Archive for the ‘Stranger in a Familiar Land’ Category

it’s late. i should be asleep, but i have a persistent cough and a sniffle and am unlikely to be going to work tomorrow, so i think i can stay up, except i slept for three hours last night, having spent the previous three nights staying up until dawn, firstly to party and secondly and thirdly to watch breaking bad and deadwood, the latter only when i got out of bed realising i couldn’t sleep because i had spent several hours in a spin cycle wondering what to do with myself in the very near future when my sabbatical is over. and now i’m in the other room because my persistent cough would keep kate awake, but the computer is in the other room, which is why i’m up late. chile has just beaten switzerland. it’s been a busy few months but i have had two blissful weeks of catching up with friends while the thespians run through the show each night in brunswick. i have half finished paintings i’ll have to slap the dust off waiting for me at the studio. i wonder if anyone has moved into the space next to me yet. i hope they smoke.

I’ve had this painting commission for a couple of years that I’ve been working at like chewing on an old rubber band. It’s a landscape; a field of canola (otherwise known as the less PC rapeseed) bristling in the afternoon as dark storm clouds march over them. In the sky, a Supermarine Spitfire flies over the heads of a man and his son. It’s a wartime picture and it’s been doing my head in for a good long while now. I’ve ripped the canvas off the frame once already, having worked myself into a corner by slapping too much paint onto the sky that didn’t shift when the clouds needed to, so stumbling in the brushwork of the delicate clouds were cloddish outlines that couldn’t be removed. I don’t tend to paint landscapes, most of my work involves interiors, so the spacial considerations are much smaller and although I enjoy painting the endless fall of light across a floor or wall, picking out objects along the way, I didn’t find it so easy faithfully painting the acreages of daylight required for a landscape.

The sky has always been the problem. I can paint the canola with less difficulty; that’s just a day or two of continuous, frenetic labour, working the field from the distance to the foreground, bringing things into sharp focus as they increase in size. It’s not something I could do in stages, once I start, I’ll have to see it through, otherwise I fall out of the temporal world I need to stand in to move the brush around and I need to be right on top of it, especially if there’s a wind blowing over the field. I learned this the hard way, when I attempted to paint the sky in the past, having worked on it in fits and starts that increasingly lead to a congestion of texture that disrupted the colour. I also didn’t want to attempt the field until the sky had at least been outlined, not only because it’s a messy affair, but also because I knew that due to my failure to paint it in the past, that unless I could get a fix on the sky first of all, it would make painting the rest of the picture excruciating.

It’s not a small painting, either. It measures 1.5×2 metres. Even if I turn it to face the wall, it still makes a big hole in my studio. Over the last two years, other paintings have come and gone, some made with such remarkable ease and satisfaction, that they made a mockery of the difficulty I’d been having with this picture. I would always see it there, in the corner of my eye, as I worked on the other pictures and each glance was accompanied by the stabbing pain in the guts, that feeling similar to being in the same room as an ex who you haven’t quite gotten over and are too distraught to speak to.

However, after months of nagging my subconscious, something clicked last Friday and I was able to punch through the procrastination. Shortly after I’d woken up, I had the feeling that I would be able to paint. It’s a rare and wonderful thing, when you have this feeling that you can work. I worked on the sky solidly for eight hours, allowing it to appear rather than forcing it for effects. Finally, after months of staring blankly at a tangled wall, waiting for an opening, I can now see an outline of steps that will lead me to the end.

spring came today; it was glorious.

need a new job. part time. hanging over me like a shadow.

did a series of chin-ups at work while waiting for the coffee to percolate.

painting is a slow process at the moment. i go to the studio and end up listening to the footy or the cricket on AM radio. robert walls needs to stop clearing this throat before he says anything.

started on the bastardy book with amiel. enjoying spending time with him brainstorming.

saw jack charles’s brother archie in richmond, incidentally. he asked me to buy him a coke so i did, although i’d seen him on the way to the bakery for my pork roll and had bought him an apricot danish, figuring i’d bump into him on the way back, but he didn’t want to have a bar of it, so i ate it myself walking up to parliament station. i think i freaked him out because i knew his name. name-dropped jack so he’d know we were on the level.

little fragments of short stories coming in starts and fits. farts and shits.

one friend has gone to paris, one to italy, another to rehab. kelly, the one who’s gone to paris, is moving to england with the express purpose of living on the moors. amongst the moss and bramble, i’d imagine. what the fuck *are* moors anyway?

bought a bag of longan, a block of deep-fried pork and two french rolls from little saigon that i had for dinner.

halfway through knut hamsun’s mysteries. if it wasn’t for public transport i’d never have the time to read. enjoying it immensely, so much so i put down junot diaz’s the brief and wonderful life of oscar wao whilst a third of the way through that book, although from what i read, i didn’t think it was much chop.