Getting near end of process of making photo albums

I made a mistake it's only since June that I've been making photo albums. I got more prints back from Pixel Perfect the print shop. Then I told them to go ahead and print out some more. When I've finished there will be thousands of photos to house. Luckily I bought the albums back in 2019 – it's been that long since I have been planning this project – and still have some left over. Two months is a long time. In that time my grandson has been born. In those two months I had my first art show and started planning my second. In those two months we had days and days of sunshine (a big contrast to the wet conditions of last year). 

I say “I made a mistake” but you probably need to know what I’m referring to. It’s not obvious on the face of it but at some point in the past week or 10 days I wrote something on social media about having been making photo albums since May.

This is how my mind works, and it could very well be the same for other people. I make a seemingly casual statement either in writing or verbally and it becomes cemented in my mind as a concrete fact. At the time I made the statement I sincerely thought that I’d been making photo albums since May but when I looked at my blog back-end today I find a post from 11 June about photo albums. 

Then again, on rethinking it that doesn’t mean that I started the albums on 11 June, in fact if I read the post it says that I was doing this activity for “a few weeks” which would take the start date back to May, so in actual fact my first statement was wrong and I had indeed been making albums since May.

Sigh.

It really is THIS difficult. It’s absolutely exhausting. Part of the process was making mum’s album, this is a “book” I made using materials my mother furnished. The story about this exercise is that in 2008 or 09 I asked mum to make notes about some photos I selected and photocopied and sent to her. It took her many years to complete the project, and then the yellow and blue sheets of lined paper were just stuck in with my photographic records being ignored. Then when I attacked the drawers in May and got out the boxes from downstairs containing other records left over from mum and dad’s apartment I assembled the materials, transcribing mum’s handwritten notes (sometimes hard to decipher), and making a little A4 “book” to share with people.

As I say it’s exhausting, but what propels me is knowing that if I don’t do this when I die all or much of that information will be lost forever. When I die (as my mother died) there will be no one to point to a photo and say “That’s grandma with Reba in 1940” about a photo of two women in woollen coats, a black-and-white photo that would otherwise be meaningless. Even if you’re a family member and you have some connection thereby to the photo not knowing is a source of pain.

Exhausting but profound.

I want to spare the people who rely on me this pain. I want them to be able to see clearly who is who, and add contextual information such as year and location, just as mum in her yellow and blue notes added context to otherwise random houses. I want to be a ferryman for the dreams of my progeny and their children down through the ages, forever and forever.

Amen!

TV review: The Lorenskog Disappearance, Netflix (2022)

When a woman the wife of a wealthy industrialist goes missing police initially don’t know who to blame. Clues are scarce and the method of communication, often via Bitcoin, is shadowy. A family member, Anne-Elisabeth’s husband, might be the killer but could he have the means to do the crime? The trails go cold one by one.

Filmed when there was snow on the ground in Norway this show ticks all the boxes for Nordic noir, including a compelling police inspector (Yngvild Støen Grotmol) who struggles with the clues and with a hesitant management class. In addition the series is structured in sections each dedicated to a particular set of characters, such as journalists or informers, so though the plot proceeds in chronological order you are always facing in a slightly different direction when each episode starts.

Journalist Erlend Moe Riise (Christian Rubeck) is good as is another journalist, Riise’s colleague Aleks Zaretski (Victoria Ose) who flips the police narrative on its head and goes looking at alternative candidates for the killer/s.

Another key component in the overall production in my view is Aleks’ boyfriend (Jonas Strand Gravli) who uses his own style of logic to unpick problems with the police case by focusing on the reception of the case in the media, and on the ways that we “frame” or understand crimes that are discussed publicly by large numbers of people. In a sense Torv and Aleks create a foil to the stupidity of the police/media machine counting on clicks and outrage to apportion blame. 

It’s an intelligent approach to a subject (murder) that is often dealt with in TV shows.

I was entertained by this wonderful show, even the criminals come out looking believable, for example the strongman Mattis (Pål Tøien) with his neck tatts and macho is a nice counterpoint to Christian’s earnest bungling. 

TV review: Mindhunter, Netflix (2017)

Running to two seasons and chronicling the instigation and early days of a special FBI unit dedicated to catching and understanding “sequence” (serial) killers, ‘Mindhunter’ is nicely scripted and directed. I’m a big fan of cop shows so this was a treat and I felt the quality throughout the extent of the days required to watch this show. Individual characters are developed properly so that you identify with their lives and personalities, Holt McCallany a s Bill Tench was particularly fine especially considering his family circumstances that are complicated by his having a withdrawn son.

Because the Behavioural Sciences Unit relied on tapes made to record interviews with convicted killers it’s fairly certain that the acting and the scripting is reliable as a real artefact. You sense that the performances given by the men (always men) Tench and Ford (Jonathan Groff) go to visit in prison are succinct and adequate to communicating the intricacies of serial murders. 

The term “hunter” used in the show’s title referring to how these men selected and stalked their prey.

A problem with the character of Ford is that, although it was him who really started the SBU in its existence, because his girlfriend Debbie (Hannah Gross) isn’t always present his character suffers. It seems that a backstory is necessary to give a cop in a show such as this the requisite depth and complexity in order to carry him/her along satisfactorily.

Anyone who likes cop shows should get a kick out of this. The Manson character played by Damon Herriman is particularly fine with his sluicing monologues and fey grandeur, a short man who compensates by sitting on the back of the chair in the room opposite the two FBI agents.

Two seasons is not long for product of this quality, and I’d be glad to get back to Ford and Tench if the makers out there in Hollywood wanted to put together a follow-up season. I felt that this had legs.

TV review: The Blacklist, Netflix (2013-2023)

Many people will want to stop reading when I say this is a police procedural, but my excuse for liking this type of show is that it explores what it means to be human in the contemporary world. This is a post-Assange production, one which reflects the moral relativism of global politics, where Capital is deeply embedded in the notion of freedom and the borders between criminal and licit activity blur, warp, and shift.

James Spader is wonderful as the mercurial Raymond Reddington, a name that along with other snippets of scripting ties this book back to Norman Mailer’s ‘Harlot’s Ghost’ and hence to Nabokov’s ‘Ada’. ‘The Blacklist’ is sort of a de-facto canonical product a cross between ‘NCIS’ and ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ with as many close-ups as car chases, gun battles, and forced intrusions.

Running to 10 seasons, it’s also a saga in the vein of series of 19th century novels. What it does best is establish rules for understanding that like a good soap opera are tied to tropes of personality that run through popular discourse. Just as in ‘B&B’ Thomas stands for chaos and the lure of the illicit, and Hope stands for constancy and virtue, in ‘The Blacklist’ Aram (Amir Arison) stands for goodness and honesty while Ressler (Diego Klattenhof) stands for apple-pie America. When Hope kisses Thomas in Rome you are sucked into someone else’s reality because of all the episodes of ‘B&B’ where Thomas has been justly spurned by so many people. When Ressler snuggles up in bed in an opioid daze in a cheap motel you are drawn into a global story of self-hatred and exploitation.

‘The Blacklist’ offers a range of different characters, a kaleidoscope of “issues” like any good police procedural, it has “good” characters no less flimsy than in any other cultural product but the longevity of the series and the skill of Spader ensure that you are allowed to explore them in a more complete way than is usual for other OTT dramas, certainly more than in most movies on the big or small screen.

You are the cop.

There are many antidotes to the sophistication of the plots exploited in ‘The Blacklist’ and Netflix offers a range of true-crime dramas, some of which highlight how corrupt the police can be. I urge anyone who reads this to understand that my comprehension of ‘The Blacklist’ is not innocent. The storylines are often complex and exhausting, the reasoning of the criminals bizarre, the flips and switches confusing. It’s really not necessary to make things this bewildering in order to entertain. Or perhaps I’m wrong and it IS necessary in order to explore the nature of civil society. Where to draw the line between legal and illegal, when is violence justified, how to know what to believe in?

In the post-Assange era the lines have shifted so that we cannot know beforehand if something “should” be legal. What words do we use to describe a solution to a problem so difficult to untangle that it calls into question the very system that we subscribe to, and that benefits us? ‘The Blacklist’ has this conundrum at heart, and it is a wild ride.

PayPal use problems: getting money back

In case you’re interested this post is a reminder for readers that PayPal has its own ways of operating that are different from how other organisations that handle money do things. 

I only did a transaction using PayPal because other options weren’t available and there started a chain of events that tied up my money for almost a week. It wasn’t a large amount of money but the balls-up meant that I had to think about PayPal for all of that time, and believe me when I say that I thought of it in a negative light. As a result PayPal is permanently on my blacklist.

The adventure of the missing money started when my daughter asked me to buy some clothes for her son from a specific website. I’d been groomed for this on a previous Messenger call when she’d mentioned a predilection for ethically sourced goods as well as for low air miles. 

It would have been impossible to ignore such a request.

On the day in question I went to the relevant website and made the purchase, asking for help from Ada at strategic points where items she’d already pointed out weren’t immediately available. Once I’d finished I went to PayPal to pay for it because I thought, the linked card not being a credit card, I’d have a debt in PayPal if I didn’t top up the account. I didn’t want to be charged for using someone else’s money.

This was on the Saturday. 

On the Monday I noticed the PayPal deductions on my cheque account and because there were two of them I called PayPal to ask why. They said that it was a problem with my bank so I got in the car and drove up to the shopping centre. They said that they needed the BSB and account number of the source retailer, so I went back home and called PayPal again. They told me that the original deduction was for the purchase but that I’d made a separate deduction (which was true) and I said that they had to TELL ME that I didn’t need to top up my PayPal account with funds from my cheque account.

I waited and waited until the following Thursday for my funds to arrive at the PayPal database, then I did the transaction to return the money but PayPal said that the transfer would be paused while they checked it. 

The thing is that PayPal never tells you at any stage that regardless of the type of card you have linked – a debit card (as in my case) or a credit card (which they stupidly offered to link for me) – the deduction will happen and so you only need to have funds available when it does. My learning from all this malarkey is that I should use PayPal only when STRICTLY NECESSARY because having their own way of operating divorced from the mainstream they’ll keep your money for the maximum amount of time so they can earn interest from it before returning it to you. PayPal is a sort of legitimate scam that provides a great service to vendors (you can accept money using only your email address) but that treats everyone else like dupes. I did my initial transaction on 1 July and got the money back on Thursday.

Not getting new photo albums

In 2019 at the end of a busy year – presented at a hospital in Jan I had a heart procedure, went to the Middle East in May, and started having panic attacks in Aug – I was tidying up the library in Pyrmont (a full three years after my mother had sadly died) and thought about what to do with hundreds of photos found in her records. There were also ones that I had left over from my rambles in Australia, Japan and China 40 years earlier at a time when, having no studio to practice art, I carried my camera around with me in streets I wandered. 

And now, in 2023 – a full seven years after surviving my mother’s death – I finally managed to summon the resolve to do something about all the confusion and mess. I decided to tidy up the drawers full of family photos and, in so doing, lay some of my demons to rest.

I turned to the Cumberland photo albums from the Photo Album Shop that the accompanying invoice says I bought on 14 Dec 2019. I began to get busy in the dining room filling two albums, sticking down the clear plastic corners and aligning the images carefully then throwing away the old contact-plastic albums that regrettably had started to disintegrate with the plastic film coming away from the adhesive backing. Then I took another step and amalgamated the two albums into one.

I wanted to buy more as I envisaged getting some of my many stored computer files printed on paper. I emailed the album shop on 15 June asking if they would swap some of my refills (top left in photo) for new albums with a different item number because what I had were now unfortunately out of stock. No reply by 19 June but in the meantime I’d done a good deal of work sorting things out, which also included a process of summoning up files on my computer and putting them on a USB stick I could take to Pixel Perfect, my print outlet in Chippendale. 

There were hundreds of them going up to 2009, where I stopped out of respect for the process, I didn’t want to be too completist and potentially outrage the universe so I put a limit on the timeframe to make things more manageable and modest. Nevertheless I had about 700 files to print and resolved to get them done in batches in order to spread the cost out over time but in the end the unit cost persuaded me to go back to the store – I was already a kilometre away on the way home (I’d reached Waterloo) when it dawned on me that the prints would only cost 60 cents and not six dollars each – and deposit the rest with the man behind the counter. In fact they even give a discount for volumes over 500 so it was good that I decided in the end to get them all done at once and the driving at that time of day was ok.

I took another step in the right direction on 23 June when I emailed my cousin Maria Celeste Bernardo who lives in Portugal asking in English (which she speaks) if she’d help put names to faces. I explained about the album in my email and within a day she’d sent a complete list of captions for 30 images I’d sent in a PDF I made with my scanning software supplied by HP. Even if I couldn’t get more of the large-format albums I could get information that would help me finish the project, a project made more difficult because it was psychically close to the death of my mother. As I mentioned at the start of this post she died in 2016 and it wasn’t until 2023 – a full seven years later – that I was able to summon up the gumption to get involved fully in the task of sorting and classifying. As I noted to Maria Celeste I am a man for whom nothing is not detailed and complex and I need to find a space in my life big enough for everything that I do. With the photo albums it took seven years to find that space, more in fact because my mother’s death came at the end of a period of six years lived in Queensland when I was looking after her on a daily basis, cooking for her, managing her finances, tidying up the charity mess she made because people kept on ringing her and asking for her credit card details. I actually spent more than a decade finding the courage to face my past in the form of a thousand family photographs.

Selecting family photos to put in an album

For the past few weeks I’ve been going through a chest of drawers containing old family photos. Anyone who follows me on Facebook knows that this has been in turn traumatising and revelatory. I’m writing about the process in my end-of-year post of course but today’s post will be a brief overview.

There are five drawers in the item of furniture and thousands of photos in the form of prints, negatives and positives. In some cases I’m taking negatives to the print shop to get proof sheets made so I can select images to have printed. In addition to regular family snapshots I’ve found some photos I took as part of my art practice in the 80s, which has been an added and pleasant bonus bec I thought all of these images had – apart from some which I’d scanned 15 years ago – lost inextricably.

Because such losses are a recurring source of sadness I resolved to put together a captioned album for my family in Japan. Despite having spent several weeks doing the sorting and selection necessary for the project, further time will be required to finish it. I have from several years ago (I think this was done in 2019) bought albums, spare leaves, and sticky corners, so all that is necessary to get the job done. As with anything worthwhile time is needed to get it right, and I promise to set up my dysfunctional laptop on my studio table so I can go through the photos one by one and write the captions in an accessible spot.

The difficulty inherent in this task is married to the motivation, on the one hand reliving the feelings the photos inspires is a source of irritation, but for the same reason I feel pain I am also compelled to complete the job.

Apart from the photo album I plan to make I will also get my framer to create a special album for the press cuttings that have been collected over the past 100 years, my grandmother Bea Dean (nee Kewish) made a little envelope to be full of clippings from newspapers and I plan to do a proper job. It’s going to be about 16 pages and will also include snapshots in black and white that mum handed down. I think that with experience I’ve garnered over the years – I worked in publishing in one form of another from 1985 to 2009 – I am uniquely placed to finish this project.

The clipping album will be something I can send around to family members to spend time with, we’re all over the place now in Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria, NSW. They can then send the album back to me, it’ll actually be more like a book with pages that you can turn. The feature of this item will be that the text is in the form of newspaper cuttings that Bea collected as well as some others that came from different family members. My great-grandfather Robert James Kewish is notable in this regard as he was a journalist and so there are some longer articles written about him. Where for most people a death will be marked by a notice in the paper paid for by a wife or son, in his case there is a whole article chronicling his life.

I feel privileged to be able to make this thing, it seems like a unique and special object that can be cherished for hundreds of years by generations. 

I only hope it survives. I got some work done on several heirlooms including an 1831 Bible that belonged to someone in the family I’m not sure who, that job cost $5000 but now I have something that I can happily pass onto my children if they want it, or else give to a cousin if they want it. You can never tell what people will want to do with possessions, some might treasure them others might just want the space and so put something up for sale.

Taking a break from painting

In January I had friends staying over and was busy doing things so took a break from painting. I still stored up words I wanted to use in new collages and I had two more Japanese sayings to employ but stopped trying to put them to use.

At that point it was about nine weeks since I started making watercolours and adding collage to them but I felt as though progress had been made, the works I made at the end of that interval were much more complex and considered than what I made at the beginning. 

Nine weeks doesn’t seem like a long time but in our age of abundance a day is forever, we’re given such a wide range of activities to embrace or reject.

In May, five months after that first break I was going back to sonnets not having worked on any for a long time. Having a range of creative activities to rely on in order to feel engaged with the world, and through which to celebrate agency is something that I aspired to many times in my life.

The clock is still ticking however.

I read a poem this morning.

In addition to sonnets I’ve been writing free-form poems.

I don’t know what you think of this post it seems quite random when I read back over its length, even though it’s not very long. I guess I’ll never know a lot of things, but that’s ok. In the end you’re only worth the memories you make in other people’s minds. In the end we all die, the secret is knowing what’s worth living for, perhaps I know. Perhaps you know. 

This day will never end.

The echoes of air traffic fill the morning, I can hear the jets and their whine, their roar, a sort of whoar crumbling the edges off 6.23am.

Media literacy revisited

I was surprised to learn yesterday that media literacy will be taught in NSW secondary schools, something that I asked for ten years ago. The proliferation of social media and websites makes this essential if we’re to preserve the integrity of our political system, under siege in many countries. 

Our media landscape in this country is a bit better than in many others because of the trusted position of the ABC but of course there’s nothing that forces people to use it, although it serves to some degree as an information clearing house, setting the tone for the day’s reporting. Because the ABC news program comes last in the evening it tends to have the last word on many issues although there are late bulletins on other major channels throughout the evening.

Today’s blogpost is however a reminder that stray thoughts can have long-lasting repercussions, little did I imagine in 2013 that the state government would take my casual words so much to heart, but inspired by fear perhaps they were impressed more by the rise of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin than by me.

Colour as a plot device

It feels like eternity has passed but since I did the ‘Death by cop’ series only two months has gone by. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the show in July so haven’t been painting much, but a few days ago I went back to what I did last year.

And reinvented it.

Last year I was making colour watercolours with collage but I hadn’t turned the paintings into series yet. A month ago I did so and therefore had something to think about when it came to doing ‘Colour as a plot device’ (which will also be the title of the show). I specifically wanted to use nine panels and made nine watercolours but then at the last minute broke up another series and used one panel from that in this new work.

I think about how artists are portrayed in popular culture, they’re usually denigrated on account of their enthusiasms, rendered in a way that makes them unpalatable. They don’t fit in. They’re deliberately different and use that as a weapon to attack the status quo. But ‘Colour as a plot device’ uses tropes from that same place to turn the mirror around, you see familiar elements of cultural iconography but the gorgeous background makes them look like they’re seen in front of a splendid sunset. We all seek to escape and when we’re caught up in a net we struggle all the harder.

I think about popular culture and what it means. That policeman, that joker, that criminal, that reigning monarch, all fit into destiny’s tableau like parts of a puzzle. You belong to an organisation you fit into its matrix, you belong to a community you conform. You settle in for the ride. You mix and mingle. 

And smile.

Unwanted domains refund

I did get a result though it wasn’t precisely what I wanted, the company (Melbourne IT) refunded half of the cost of the domains which meant about $180 going back into my credit card account yesterday evening late. 

I had an email from the company two days ago in which they outlined their reasoning for the decision to keep half of the money. This being because they’d already paid to have the domains registered. 

When I spoke with the frontline staffer on Saturday she was understanding and actually got up from her desk and went to the accounts department to state my case, so I guess I should be grateful. I think that the damage to my relationship with the company has been tarnished but it’s not critical, I think that if the company had refused to pass on a refund it might’ve sparked me to move to find a different ISP.

This whole saga outlined in the previous blogpost just goes to the big issue in that technology is HARD because even if we have specialised companies whose only job is to look after intellectual assets there will be mistakes and misjudgement. There’s no reason why this problem had to occur other than the cause which was a difficult-to-use interface provided by the company. If you need a university degree to get such an easy thing right then there’s a lack of consideration that leads to unnecessary financial loss. Money is spent on things that are worthless if the communication mechanism is not adequate for the skillsets represented. The technology is at fault.

I guess that I need to be more careful in future. I’ve got more unwanted URLs in my list and will have to make sure, when they come up for renewal, to phone the company and get their representative to walk me through the process or for their help desk to make the necessary change themselves. I’m not going to rely on my own capabilities again it costs too much, I spent the weekend and most of this week worrying about this situation and it’s left an indelible mark on my memory.

Unwanted domains renewed

Trying here to be philosophical about this but it’s a struggle. Today Melbourne IT my ISP reregistered two domains I never wanted in the first place. Years ago they thought I might like to have them and registered them so they’d been in my domain list. A couple of weeks ago they told me they’d be reregistered so I went into the user interface and unticked the relevant boxes but it seems like it didn’t make any difference because this morning I got a charge on my credit card on account of the stupid domains.

I called the company and spoke with a guy who listened but he said the call would have to be escalated to someone else to investigate so I’m going to have to think about this painful situation for a day or two while they make up their minds.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal and I have enough money in most months to absorb this kind of cost but my daughter is about to have her first child so I’m watching every dollar right now. Because of who I am my mind is going to be looping back to Melbourne IT and whether I should ditch them in favour of another provider because of their idiotic policy of suggesting related domains to new customers.

I guess this is the mental tax you pay in the internet age.

A tax in my case anyway because I am naturally a worrier, and when it comes to domains we have something important to worry about. I do not know how many services I have linked to my main email address but I do know that if I lost it I’d be in all kinds of strife. In fact if I lost it today’s discomfort would seem like a dream. At least you can wake up from a dream.

Probably in a year I will still remember my present irritation because it relates to internet domains, which are things that have nowadays such a critical place in our lives. There are not many books I’ve read that feature the internet, let alone the specific complex feelings that personal domains possess in our pantheon of things. I wonder if anyone’s written a police procedural with a domain as a major plot device. I think that probably someone out there has done this but it’s not something I’ve personally come across.

'Magnificent obsessions' series

I was out with friends on Saturday but stayed home all day Sun giving me time and space to dream. 

Because I’d flattened out a whole lot of watercolours I had given them a second life and resurrected possibilities. The confluence of events led me to making a bunch of standalone paintings into a series I titled ‘Magnificent obsessions’ in honour of Sydneysiders’ penchant for food and real estate. The title is similar to my old boss’ film title, what she made after she left the company we worked at. 

Like my collage I’m not really stealing the film title, it’s more like payment because I made some graphics for the credits, and anyway her film title is not precisely the same. I repurpose magazines to make collage so why not repurpose a pair of words?

There is something unwieldy about our obsession with real estate, more recently paired with an interest in food – see all the cooking shows about farm-to-fork etc – and it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “magnificent” though we have nationally a much higher mobility rate than other countries apart from those in Scandinavia, so evidently the use of dwellings to improve one’s material wellbeing isn’t all bad. 

We’re yet to see if the state and federal governments can do something about homelessness, which is still too high. We know what to do about homelessness it’s just a matter of authorities biting the bullet and taking the necessary actions to make sure people are housed. The measures required imply an all-of-government response. I wonder if siloing – which is inevitable where you have organisations responding – isn’t going to throw a spanner in the works.

Automobile transition series

This week I flattened out a whole slew of paintings. What happens is that if you don’t use good paper with lots of water the paintings dry curled, so I popped down to IGA on the off-chance they’d have a squirter bottle to fill with water. 

In fact this one was the last one on the shelf so for the rest of the day I sprayed the backs of paintings than weighed them down with heavy books as per the instructions I’d got from Google. 

It worked so well that I decided to revisit one series and add a closure to round out the viewing experience.

It’s a sort of comic/conceit that I’m going to call ‘Automobile transition’ in order to tap into the zeitgeist and capitalise on a popular theme. In fact the series DOES show change from one state to another and back again.

The original paintings were done in November so it goes a LONG way into the past. When I first did the paintings I started out by experimenting, just following my intuition. In the same way that in October I began in Pitt Street Mall to paint leaves, when I started to use collage it seemed natural to make leaves as well.

Abstract chevron sets

I can’t remember exactly when it was, yesterday or the day before, but I assembled the abstract series of works into sets (see below) giving the individual paintings a second opportunity to glow. One viewer said they are “luscious” and I’m grateful for the feedback, but for myself I think they create meaning when they’re considered together because of the sheer diversity the new work embodies.

Seeing the thing here online you don’t get the full effect but in real life when seen together the paintings secure new life because in addition to the range of colours, the arrow (chevron) shapes all point in different directions so the eye is constantly changing its point of focus from one panel to another. The sense of movement you get from the work has something to do with this diversity, as though a sink full of soapy water were being stirred.

Because I had two panels left over after putting the two sets together I am making a third set to accommodate the two spare paintings. I explained in the previous blogpost how I came to have three of the first set, and not two.

Abstract series

On Thursday I was due to meet friends for dinner in Darlinghurst and there was a show opening also nearby to go to. A friend had furthermore offered to give me things for the baby (my daughter is expecting) so I had three reasons to go into town, and caught a bus at around 3pm. I went to the Sheraton Hotel to pick up the bibs and cap then went to Dymocks and bought some more children’s books as well as some art books.

I started reading one on abstract painters when I was in the CBD at Westfield’s food court where you can sit freely for as long as you like, then I tried getting on the train but it didn’t come so resigned myself to resorting to a bus, which I caught on Elizabeth St.

The walk down from Oxford St to Rushcutters bay was a little stressful because I was always wondering as I went along when my heart would start thumping but it stayed calm. I took in the show by myself – you can see the review on the Esag blog – then sauntered back up the hill to Victoria St where I sat down on a bench reading.

The cars were buzzing behind me and one popped and snorted as it changed gears because it was owned by a young man and he thinks that making noise is as fun for everyone else as it is for him. For about 30 minutes I wandered mentally through different worlds, art movements, manifestos, declarations etc and I came away amused at the frailty of human endeavour, we think what we do has a certain meaning and it turns out that other people (in the future, say) don’t care a fig about what we say and only admire the pretty pictures.

Last night I talked with my friend Basia about all these earnest people and their exhortations and “position statements” etc and we laughed (I love the pretty pictures though). We also talked about the abstract works I made in response to reading the book (see below), I started with an unused base watercolour from a previous series and did four more to make five in the ‘Yellow abstract’ set, then did four ‘Orange abstract’ paintings using some of the new paint I picked up on Thursday.

At dinner a friend of a friend commented on my paintings (not from the abstract series) and later I saw an SMS she sent regarding them that noted their preliminary nature, I think she wants me to make acrylic or oil paintings and use these watercolours as studies. I took this person’s words to heart thinking about the future and its mysteries but haven't moved away from my current method yet and possibly never will. I’d shown her some of my return to the ad slogan series (see below) and I hadn’t started on the abstract ones at that point. her husband also said I should use larger paper but after talking with Basia about both of these suggestions I'm deciding to stay put for the moment. I'm enjoying myself.

A distant ship on the horizon (the newscast)

You might remember if you’ve been following the progress of my art practice that I did a series called ‘Shipwreck’, it was back at the middle of last month (it seems like years have passed) and it contained renderings of ships mainly the Pasha Bulker that ran aground off Newcastle in 2008. 

More recently in fact last year there was the Portland Bay operated by a company called Pacific Basin (operating out of Hong Kong) which lost power at sea near Sydney. At the time I took photos of the newscasts the ship was still at sea and every day there were updates fed to viewers via the Nine channel as well as others, I don’t know I can’t remember exactly which station broadcast what it was so long ago and so many things have happened to me in the intervening months.

In fact in July I met Simon Kahn and we started the art group, so it has truly been a momentous year for me. Nevertheless I distinctly recall the ship and have therefore used it to talk about time’s passing in this new work ‘A distant ship on the horizon (the newscast)’ .

The above photo shows the necessary 4 panels laid out in the correct order. The following photos show the individual panels separately.

I’m tentatively happy with the overall effect but am welcome to ideas from other people. ‘A distant ship on the horizon (the newscast)’ of course references a popular song of my youth, in fact the song was on a concept album that all of my friends were listening to that had been put out by Pink Floyd in late 1979 titled ‘The Wall’. 

Looking back it was timely as the Berlin Wall came down a decade later but for us the idea of protest embodied in the songs had a closer relevance. The only thing I can think about now in relation to the songs is how poor the education system was (is?) in addressing our needs. The art group is a way for me to regain time (see first panel) but like looking through the smoke of a burning forest it’s hard to remember the reason why it was important to make art in the first place.

Settling on a 4-panel work like this is a new approach for me, previously these “double overlay” works have been standalones, and the reason for additional curiosity and application is the show planned for June. As I put together things to go in the show I see new opportunities for expression and this leads me to starting works. A major problem for me is insight however, as the more I struggle the harder it is to write coherently about the work, I wish someone else would come and take the job of talking about ‘A distant ship on the horizon (the newscast)’ away from me, relieve me of the burden of making sense, of promoting the work, of being a mouthpiece. The more I think about it the less I want to explain and clarify but by the same token writing has become such an intrinsic part of my life – writing a way to do art WHILE SEATED AT A DESK – that I also see no way to avoid speaking.

While seated at a desk. In a way Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ is a reaction to the study (not to be confused with the studio), or at least I currently choose to see it that way. I choose that explanation for my interest in a ship in distress at sea. What is it about ships that attracts us so strongly? Is it the idea of another shore, or places to go to gain wealth, status, or experiences? Is it the danger that draws us, that challenges our jaded complacency: here, look, this is what adventure is like. When we sit down to watch the news, or, more likely, when we overhear a story on the news as we’re preparing dinner of helping the kids with some routine task, do we empathise with the people whose traumas are laid out for our entertainment? Do we feel comfortable, and forget about the niggling insecurities that lash us? Do we wish we were somewhere else? Do we reconcile ourselves with our domestic dramas?

Whatever it is about the news it’s not going away anytime soon in fact it looks more and more every week like an institution, complete and fixed in space, a point of reference we can all orient ourselves by as we journey through life.

Going back to 'Social animals' series

I’d just done some “double overlay” paintings, in fact four of them (see last post) and decided to go back to November when I made the original “social animals” series. The reason for this move was that I didn’t have any new Japanese “kotowaza” to use but needed a break. The ‘Social animals’ paintings are easy to do and this time I’d be making sets deliberately, originally I made up the sets in the end with extra ‘Party animal’ paintings having made a bunch of the other ones. You’ll see (if it’s not clear what I’m talking about right now).

I had always wanted to make ‘Social animal’ paintings in red and blue, and now added yellow as well for variety. Perhaps in future I’ll just do red and blue alone or maybe red, white and blue. That’s the thing about painting it’s not just WHAT you draw of paint, it’s also the colours you use, or else the overall tone.

I chose brightness this time because red, blue and yellow is a happy combination. For the collage I used some old paramontage rejects photos that were still usable in this way but that I otherwise had no use for. I have a bunch of paramontages upstairs not being used that people can’t even see because the living room is on a different floor, but I haven’t made up my mind to cut them up yet. Maybe some of the less successful ones I’ll cannibalise in this way I haven’t made up my mind yet.

The photo paper these paramontages are printed on is very thick relative to ordinary magazine paper so it takes a while to get the collage to stick but I spend a good deal of effort making sure it does. Following the red-blue-yellow ‘Social animals’ set I’ve also started a maroon/purple set so will post those later on the blog. The reason I chose the maroon/purple colour scheme is that a friend recommended this for a “kotowaza” series and I got some positive feedback on the colours then.

New collage series 2

I started this “double overlay” collage series last week and you can see the post about it on the blog if you go to look in the menu, then I got caught up in “kotowaza” paintings again before coming back to it. I did these four paintings a couple of days ago and while I still have some reservations about this series, especially with regards to framing, I am pretty happy with how things are progressing.

It takes a while to plan a painting like this because you need to work out spacially where the underpainting is going to get cut off by the pasted letters. It’s like writing a sonnet where you need to work out how to make the rhymes match the sense, you start with the hard bit then let the rest of it take care of itself.

I made the Twitter pair first, one morning getting my paints and brush ready along with water, a cutting knife, and a sheet of paper towel. I use the cheap Officeworks paints mainly substituting Japanese watercolours occasionally. I don’t use paint from a tube for these paintings as I need a wide range of paints quickly and it takes too long to open the tube, squeeze a tiny bit out onto a takeaway-container lid, and put back the cap.

I did ‘Alone Denmark’ next then ‘Gobbledygook’ to round out the day’s work. I enjoy every part of the process with the exception of the underpainting in watercolour. The reason I don’t enjoy this part is because it’s permanent and the placement is critical making it a bit nerve-wracking, so for example you can see in ‘Alone Denmark’ I didn’t quite hit the mark and the subject’s eye is missing in the final assembly.

The Posca marks that are put over the top are also a bit nerve-wracking because of the care needed to make them clean and in place so I don’t completely enjoy this part of the process but the selection of colours like the collage part is a lot of fun. I always look forward to seeing what it will look like in the end.

New kotowaza paintings

I wonder if getting “kotowaza” (Japanese sayings) from my family is quite fair, if it’s just a way to get approval in advance for a piece. I’m not sure. All I know is that it makes sense to do paintings in this way, by getting other people involved. Perhaps this was my weakness all those years ago in that the reason I didn’t continue with art practice when I was a young man was because I needed approval.

Perhaps.

Nevertheless that’s who I am. I have another friend who helped with these paintings and her name is Basia, she helped by suggesting the colours. She said I should go outside my comfort zone and do green/blue and maroon/purple and that’s what I did.

'Chalk and cheese' (the moon and a turtle).

'Loost a fly to catch a trout' (a loss leads to a benefit).

'An impossible task' (eye medicine from the second floor).

'Ups and downs' (fall down seven times get up eight).

This wasn't the order in which they were made it was 1, 2, 4, 3 but I started with the green/blue ones and then did the maroon/purple ones. If you have suggestions for the colours for the nexdt lot, let me know in the comments. I will try to get more "kotowaza" sayings from my family soon ...