Trolley’s last words

This is all my fault of course. If I’d got up a little earlier and headed in the right direction. If I’d eaten breakfast. If I had stopped thinking about shit and criticising it, then, I would’ve known what was going to happen to this poor creature and I would’ve made sure I got it to safety…
No, get it right, I don’t support industries that have financial links with petroleum based organisations, if I can help it. Their trolleys can all die. Ha ha ha. Um… unless it is really late and I’m desperate for food and there’s no other shop open.
Actually, I’m not sure what to think about this one. But I’m certainly not going to carry the troll home like it was demanding. Fck that. Let it rot in the gutter. Serve it right for being born to be a slave to a company that supports GM and nanotech food products. So what if it is helpless and chained into service. So what I say. It should find some way to fight if it really wants to be free, (unless it’s into the whole masochist thing).
Oh, maybe that was it. This poor trolley was trying to escape and that’s when it happened… ah. Oh dear well, poor thing. Hmm. Too bad huh. Anyway, I’m not a trolley and I don’t use them, so I don’t have to concern myself with why some vehicle crushed the thing in the gutter. End of story.

http://www.mindfreedom.org/shield/introduction-to-mindfreedom-shield
http://www.kqed.org/w/hope/involuntarytreatment.html#

Minimalism

A friend recently said to me, “Your paintings are too detailed. People can’t be bothered looking at details.”

The want to institutionalise art like it is a mad thing that needs to be tamed, like a garden that is “over grown”, making it like something that is already known. Art is something that can be shown, but to make it taut and tense, to me, just doesn’t make sense. The age of minimalism has had its daze, let our gardens grow wild and let’s get lost in paintings which have – like the (now forbidden) campfire, that – forever gaze.

Well, it’s good to have an aim. Very recent painting, (working title: Visitors from the sea) still wet and probably needs a bit more detailing, I think. And, while I don’t want people to look directly at my exterior for too long, it gives me pleasure to have others scrutinize my artwork. So please get lost:)

Ecological necessities are not votable

I used to watch the whales from my grandmother’s upstairs window. Trying to focus her huge binoculars in my hands to see amongst the red-herrings of sea-weed, if there were any big moving bodies of energy about. We like them being there, even though we don’t watch them daily anymore. To kill them… it’s like flattening an island, sinking a ship full of people, tearing down a mountain, cutting out a rainforest, blowing up my neighbour’s home…
Humans cannot live without anything else to sustain them. Even lead boxes let things in and humans have pores that sieve the air and great big blow holes taking in and expiring. We interact with the earth and its creatures, we even interact with the energy of far distant singularities. Interconnection cannot be denied. I’ve tried thinking about a way a human could sustain itself without anything else and I came up with the idea of humans feeding off humans. It wasn’t a utopia and it still didn’t quite make sense.
So I reckon we’re not actually destroying the earth, we’re destroying our habitat. The earth will live on, it’s bigger than us. Humans will die off. And I like humans. It’s just that some of their systems tend to run backwards, or take way too much time to catch on, making human survival doubtful.
As I voted today (incidentally in a polling booth which is normally an army barracks) I thought, is there satisfaction is killing when it is not for hunger? Or are people doing as they are told because someone else says the only choice they have is this? And why indeed is it that only a couple of parties really get to have a say; when one is prepared to pulp Tasmania’s forests, and the other is stuck in the raciest and dirty industries of the 1950s? And neither would be prepared to protect the big visiting locals who travel the sea.
When people are forced off their land they own, with guns to their head so that companies can mine it… I just find Australia a little strange. But at least there are some organisations out there prepared to body-guard the whales.
http://www.seashepherd.org/
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/

Threads and buttons and leather looks

I’m very minimalist in what I wear. I tend to get paint on everything anyway. Besides, I’m not sure if I want to have garments that make people look at me, because I’m not quite sure what the point of that is.



There was a woman sitting across from me, on the tram. I noticed intricate patterns on her skirt. They were like nothing I’d seen before… but my mind started reminiscing about lace-work my nana made and that long, long dead relative that was a court embroider. The tiny delicate stitches. They were gold against the black and swirling. I was wondering who made it. I forgot it was a skirt... I forgot there was a woman wearing it, until I reached her shoe and looked up.

Her face was like a snarl that had been hit by a shovel as she looked at my plain shabby clothes splattered with paint. Okay, she didn’t get the same treat when she looked at my gear, so I guess it was rude to look upon the beauty and wealth of her material.

I told my friend Buddy about this. He said, “You just don’t want to look at women’s skirts, in general.”
“But it was so pretty.”
“Even more reason to not look apparently.”
“Why do they wear things that are so attractive if they don’t want people to look? She was just a middle-aged woman. I wasn’t eying her off, even if I was into that stuff.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been in trouble for it too.”

I get recycled clothes, this has to do with what I call “ethical economy”. My priority is for pockets. Also, Melbourne’s weather changes in a snap and I’m out for a sunny day and then the rain and wind comes in.
This happened recently, but I was lucky enough to be passing by a shop. And they had a nice red coat for me. Unfortunately this came with unknown problems… I found that my keys disappeared, for there was a hole in the pocket and my keys were jangling around in the lining of the coat.
Then, on the way home I was about to get off the tram when a nice young chap tapped me on the shoulder.
“You’re losing your buttons,” he said handing me one of my little cherry-red things.
“Thanks,” I said. Thinking about how he would feel if someone came up to him and said he’d lost his leather… coat. Yes he might just be as red as my button in some places.
Look, I was cold and hungry, and at the point of wanting to feast on some poor little fish or anything else that I could find. Clearly I was losing my buttons in more than one way.

Scent trail

I was walking through the local gardens and got a whiff of this sharp biting scent. I remember the smell from bushland when I was nine or so, I found a chrysalis and wanted to take it with me, but thought better of it. I have no idea what the creature hiding inside the opaque brown thumb-sized hibernation was; but there were many of these cocoons and they had that strong acidic smell which only seemed to be present during the early evening.
Just small little black flies in the air. The dragonflies had their wild day in our city garden. Probably should do a painting of them. Made such a motorised buzz of noise when they zoomed past or rammed me in the nose. So I was thinking the smell was either cicadas, or wasps.
If I could digitally record and map the particle wave patterns from this scent, load it into Google, then get an instant answer it would stop bugging me… This sort of thinking waffled through my mind as I created Scent trail. It's not really how things look, so much as the picture a scent creates in my mind that drives my hands to explore on the canvas.

Sketchbook characters and developing story

Getting a few of these hundreds of original characters in my sketch book happening into stories. Here’s two of them: Ange and Grumble.

Part one: The drought of Faeryland
Ange wanted to do something. She could see how her land had become parched. Even the oracle tree looked sapped of strength this year. Hardly produced fruit. And the river was barely enough for the fish to swim in.
The faeries were developing ways of making water. It was not real water, but it would do almost the same trick as water.
But Ange wanted to feel the rain on her skin. She wanted to put up a nasturtium umbrella and watch the droplets fall around her. Little lovely crystals splashing around. And it was because of this desire for rains she had not seen for so long, that she started working on a spell. A wishing spell. She would call to a raincloud. Why not? Faeries have made the dead rise again. Surely a raincloud could not be that hard. They probably all just superstitious, Ange thought.
But it was very clear, calling rainclouds was forbidden by faery lore. Ange reasoned that if she called a small cloud secretly, to just rain near one place, enough to create a bit of green, she could then convince the faeries to ban together and call a bigger cloud up and then they could all dance together under the rain. It would be so lovely! She closed her eyes and dreamed. Then she started singing. “Bring in the rain…”
Her body smoothly moved about, as if in a trance. “The rain is coming now. Bring in the rain…”
And then it came, the thing that the faeries had said was impossible. First a little drop on her cheek. She went to touch it, thinking it might just be a falling leaf or a little creature, but no, it was damp and dissolved with her touch. Her heart beat to the rhythm of falling, falling droplets everywhere around her. So beautiful so wonderful. She sung and danced more vigorously and watched little flowers spring up at her feet.
Then after quite a soaking, the rain stopped. But she could still hear the cloud rumbling above her. She looked up and there it was above her head. It seemed to be trying to get away but was stuck there above her, like a halo of grumbling energy.
“If you wish to go, I suppose you can now,” said Ange. “This was just an experiment. Thankyou. Now I know we really can call a raincloud.”
“I’d leave if I could,” the raincloud called Grumble said. “But some little faery cast a spell on me, didn’t she? Can’t get away now back to my family. Can’t even think of making snow! Errhhhhhhr erhr…”
Rain started falling again, lots of it. Bitter cold rain.
Ange shivered. “Go away rain come back another day.”
“That’s too much of a cliché,” Grumble stopped crying. “Clichés don’t work as spells, because their original magic has been worn thin.”
“But I did get you to stop raining on me.”
“I want to go home!”
“I know. I know. I’ll think of a way Mr Raincloud.”
“Grumble. They called me that when I was born. What do they call you? Twitterbug faery?”
“Ange. I’m an seraph faery. Look, I’m sorry Grumble. It’s just that we had a drought and I thought you might be able to help us.”
Grumble started crying again, “I want to go home. I don’t like being so low to the earth. People will think I’m some kind of fog, but I’m not and I don’t want to be.”
Ange picked a leaf from a nearby tree to try and shelter herself, “Don’t worry Grumble I’ll find a way. If I had the powers to call you here, surely I have the powers to set you free.”
“Easier said than done.”
But, time passed and Ange was not able to set Grumble free. She could no longer fly, for her wings were always wet. And all the faeries wanted nothing to do with her, because she had broken the lore.
It seemed like life couldn’t get worse. Ange couldn’t even complain, because Grumble already did that for her, she couldn’t dwell in her misery because Grumble was better at that than her and she certainly couldn’t grumble.

Another kind of wheel