation was an awkward and painful one – a polite stand-off of sorts. I like this man, a usually softly-spoken and gentle person. He can have had no idea of the reverberation of his own pain and how it might play out in me. Short of buying the work back (which I can’t afford to do), there was little I could offer. He asked me to think about it.

And needless to say, I have been thinking about it ever since.

Wealth and Ambition

The three-minute ride to the studio yesterday yielded something precious.

The road runs along the railway line, and plane trees, already splendidly committed to autumn, line the road. These have recently been subjected to routine council pruning: an inelegant topiary necessary to accommodate overhead power lines. It leaves the trees in a comical Y form, and I always feel vaguely humiliated on their behalf.

Today I was arrested by the sight of the severed branches awaiting disposal in a tangled row beneath the trees, still in full leaf and mirroring their overhead counterparts. I felt drawn to cross the road, feeling there must be a gift there for me.

 

As soon as I had felt it, I knew what it must be, and almost as soon as I knew, I found it. A darker mass of twigs, tipped on its side, but intact: a displaced birds' nest.

I felt overwhelmed by its being there for me to find, by the marvel of its intricate construction, the touching bed of soft furs and fibres at its centre. 

It is amazing what wealth is contained in such a thing. To find it was to encounter ideas of skill without ego; care independent of intellect; endeavor without certainty; design more ancient than I can comprehend. In a moment, I felt all the inexpressible troublings of sorrow and courage, blame and inevitability, fragility, instinct, family, loss, guilt, privilege, tenderness...

This small, wild triumph, overthrown by the oafish plod of urban imperatives, was almost weightless in my hands. I understood all there was to understand in the breath-held flash of first encounter, and felt as though I had stumbled on a priceless bounty.

Of course, the only way I know to honour it is to draw it. And that is an immense task!

I have begun - and already there are problems. For instance: I have, so typically, let the drawing outgrow its frame. Will I fit in enough for it to look wonderful, still? Will there be enough information, even, for it to look like a nest? I will press on, rather than begin anew. There is too much already that is nice about it: the smoke-grey, textured spaces where the ink has been erased are beautiful, and there is a momentum in the composition that I like.

If I need more space, I'll divide this one in two and add a third panel. The important thing is just to trust, isn't it? To keep building, twig by twig, in the faith that it will come to completion and serve its function before any other forces come to cast it aside.

Sticky

Stick

A Storm Brewing

Something in the murkier regions of my consciousness is putting up a fight. I can feel its willful inertia: the powerful resistance of a toddler sitting down against the pull of adult plans.

But what is being resisted? My instincts and body are bracing for a change of which my mind is still quite ignorant. My chest has an apprehensive weight on it, making normal breathing an effort, and I feel as though I am missing the point, failing to cotton on. But to what, to what, to what?

Here is what I think, for the record: a change that will upset life as I know it is afoot. In my heart, or in my art, something new, disruptive and most probably good is imminent, and I'm scared.

I don't know what to do, except to keep on doing. More parasols, more ink, more dreaming and longing within the bounds that have yielded love before. What can I do differently to summon the good storm, to make it welcome and to minimise its damage, when I don't know its nature or its source?

What if it passes me by? What if its winds are already propelling me forward and I am hampering them, planting my nappy on the pavement and insisting on doing things the way I have always done?

Oh, how hard it is, sometimes, to even know how to be open to the world!

Teeny Tinies

My desk, today.

More Pegs (in progress)

 

I am enjoying these pegs.
I have made a few versions, and often I like them best at this stage, when the ink ground has not yet released them completely, and they sit there only half-exhumed, so that the eye sees, one moment, pegs swinging free in the air, the next, their entrapment within a drawing convention.

I've had a few false starts and a bit of a slow week. The start of my teaching term is imminent, and after all these years I still get nervous.

But today the studio is yielding joy.

I feel certain that there is something important in the pegs, if I can just get at it... I spotted them weeks ago out the back window of my home: these pegs that are always there, that I always see. But on this occasion, I had the enormous privilege of seeing them with fresh eyes for some reason, and there was more there than I would have thought. Some tacit, shimmering communication about the order of things. I have no idea what it was, and perhaps it's for my own good, but I felt richer for having seen it for moment.

Some of that glow is still humming in my dealings with the pegs, today.

Take Me To The River

Today I took myself on another Artist's Date. Since my wonderful Puffing Billy adventure some weeks ago, I have been enjoying conceiving these solo adventures. I have been to the Night Market, where I let myself be caught in the current of a dense sea of people sampling foods of the world, scented candles and buskers. I ate an eggplant and tofu wrap, sipped wine from a plastic tumbler and listened to a reggae band play Leonard Cohen covers. I also found, beneath all those feet, the little green cocktail umbrella that has given me so much energy in the studio.

Last week I saw Art School Confidential at the Rooftop Cinema. A lovely venue but an awful film! It left me feeling much less wholesome than my other excursions. So I was keen to do something more down-to-earth, this week.

I took myself kayaking on the Yarra river.

For someone so thoroughly unsporty as me, it took some courage just to front up at the boathouse. It was quiet at Studley Park, just a few retirees ordering cappuccinos at the kiosk and, on the water, two young women with toddlers in a rowboat, puffy in life vests and going nowhere fast.

I drew a few quizzical glances when I asked to hire a kayak on my own. The boathouse at Studley Park is very much a family and leisure spot. Picnickers having a splash for fun - but I was too scared to front up at a more serious rowing club. 

I entombed my long legs in the nose of the kayak and tried very hard to row in a straight line until I was out of sight of the kiosk. I was all over the shop at first, drifting toward one bank and then the other, trying to look especially interested in the trees and ducks so that any onlooker might think I was doing it on purpose. 

Visions of myself as Pocahontas evaporated pretty quickly. Every stroke deposited a quantity of water on the lap of my black jeans, and the arhythmic clunking of the paddle on the fibreglass body of my craft announced my ineptitude to anyone who happened to be passing.

The nice thing was, there was no sign of anyone.

I shook off my mild humiliation and realised I was quite alone, in the middle of the river, with nothing behind or ahead but water and bushland (though an occasional 'thwack!' to my left betrayed a golfcourse behind the trees). I put my raincoat over my already drenched legs and paddled forth, improvising different paddling techniques. By and by, two blokes in a little motorboat chugged slowly by. They looked like rangers or park staff, inspecting the banks, but it occurred to me they might also be checking up on the weirdo zig-zagging solo up the Yarra with no apparent reason or experience.

When they were gone, all was silent again, except for the busy chatter of the birds. Ducks stared me down from the muddy banks, and I spied a pair of red-rumped parrots above me in a bare tree, huddled together with vivid yellow bellies.

I had hired the kayak for an hour (a decision I queried after the first fifteen tiring minutes) and so my destination was a point on my watch-face, not on the map. I was impressed by how far I seemed to have come in half an hour - to a part of the river I hadn't seen before. Just as I was about to turn back, I noticed a sign on the left bank (to which I was headed on purpose, of course). I read it, for the sake of appearances, and found that it said: 

FLYING FOXES: 

You are approaching a very large colony of flying foxes. 

Do not be alarmed, they will not harm you...

I looked upstream. To my astonishment and delight, I found every tree on the landscape before me decorated with sleeping bats. I cried out in surprise. There were hundreds of them. I have never seen anything like it! I paddled closer and looked up at them: marvellous, strange fruit, shrink-wrapped in leathery wings.

Now and again, one of the motionless number would suddenly extend a wing or two for a stretch, before re-wrapping itself and continuing its slumber. Two woke completely and flapped a slow whoomph-whoomph above me, their iconic wings spanning a dark metre.

I was captivated.

Reluctantly, and now running late, I paddled in an arc and headed back, with a surer stroke, slipping fast downstream, Pocahontas in sodden jeans.

 

All Tidied Up

In the end, it had to happen.
As predicted, the inner clarity clashed with the outer chaos, perhaps especially because the clarity served to describe something quite chaotic and incidental, as it was. So, reluctantly, I washed away most of the lines and scuffings that haloed the parasol, feeling sincerely that it was for the greater good.

Umbrella Dilemma

This little beauty has a long way to go, yet, but I wanted to share it with you in its current state because it illustrates a typical dilemma of mine.

I tend towards compulsive refinement in my drawing process, and although I feel I am a good judge of when enough is really enough, it very often happens that a new phase of development requires a difficult sacrifice. Because my process usually involves a very rough ink sketch in the initial stage, there are often beautiful surprises that emerge as the ink is layered and then washed away - distressed calligraphic passages, or sometimes just one line or accidental drip that seems to put my deliberate marks to shame.

This drawing is full of such things, mainly because I struggled a lot in its early stages (if you look closely, you'll see I even had a compositional rethink: shifting the whole parasol from the right-hand edge to the left, where it just looked better.)

As a result of these struggles, I find that the drawing has a slight vibration to it, as though it is trembling in the breeze, about to cartwheel away, but kept just-anchored by an outweighing gravity. It doesn't carry so well in the photo, here, but in the studio, where the drawing is about one metre square, the shabby marks around it seem to give it an energy or tension that is quite captivating.

So, the dilemma is how to develop the drawing as I want to, without sacrificing this strange and rare quality. I'm not sure if I can do it. I could leave it as it is, but the floppiness of the parasol would irritate me. I want to achieve the crisp folds and brittleness of the translucent paper. I am thinking that the best option is to work inwards, tightening the detail within the form, but leaving the background in its raw, quasi-erased state... but will the two parts then seem incongruous?

I'll keep you posted.

Dad

It's Sunday, and there was housework to do before I felt free to go to the studio.

I didn't mind too much.

Even on arrival - already lunchtime - I was waylaid by a gaggle of local kids selling homemade lemonade from their front porch. All profits were to go to charity, "So you'll be saving someone's life!"

Who could resist?
I decided to buy two cups' worth to take back to the studio and have with my lunch. It was stinking hot. But as it turned out, take-away was not an option, and I was offered a garden chair on which to sit under a birch tree, and a child's melamine mug full of cold, tart lemonade. It was delicious, and I chatted with the other neighbours who had been lassoed in from the street.

In the studio, I ate a lunch of leftovers, made a cup of tea and wrote my diary. I set up my camera on my new telescopic tripod. The tripod is special. It appeared serendipitously at the op shop last week, the kind Universe furnishing me with the only thing I lacked to make the animation I had dreamt up the day before. It is a pleasing thing, too: spindly and elegant at full extension, it folds, with pleasing clicks, into a neat baton, and zips into a brown case. There is no doubt in my mind that it belonged to a gentleman hobbyist with a homburg and a box brownie.

Today I was filming my progress on the second parasol.
The work is pinned a little high for the tripod, which stands on tiptoe, as it were, its legs pulled precariously close. But I know where it is, and I won't knock it over.

After a couple of hours, Dad came to visit with my grandmother, his mum.
Having visitors is always risky. The equilibrium in the studio is delicate and hard-won, and, while stable enough for solitary me, it is readily unbalanced by the presence of others. But I was feeling strong. Yesterday's completion of the first big parasol had left me almost breathless with awe. I had stared at it, astonished that it had come from my own hands. I felt powerful and blessed at once, and cycled home in the balmy evening with a full heart. So I said, "of course!" when Dad asked if they could come for a brief visit. I was excited for them to see the new wonders I had made.

I wanted to hear Dad say, "WOW!"

The studio sits deep in a warren of white, makeshift corridors. I greeted them at the front door, linked arms with my grandmother and walked at her pace while Dad loped behind, chatting.

"Now, Moss. Do you need a radio?" he asked.
"No." I said.
"But - have you got one?" he persisted.
"No."
"I've brought Mum's old one for you. It works great, you just can't turn it off."

We were still walking through the labyrinth, but slowed while he fished in his supermarket bag and I protested that I have an iPod with hundreds of songs... my voice faded and my heart gave a sad little skip as the radio emerged in his hand. The cube!

The clock-radio cube - that wonder of function and design that had sat on my grandmother's bedside table since 1989. It had been one of Dad's more successful gifts. A triumph that brought his mother to hand-clasping exclamations of delight. It was cream-coloured, with one clear-plastic face, a window to blackness through which shone digits in digital red. It was there to be covertly inspected and admired on sleepover visits, when my grandmother was still strong and quick, and when I was a loose-limbed, buck-toothed day-dreamer, transported by her stories of long-ago loves.

And there it was, under the flourescent corridor lights, inert, clunky and small in my Dad's hand.

And obsolete.

"I don't need it," I said again, wounded by the very fact.
I don't need any more stuff.

Dad looked wounded, too, and wrapped it back in the shopping bag.

And then we were at my studio door - I swung it open with a proud flourish and led them in.
"Well, then!" said my grandmother, "isn't this nice?" We urged her to take a seat in my new old chair, where her small, neat form sank into its depths. It's the only chair in the room, so Dad and I stood awkwardly around. Dad noticed the tripod.
I knew he would.

"If you knock that, your camera is GONE," he said, our great worrier, daily fantasising catastrophe.

I assured him I was aware of it all the time, and would not knock it. For some reason, my heart had commenced a drumming panic in my chest. Anxiety had infiltrated my haven, my studio. My gleaming, god-sent tripod was under question. I was firm and insistent in my reassurance. I had known he would say it, and had known there was no way to stop it. My brilliant parasol quietly held its ground behind Dad as he shifted restlessly from foot to foot. I decided quickly that it was still brilliant to me, even if no-one else thought so. Dad joked that a cocktail umbrella could be a murder weapon in an Agatha Christie novel, then promptly considered the logistics and decided that it couldn't. We all laughed, directionless. Dad said he still felt sad about the radio.

After they left, Dad helping my grandmother carefully down the dangerous steps and along the cobbled lane, I sank into my new old chair and tried to calm my heart. The white walls reverberated with my strange anxiety. I could almost see Dad's words flying wildly across the room and rebounding in all directions - thin, white, violent streaks of panic. I couldn't make sense of my reaction, and, finding no sense, I also found I couldn't subdue it.

Until I looked again at the parasol.

All my life, I've felt pangs of real grief on behalf of inanimate objects that have been discarded, damaged, forsaken. My sister has it, too. We each mourned, at primary school, for the yellow texta, passed over by most children for its insipidness against white paper. We each, in our different classrooms, made a point of using it to make it feel included.
It wasn't till years later that we discovered we shared this specific, weird sympathy.

It is a cute quirk; a humorous affliction; a completely unjustifiable source of sorrow.
But with it, I have forged my own particular understanding of the unfathomable world.

It has become my art.

And I got it from Dad.

Parasol progress

Counterpoint

I approached the day's work with some trepidation. When I arrived, all the drawings seemed disjointed. Each one fitting its frame, few spilling over into the unknown void beyond the edges of the page. Each seemed to make its own statement, unrelated to the next. And there was still some sense of a missing gravity - the drawings, while meditative and sincere, were all - with the possible dramatic exception of the sandals - gentle and quiet. A collection needs more light and shade between the works. I felt they needed a subtle counterpoint. Something in the same vein, but with an edge of something... darker.

I felt very sure that the answer lay in the beat-up little cocktail umbrella. As an object, it has given me so much excitement. I feel I understand a lot of complex things from it. About myself, about celebrating and fighting, about beauty, endeavour, stoicism and vulnerability. Amongst other things.

There was life in the studios - voices and movement, laughter. I chatted with Yong, a young Korean man next door to me, who is trying to establish a studio soccer team. When he expressed interest in my work, I invited him into my studio. After making positive noises abut my drawings, he exclaimed at my Chinese brushes, telling me his father, at 70, is studying calligraphy at University. Yong's father, born too poor to attend school, is a self-made businessman, and commenced academic study at the age of sixty. Yong told me (with pride, I think) that his father failed many, many times, before finally being accepted into University.

I felt heartened by the encounter.

I spent a bit of time cropping and rearranging the existing drawings - curating them - until they seemed more connected. Then I began drawing the little parasol - but this time, large.

I liked it from the first minute.
Loose and calligraphic, it was pure joy to make and pleasing to look at. It has remained very satisfying, and although I still have quite a bit to do, I think it will be a good work. Already it has brought balance to the collection as a whole. It feels like an anchor - how odd for a parasol!

Cocktail Umbrella

My day feels redeemed by this tiny fellow, who so beautifully described how I was feeling. We worked together closely and intently, the tiny parasol and I. The drawing is small - maybe my smallest ever, but, despite flaws, it commands attention amongst the other works on the wall, and I feel much better.

Sore

Today, everything hurts.
I have a full eight hours in the studio, but nothing is working, and I am finding it hard to be philosophical.
The albino leaf has been abandoned - I have already cut up the paper to re-use. The eggs in their little newspaper box are good, but the torn surface of the drawing seems at odds with the smooth surfaces I am trying to describe, and there is nothing to be done about it.
I have started to draw the little cocktail umbrella I found last week at the night market. I watched it for half an hour, as it was buffeted and trampled by the crowd, its shape changing moment to moment. I have always found cocktail umbrellas so enchanting, and there was something poignant and mesmerising about its plight. I rescued it and brought it home.
But my drawing just looks mean and cramped. I will try again.
I am not able to rise above heartbreak, today, either. I have been doing so well! But today my spirit can't emerge from the sorry, bottom-line knowledge that I put all my love on the line, the best and bravest of myself, and I lost.
I am indulging in that timeless, irrational question: why me?
Of course I am. My gut is sore and heavy with the monthly reminder that I am still not a mother. I know the drill. By tomorrow, this cloud will have lifted and I will feel glad again. After all, I am an independent young woman with the world at her feet, right?
I opened at random my book of Hafiz poems, and arrived at two lines overflowing from the previous page.

'Nothing evolves us
Like love'

Well, thank you, Hafiz.
But today I am a cave woman.

Newspaper Nest (in progress)

Barest bones

Any fears of getting too pretty have been assuaged. Today's offering is a mess!
I include it here for the sake of honesty, though I'm wincing a little at the exposure of my clumsiness. Truth be told, I don't know if this one will work out, but I'm excited about it.
It represents forty fast minutes of drawing time - all I had, today, between one thing and another.
I am getting into the habit of 'half-hour starts', when I don't have a lot of studio time (stop me if I've told you this already). Today, for instance, I could have spent my brief opportunity on the dandelion, but I know that the slowest part of a drawing is its final stages. I would be unlikely to have finished it, and it would be harder to feel I'd made any progress at all.
But in half an hour, I can make something where there was nothing, and that is a very significant development!
So I started something new.

Here (let me decode the scribble) is a plane tree leaf, fallen in this premature Autumn onto the glaring concrete surrounding the local mega-chain supermarket. I noticed it because it, too, was starkly white in the searing afternoon sun, and appeared almost to be fashioned out of the path itself. It is a murky orange on its face, but its strange, albino back has the appearance of creased paper, and against a white background, the shadows are all that distinguish it.
The surface of the leaf is a rearing, bucking landscape, full of volumes and hollows, and I struggled, when I began, to reconcile them with preconceived assumptions about what a leaf looks like. I started by drawing it simply as a pattern of light and shade, transcribing the surface information as a camera does. But the sense of body, of presence, eluded me, and I was discouraged by the clumsiness of my attempts.
So I resorted to a more abstract, linear mapping of what I know about the leaf - here the peak of the hill, here the gentle swell, here the sudden decline. It is one of my favourite approaches to a drawing, though often little of it will remain visible in the end. It helps me to grapple with the mystery of presence itself. It is more physical and satisfying, and tracks something more elusive than the fall of light.
It tracks my desire to wrest form out of flatness like a magician.

Roadside Dandelion (in progress)

This little fellow runs dangerously near to cliché, but I am trying to obey the tiny but decisive voice in my head that says 'yes!' to some things and not to others.

It is a voice separate from my rational mind, which has been deeply conditioned to be superstitious of all beauty, but, frankly, has no idea what is beauty and what isn't. The tiny voice has quite a mind of its own. It says 'yes!' to my sandals and 'no!' to my boots. It says 'yes!' to the tiny double-leaf sprout, but sadly, 'no!' to the lovely blue feather I also found on my Emerald adventure. It says 'yes!' to garbage bags - almost always! - but 'no!' to the rags of which I have made so many drawings in the past. The tiny voice changes its mind, too, usually after a drawing has been made. The bamboo boats it insisted on so fervently two years ago, are of no interest, now, though I hold them in nice light and say, 'please?' (because I love them).

My opinionated little friend is therefore my most trusted compass for what to work with, next. If it says, 'oh, that roadside weed is so you, this season,' I will take the advice, because I usually learn why, later on.

So far, my grouchy mistrust of the weed (which I tied gingerly to a pillar in my studio, feeling sure a dog must have pissed on it) has already changed to sheer delight at the jerky abandon of the leaves. And the drawing throws up enough demands and challenges for my rational mind to be appeased.

Double-leaf in Colour

I decided to take the plunge and add colour to the double-leaf sprout.
My, but with what a pounding of heart and sickening of stomach I reached for my watercolours. Inevitability is sometimes a horrible feeling. I suddenly knew I was going to do it, and that there'd be no stopping me, for better or worse. Every subsequent mark was made with my heart in my throat.
I still don't know how I feel about it. The deeply private monotone drawing is gone forever, replaced by this other work, with which I have no choice, now, but to try and be friends!
I think we'll grow to like each other. For the moment we are staring darkly and suspiciously at one another across the room, like two stunned children on the first day at kindergarten.
Well, I, for one, am going to see what I can find up the street for some afternoon tea. It'll be good for me to step back out into the world for a bit.
And I've been a brave girl, this afternoon, so a chocolatey reward is in order.

Double-leaf Sprout (in progress)

I found this infant tree amid the grass at Emerald Lake Park, yesterday. It stung vivid vermilion amid the hardy, green stubble, and I plucked it out without a second thought, so sure was I that it was for me, that I would draw it, and that I would then plant it in my garden, where it would grow to be a strong and lissom maple (for what else could it be?).

Well, I'm drawing it, anyway.

My intention was to work it in colour, and I may bleed some red ink into this. But reds are so fickle and tricky. They can sap all the colour out of a monotone drawing - truly! I think I might do better to make a second version in colour. I'm liking this one so much, as it is.

Taking a short break, today, while my wet and laboured page slowly dried, I leafed through old Rumi with the usual hope of a moment of grace.

Funnily enough, these lines form part of the only poem bookmarked:

"we are the first double-leaf sprout

two inches out of the ground.

We need rain, or we may not grow

more than this."

excerpt from I Ask One More Thing

translation: Coleman Barks

 

On Puffing Billy

A few shots from today's 'Artist's Date' - from Liam, the Rockwellian station-hand (aged 14); to the free-spirited Harmony, trying to grasp at the world as she flew past it.

 

 

At Menzies Creek

There can be no child on Puffing Billy today who is as excited as me. It's twenty years since I last dangled my big feet out over the whizzing wildflowers and blackberries, waving at cars stopped at crossings and gardeners hefting debris onto bonfires.
Half an hour to go before we reach Emerald Lake.
I was sorry to forgo the studio, today; to leave my little jar of flowers in the dark for all these hours.
But I'm taking Puffing Billy to Emerald Lake, all by myself, with a thermos of coffee and a packed lunch, my diary, my novel, my ink and brushes. Could any thought be more glorious?

I snapped this at Menzies Creek station, where I stepped out to stretch my legs. I was struck by the reflection of the little girl in pink. I had no idea, till examining the picture, that the station master was watching...

Whoooooo-ooot!
Departing now for Emerald Lake.

Day Five - Nearly Done

Day Four - Sandals progress

Day Three

It was 5pm before I summoned the courage to begin drawing.
My space had been ready since midday, and I spent the afternoon buying a pot plant and sleeping with my mouth open in my new old chair.

I have promised myself I will do practical tasks where creativity eludes me. I need a way to keep moving in the studio. It is an interesting thing to start fresh with a clear knowledge of my habits and tendencies. Cutting paper down to size is my least favourite - but necessary - studio task. It requires little brain power and virtually no creativity. I organised my tools and set to work, cutting more paper than was immediately necessary, so that I wouldn't meet that stumbling block again for a while. I nailed it all up on the wall, so that spanking white pages stared out at me, innocent and threatening at once. I sat down in my new old chair again.

Julia Cameron says, take care of the quantity and the quality will take care of itself.
I thought of Leonard Cohen claiming he never has any good ideas, but just chips away at things till something is good.

I'm not exactly a stranger to inspiration, but I don't generally work from it directly.
It's funny: when I am away from the studio, or kept from drawing by work or other obstacles, the world is full of beauty, surprise and meaning. Little things open up their secrets and show me fleeting glimpses of a cohesive universe, a pure, wordless understanding of everything, before becoming merely pegs again, or merely shoes, or merely a heron in the suburban wetlands, dishevelled by a sudden gust of wind.
But in the studio, where I must take some responsibility for these revelations, must translate them, redesign them, compose them - the task seems quite beyond me and, disappointed by my futility, the vision ebbs away and I am left with only an indistinct memory, and a slight concern that I may be just a little unhinged. Mostly, I draw pegs or rags, not because they are showing me the world, but because they did once, for a fraction of a second, and I hope to draw it out again.

So, it took a massive effort of will to get out of the chair and begin, yesterday (and no, it's not the chair's fault. I can easily spend hours sitting on a lumpy concrete floor if procrastination demands. The chair just saves me from associated injury). But beginning, in the end, contains its own, other magic. Almost immediately, the object has another interpretation, another existence, even. The drawing, like a newborn, is straight-away irrefutably present and demanding, and has a unique beauty or interest for me that did not exist, even in imagination, before I began.

Pegs (In Progress)

Day One

I have had a pretty good day. Good days at the moment only really come as the result of energy and purpose. I am still in a state of awful surprise over Lewis's leaving, and it strikes most painfuly at this hour, when one out of two nights I'd be on one or other side of his kitchen counter, sharing stories of the day, drinking wine and cracking jokes, with the steady, happy expectation of sleeping with his warm body next to mine all night. I thought I was expecting he might take the option of leaving. We had debated the issue of having children for so long, without much sign of a shift in him. But in reality, I am staggered that he could leave us in mid-flight like that. We were strong. We were - apart from this ever-present question - happy.

I was, anyway.

And yet - there is a part of me that has blossomed since the very day he left. It is a really uncomfortable thing to realise, but my life feels bigger when I am not attached to Lewis. It is not who he is, or how our love is, but the mechanism he has developed, over all his years of living and getting hurt, for quelling a wild, happy possibility as it arises. It's a crippling habit, and I hope he manages to overcome the fear that is its cause. And I need to develop a better resilience to pessimism! But it was a surprise to me, to remember that the habit is not mine, and doesn't come naturally to me. That, almost as soon as he was gone, my life - my dreams - seemed to expand with a snap like a great, bright parachute.
I visited Lewis, the other day, and was surprised to find that I and my great silken canopy did not seem to fit in his house anymore. Already.

And yet, at this hour each night, and later, as I tuck into bed, I have this vertiginous feeling, as though the wind has been knocked out of me and the ground has disappeared from beneath me. It's loss in its raw form, unthought, unrationalised. I just miss him horribly.
But what has changed is my impression that I was, in some way, not good enough for Lewis to choose a life with me. Instead, I think, his life is currently too small, too constrained, to accommodate me. It shouldn't be: he has a glorious parachute scrunched tightly inside him, but he doesn't know what to do with it, yet. I really, really hope he works out how, and that he does it before I get too accustomed to my airborne solitude. I miss him. But I don't miss the shape of my self when I was with him, and this is a revelation.

Today I moved into my new studio. That is to say, I was given the keys to my new studio and, with no car - in particular no Land Rover - I ferried a collection of inks and brushes and rags via bicycle and deposited them in the empty, blank space, where they seemed almost to be sucked into the void in their smallness. I have been psyching myself up for this day - I've known it before - the realisation that prorastination still presides, even when the gates are open. I looked at the space: it is, in its current state, procrastination aside, completely unworkable. It needs flat walls (they are stud walls at present), and a desk. There is nowhere to sit. I knew I could sit there on the lumpy, concrete floor for days, daydreaming and planning and wishing I still had Lewis and his manly know-how and his Land Rover and tools. But I really am determined to live differently in this, my year of art. To say 'yes' to myself, to be an artist without boundaries...

...well, let's not get carried away: an artist without fear of timber yards.

So! I gathered my courage and went directly to the timber yard, and ordered 3 GIANT sheets of plasterboard to use as drawing walls. The guy at the desk was convinced I had no idea what I was doing. I persuaded him that yes, I did want what I said I wanted, and once he understood why partially-clad walls would be adequate for my needs, he helped me patiently with all the things I didn't know, and I think he got a kick out of problem-solving with me. I ordered everything I need to be delivered, and then called on Aroha, who had offered to take me op-shopping for furniture, with her station-wagon. We didn't find everything I needed, but we found the one essential thing: A deep, comfortable, nostalgic armchair, covered in a floral fabric like we had on our couch as little kids. I recognised it straight away as MY chair. I bargained it down to $60, and we gleefully drove it home to the new studio, where it is now waiting in the dark with my little brushes and bottles of ink in an otherwise empty room. And so ends day one. Baby steps.

Tomorrow my plasterboard will be delivered! I have enlisted the help of Jessie and Dad for installing it, and when it is sealed and dry, I will have enough equipment to at least begin something, and a chair to curl up in and mull it all over.