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!