27 April 2011

I am writing on a balcony of a holiday house on the outskirts of Denmark, WA. It is heavily forested and the sun is just coming up (officially it came up 4 mins ago, at 6:15). I have been out here working on a book project for some time and my feet are cold but I do not sense mosquitoes, which makes a difference from last night. We are about 4 km from Denmark (Mia’s sister referred to this as the ‘city centre’ then corrected herself but everyone then seemed to pick up the habit) and on the gulf, rather than the river. There is a ton of wildlife and domesticated life out there – birds and dogs mainly. Also some cars periodically speeding around and I can hear the little boys are up and about inside the house too. I am sure I didn’t put it in these words but everyone assures me that I did, last night, promise Rohan that in the morning I would go for a run and he could accompany me on his bike. Why I would say ‘run’ I don’t know but I assume he won’t cavil if I don’t run. We will probably try and find our way to the water, which is easily seen through the trees and obviously quite close, but not apparently easily accessible (there is what looks like a track directly opposite the house but it has Private Property signs all over it). It rained quite heavily last night but I don’t believe that is what has been predicted for today. Denmark itself seems like a pretty enough town. As usual (I think this is my third visit) the south-west of WA reminds me more of exurban Tasmania than anything else, even though I daresay it’s its own place too, and it certainly has its own distinct look in terms of flora. Denmark is your standard country-town-gone-to-the-trendies, which is fine by me and probably by everyone who sold out to the trendies ten or fifteen years ago; there’s an organic co-op, for instance, and a bookshop I’m interested in exploring today if possible though it may just be overpriced copies of things you can get in any Perth bookstore… we’ll see. Eleven hours later: the bookshop was actually pretty decent (I think it was called Odyssey) but cash only, so any serious visit will have to be put off until tomorrow, payday. We did go to the two Denmark op shops and the amazing craft shop. What was most amazing is that Denmark does not appear to have a mail box or at least as far as I could tell the only mail box at the post office was one which catered for mail sent to Denmark and Walpole only! I can’t figure that one out. I am on the verandah yet again and there are people celebrating down the hill. I am totally outraged as I just discovered via my iPhone and facebook that Buckingham Palace have axed the Chaser’s royal wedding commentary, not that I would have been particularly up for watching it, but this is a grotesque and appalling piece of censorship. I am so averse to the royal wedding (if you can call it that – some people in the royal family are getting married apparently) I really, really want it all to be over and finished, it’s such a crock of shit, and a cynical crock of shit at that. You just have to forget that rubbish and concentrate instead on the pleasurable sounds of pink and greys cracking seeds on the verandah. Deep breaths.

happy sixth birthday lorraine

Actually, this blog started a few months earlier than six years ago, closer to May 2006, I think, but I seem to have misplaced those earlier entries so this is as good a time as any to be the birthday. The laughs and cries we've had over that time! All the friends found and lost along the way. I'd particularly like to thank Danny, Marshall Stacks and Ann O'Dyne my three regular readers, though of course my particular partickler thanks go to Mia who has put up with all of this for so long. Also thank you to everyone who follows the 'birdshit-encrusted pub steps' label through blog posts, I don't know what it means either.

I imagine it is tremendously dull to read the meanderings of a 46 year old academic who finds himself so terribly fascinating for no obvious reason. I try to be funny but often of course this being the internet that is in itself no guarantee of nuthin'. Well, here's to another six - nay, sixty - years of this guff (how much longer will this blog go for? They have to stop sometime, apparently. I'm always amazed by people who do a few posts and then quit. I'm reminded of Sue Grigg, when she and I were about 20, marvelling at a couple about ten years older than us who had been together about ten years, who had broken up. 'I mean,' she said, 'why bother?')

barry update

Barry is of course a great addition to the family and while no-one can replace Millie he takes human-dog relationships round here to a new paradigm. Even Charlie is kind of into him now I think, in a sort of Charliesque way (she growls at him 4 or 5 times a day in quite a sinister, ugly way but since she could quite easily snap his head off with her jaws and hasn't, you assume she's taken on a pedagogical role more than anything). He bites a lot but that's OK, as long as he grows out of it, which Mia keeps saying he will.

a perth memory

Mia painting her parents' house, watched by Taffy and Rohan. I had never seen the house from this angle before and while it's not tiny, this picture gives a deceptive impression of its size: it's on 3 levels, but it hugs a rocky hillside, so it's probably about 1/3 the mass you'd imagine if you just extrapolated what a 'normal' house would  be like, from seeing this aspect of it. If I remember correctly Rohan is actually waving to Mia but he has this huge head that got between the camera and his hand. That's kids for you.

art fair

Mia has some paintings in the art fair, we went last night. Usual extraordinary mixture of the very fine and the quite appalling. You can see the little space where her paintings are through here (behind the column).

And the Exhibition Building never fails to impress anytime.

people who use their hands rool

Those of you who know Mia’s work know that she has in the last couple of years (more probably) taken to sewing parts of the canvas with relevantly-coloured cotton to fit with the otherwise representative image giving a textural feel to her oil painted views.

Because I generally assume there is little Mia can’t do particularly when she puts her mind to it I have fairly much taken this with my usual unimpressed impressedness because, while I know I couldn’t do anything like it myself, I know she has this amazing ability to negotiate an image and turn out something that looks, firstly, like the thing it is meant to look like, and secondly, uniquely hers. But, in the heat of a hot day, I was watching her listlessly from the side of the room as she sewed a new canvas with nothing but a few vague blue pencil lines and a reference photograph and I was struck by how incredible a talent it is to be able to manipulate a dumb machine on a square of canvas half-intuitively, half with concentration, and always aware if you mess it up you’ve ruined it. I was reminded by Marion Mahony Griffin’s silk paintings of the hypothetical Canberra where once again if she messed up once, she would have to scrap the whole shebang. Surely this puts more and more pressure on the artist as the picture builds in complexity. I don’t know if I could hack that complexity.

And, like all artists in this long and increasingly complicated age of reproduction, people like Mia and Marion know/knew they were up against those who could rub it out and start again in a second, that the visceral affect of the final product competes with someone using photoshop or whatever the 1912 equivalent of photoshop was (there was one in this sense, I’m sure) and it’s only those who care to examine the end product in detail – and most don’t – who can see what a built-up layered piece of art it is, impressive on that point only, and it looks beautiful as well, not coincidentally.

William Morris had his funny big schtick about taking pride in work and nurturing an innate but hidden artisinal sense in every human. I have yet to develop that sense in myself as yet, though I do draw a little now and then, rarely representatively. I have thought though about making our house decoration-unique, since it’s pretty unlikely we’ll ever sell it, certainly it seems that way now. Like the best artists Mia has the artisan-artist sense. Many members of my family have the artisinal part, my father, my brother though not so much now, my sister has been amplifying hers with her interest in sewing and textiley things. I am sure it’s the way of the future.

Meanwhile I bash away on various computers writing rewriting it’s never perfect and it doesn’t really have to be because it’s tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper or, in the case of the internet, tomorrow’s waste of electricity and that’s all. However I do not kill people or animals (not directly, indirectly I am as bad as anyone) so that’s what I give to the future.

mia

She feels as much at home on the building site as when she's jamming with her band The Cool Change or playing guitar near a dog - she's Mia!

mia's dream

A few days ago - I think when she was finishing her magnum opus or maybe the 'making of' film (I'm not joking), Mia went to bed at the time I was getting up, like 6am-ish. About an hour later I was going to work so I came in to say goodbye, and this transpired:

M: It's all flat and rocky.
D (more and more like an old man who wants to describe everything around him so people know he's sentient): I think you must be dreaming.
M: No, it's happening now.
D: Do you mind if I blog that?
M: [mumbles]

Later on she agreed she didn't mind.