It’s been too long between posts, I know. In my defense I’ve been sick in bed with the flu for much of the week. My recovery seems to be a slow going one, but I’m hopeful (and impressed by the wonders of western medicine, which, honestly, I had been quite distrustful of).

I was in the local art supply store a few weeks ago when the woman working behind the counter happened to mention some life drawing sessions that take place in the area. I was vaguely interested, but didn’t quite take in all the details. When I got home I searched the web to see if I could find any details – I couldn’t, but through my search I found something much more interesting.

Turns out that there were weekly art classes in the area. I was interested but tentative, my experience had lead me to believe no teacher is better than a bad (mean spirited, unsupportive) teacher. I sent off an exploratory email and mused over the reply. And the following week I decided to go.

I was so glad that I did too. It is such a wonderfully supportive environment. Minutes into the first class I started nervously denigrating some of my artwork and was promptly told I wasn’t allowed to do such things. It really put me at ease. The other students are all working on their own projects and they’re fascinating. One woman was literally burning an image onto animal skin. It was just really inspiring and invigorating to come into contact with interesting creative people doing creative things.

Sometimes I feel frustrated with what I’m working on, but just knowing there’s someone there to ask for guidance from is a blessing.

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Life has been rather hectic lately and I haven’t had a chance to touch base or even do much artwork. Hopefully some balance will return soon. But in the interim, some of you might remember that Dailybooth user Inamusement Sharon drew my portrait. Well she sent it to me and it arrived today, and I put it in this frame.

It’s so lovely to just know that somebody took the time and energy and focus to create this artwork. And even nicer to have it in my hands from New Zealand. This is really special.

Thank you Sharon!

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Saying something but not really saying anything at all. Have I lost you already? Bear with me.

A guy I went to high school with many years ago traveled through Europe and wrote a travel memoir of sorts. Even though I was still here in Australia I somehow graced its pages, albeit briefly.

John’s one of the most introspective and thoughtful people I know. He can be incredibly insightful. The flip side of this is that he’s always second-guessing himself. He also writes a lot of poetry that I rarely understand the significance of. I think his poems should include explanations, because all the imagery and motifs are usually things that a third party could never be expected to understand. And isn’t that part of why we write – to be understood?

The first time I read this I must concede I felt a little insulted. I thought my poems were so obvious. They felt dangerous to write and dangerous to share. But I have to admit that they were cryptic. Purposefully so. There was a lot boiling just beneath the surface and I needed to let it out, one way or another. So I wrote. (Well, actually, originally I scribbled. But ultimately I wrote.)

It was in effect telling something (to unburden my worried mind) without telling everything. The truth was I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I wasn’t sure who I could trust. And sometimes I was just channeling whatever music I was listening to – Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, Sophie B. Hawkins. Sometimes certain imagery just seemed apt. Sometimes it was entirely about wordplay and alliteration and just the natural rhythms of syllables rubbing up against each other.

Someone asked me recently what my interest in their artwork was. And in unpacking my relationship to their visual artwork and photography I realised some things about my own visual arts output. And I was surprised at how little I wanted to explain things with words, even though I am first and foremost a writer. And I started to look at my paintings and drawings and saw them only as flat, meaningless snapshots. They don’t seem to have any obvious meaning or narrative. They are people generally, but who are these people? What is their relationship to me? What is my interest in them? It’s scarcely obvious from the images themselves… and I clearly don’t choose to explain it in words.

And perhaps this is only made more complicated by the way I choose to work – from photographs sourced on the Internet. Some of these people are dear friends, some are barely known to me. Sometimes the act of drawing a person is a way of initiating a conversation with them. If the likeness is at all compelling it’s almost a party trick, and it’s a better way of talking to someone on the other side of the world than say asking the time or making small talk about the weather. Sometimes my interest in them is sexual, sometimes it is romantic, sometimes it’s just aesthetic or primarily aesthetic – something about a facial feature or a particular look or stance or a curve or a line. Sometimes it’s about paying tribute to someone who has supported me, encouraged me, inspired me.

And I think increasingly it’s not so much about the artwork itself (my skills are frankly limited) but the effort, the care. The fact that I devote time and energy and attention to an individual for a period of time. And sometimes the output itself seems sorely inadequate, that when I draw a pencil likeness of my dear friend Davey it sort of fails to embody all the emotion I feel welling up inside me as I drag pencil across the page. That this act doesn’t originate from a specific desire to create art for its own sake, or for pencil practice, but from a deep desire to pay tribute to an extraordinary and unlikely friendship, to document a kind of everyday miracle.

But if you know that it is only because I have just told you as much. There’s nothing intrinsically about the drawing that embodies that information, at least nothing I can see.

So perhaps my paintings say nothing. Perhaps, like my high school poetry, they are too obscure.

And perhaps they could say more. Perhaps I could say more. Perhaps I could use all the tools in my arsenal to express the things I secretly wish to express.

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I am a firm believer in Morning Pages but that doesn’t mean I use them all the time. Though it felt like a really long time since I had last drawn/painted anything (it probably wasn’t as long as it felt) and I was beginning to feel to quite anxious about starting anything. In truth I was scared to start anything in case it turned out to be awful, in case it revealed me to be the complete hack I think I am.

I sat down at a desk at my local library and told myself I’d just scribble. Scribbling has been a catalyst throughout different times in my life, something about the movement of a pen or pencil with or without conscious thought, without or without something obvious to say, leads to other things.

Over the course of two pages I found I had written the same name five times. Someone I used to know… And a flood of memories returned to me in that instance. Little things imbued with funny meanings that would be lost on the casual observer. I remembered that person’s obsession with Grain Wave chips. I remembered that Timezone photo booth we got our photo taken in. I remembered silly little things that were said. I remembered the in flight radio station I listened to on the flight home.

I think I was so preoccupied with moving on that I had never really stock of what actually transpired.

At any rate I felt this great need to draw this person. So I did. I won’t share it here (or anywhere really) because I doubt this person would appreciate me drawing me and I am no longer in contact with them to ask permission. But the point is I am drawing again and it feels good.

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I distinctly recall reading something in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way about concentrating on the quantity and leaving the ‘quality’ to God. Well today I’ve been doing that. The quality is fairly uninspiring but there’s something nice – even comforting – about about just churning things out and seeing what happens. And it gives me an opportunity to real play with my materials.

Today I’ve been using Watercolor Postcards and Derwent Inktense water soluble pencils.

Assorted Postcards

There’s something quite liberating about drawing on surfaces as small as postcards. You can do a lot of them in a short period of time. If the one you’re working on doesn’t work out, move on to another.

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It was my 29th birthday yesterday. I’ve never been a ‘bucket list’ kind of guy but somehow the prospect of being one year off thirty made me acutely aware of all the things I haven’t done. The most random things too, like “I’ve never drank sake.”

I drove down the coast to Huskisson determined to do something different for my birthday. It was exactly what I needed too. The minute I stepped out of the car I was hit by the strong salty scent of the sea. Something about it just recharged my circuits. I guess I’ve lived near the sea for most of my life, there’s a connection there. I remember driving towards Canberra once (which is quite inland) and having this strange sense that something was wrong. It occurred to me that the thing I found so disconcerting was that there were no seagulls in the park I was in.

I had a custard and cream cannelloni and coffee for morning tea, and later salt and pepper squid for lunch. But by far the best thing was just walking along the beach – the glorious white sand – and taking in all the sights and sounds. I was grinning like a lunatic. I struggle to remember the last time I was so genuinely excited to be somewhere.

I took a photograph of myself on my birthday on Dailybooth and am working on a painting based on it. It’s a bit crude at the moment but it’s good to be painting again. Especially to be painting with acrylics again. The watercolours have been doing my head in, so it’s nice to return to something I know a little about.

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When I paint with acrylics I paint on stretched canvases or canvas boards. This is great, but I wanted to make more portable artwork – things I could post easily to people all around the world (hence my interest in Artist Trading Cards and Watercolour postcards).

But, like anything, learning a new medium comes with its own stumbling blocks and learning curve. The one thing I was particularly worried about was stretching paper. It seemed an entirely mysterious process to me and every book I consulted seemed to have a slight variation on how it should be done. Eventually I bought some watercolour gummed brown tape and found the video below, and eventually I managed my way through the process.

The paper didn’t buckle so I guess the stretching was a success. Though I don’t think much of the picture of itself…

2011 feels increasingly like the year of the beginner. Everything I do feels like I’m doing it for the first time, and quite often the results reflect this too. I’m trying to take my output less seriously. I want to experiment more, and produce more… and be less neurotic about the quality, and more dedicated to the quantity. But it is challenging…

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I considered titling this entry, “New Year, Same Old Crap.” I know some people are filled with a sense of new beginnings and possibility at this time. I can’t say this is something I’ve experienced. For me there has been an acute feeling that all the new challenges will be the same as the old ones, that there are some things that may always seem daunting – such as starting, such as trying new things, such as the voice of the inner critic. I suppose the answer is to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ but mostly I would just like to not feel the fear.

I am always reluctant to entertain ideas of new years resolutions since they always feel like setting one’s self up to fail. But I thought I would muse over things in a general way – hopes, fears and the like.

In 2011 I would like to be less fearful. I don’t know how plausible this is. Perhaps if I can be more busy doing things I will just automatically have less time to be neurotic. I want to be less fearful of starting, or at least less tempted to use that fear as an excuse not to start. I want to focus less on how other people might look at me or think about me. I want to explore the things that are close to my heart. I want to replace old beliefs about not being able to be happy with a sense of possibility. I want to try new things and speak my mind. I want to use the art supplies I have and not use art supply shopping as an excuse to stall on actually producing artwork.

I want to find my copy of The Artist’s Way (I can’t for the life of me find it!) and I want to refill my artist’s well. I’ve been feeling like a blank page lately, nothing of interest to express.

But mostly in 2011 I want to be more myself. I don’t want to ‘change’. I don’t want to lose weight. I don’t want to be more virtuous. I just want to be less inhibited. I want to be unapologetic about who I am, and do the things I want to do. That sounds like such a laughable paragraph but I want to dispense with all the shame that informs so much of my life.

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I feel this strange urge to write some sort of Christmas message as I sit here on Christmas Eve watching Monkey Magic of all things… I don’t know that I have any great wisdom to offer, except perhaps the recent realisation that making things for others can be quite a wonderful rewarding thing to do.

Whether it’s making gingerbread cookies…

Or preparing a roast Turkey for your family (something I certainly hadn’t done before) with Nigella’s butter and maple syrup glaze…

Or just giving someone you love something you made with your own hands…

It seems counter-intuitive but you receive things (albeit sometimes intangible things) by giving. You receive pleasure by giving pleasure, you gain connection through giving of yourself. So this holiday season I invite you to give something of yourself to someone else and see what happens.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, Joyous Kwanzaa… or even just a Happy December.

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I decided to give the pencils a rest and get my Wacom graphics tablet outside. They’re quite rough and ready… but oh well.

Digital Sketch: Boats On The Water
Digital Sketch on Wacom Tablet

Digital Sketch: Freestyle Tree
Digital Sketch on Wacom Tablet

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