Keirle Park, I Sing the Body Electric

 

It had been raining but the weather held up for the tennis lesson hour.   I walked along the lagoon path to Queenscliff,  and just overhead one of the Lifesavers, saying "Shaaadddduppp" in response to  something said by a weasely disgruntled looking fellow. Back at the park there were more random pieces of rubbish than people on the oval and I noticed this power pole with its lovely intracies of insulation, its complex array of linkages and wires.  28 February 2011

Mr Brassica and a Family Heirloom

 

Mr Farmhand used to work for Mr Bart Brassica but that pitchfork Farmer Bart carried around all the time got on Mr Farmhand's nerves. As you can see here, Mr Bart  B.(aka as One-Eyed Bart but don't call him that to his face) likes to take an eleveated position. Here he has scaled a ceramic sculpture by Jennifer Orchard, that melds elements of the Brassica Family, which Farmer Bart considers a family heirloom. You can see Bart's tomatoes staked up in the garden below.

Rhubarb and the value of repetition

 

Sometimes, somethings,  such as the interviews in the Saturday papers,  literary quotes, flimsy short stories or even the eponymous odd vegetable  that functions as fruit itself, Rhubarb, inclines me to say that usefully economic phrase and model of incantatory repetition: Rhubarb, Rhubarb, Rhubarb.  Or as here to draw it three times. 

Stalwart Mr Farmhand tends to the weekend chores

 Mr Farmhand is a thoroughly modern fellow who pitches in without kowtowing  to any gender stereotypes. Here, despite the obvious tussle with mass and  inertia, he prepares to set off to the supermarket. Perhaps he's going in to check on his organic polenta crop?

In Praise of Dioramas -The American Museum of Natural History

 Ray Bradbury's short story The Veldt might well have taken it's cue from the African mammal dioramas in the American Museum of National History.  It's nearly hard to believe this Exhibition hall, named after Carl Ackeley, opened in 1936.  There is a feeling one might step into the scene, and the suspended moment that these antelope are caught in might  break, and see them bound off the grassland, leaving you stranded with the rough grass scratching your legs, and a scent of trouble in the air.  

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The perils of bike parking

Is there a society for the prevention of cruelty to bikes? Surely leaving this fellow, snowed in and iced up is a little negligent. What would Flann O'Brien think?

Winter light and Monochrome In Prussian Blue

The Prussians must have known a thing or two about snow, though it seems a tenuous speculation to link this to the colour Prussian Blue.  At first I was convinced  that the single colour I needed for wintery monochrome postcard sketches was sepia, but after looking at how blue the tree shadows falling on snow are ( eg below) perhaps the Prussian was right.

Mr Farmhad prunes the Bamboo Grove

Here Mr Farmhand shows really how adaptable he is, helping trim the high branches in the bamboo grove, while composing a haiku:

Not a breath of wind

stirs the high leaves

of the plastic bamboo

Tin Top Hat, Tin Specs, Tin Bonnet, Tin Candelabra & The Virtue of the Small Museum

While the Tin Candelabra only makes its shadow known in this photograph of Tin [tenth] wedding anniversay amusements this may have appealed to  the witty surrealism of the Victorian smiths who made these momentoes.  This display is in the American Museum of Folk Art , 53rd  Street West, a  smallish museum. A smallish museum is, in my view,  is a virtue in itself. 

The scale of a Museum really is the deciding factor of its relationship with the visitor. Twice I stayed for a week in an apartment block in Rue de Benjamin Franklin in the 16th arrondisement in Paris which housed the George Clemenceau Museum. Though ruefully, it being so close at hand, I never managed to actually visit, I knew it was exactly the same scale as the apartment I stayed in. One can inhabit a museum this size, very quickly you are in loco parentis, assuming the role of caretaker and collector. When the museum expands to a certain point, say that of Museum of Butter in Cork ( which I've written about in Meanjin, Vol 69, Dec 2010) or Lisbon’s wonderful Museo de Musica, one shifts into something a flanûer. You are not sure what direction you should go in but it cannot matter; you will not get lost or bored. At the end of this scale is the Louvre, magnificent but disorientating, even alienating, with its endless kilometres of hallways and levels, some underground like the Tombs of Atuan, some involving Escher like sets of rising stairs, and endless amounts of art which seem to look down on the visitor who is such a philistine as not to give them the proper consideration due to them. It may turn out that all you can recall later is the crowd around the Mona Lisa and the putti on ceilings. You are estranged, lost and must keep referring to floor plans if you are to regain the world outside. To me this is like being lost in the Mirror Maze at Luna Park, everything starts looking the same, only progressively more distorted. There is a puffy anxious feeling on regaining the light of day and a feeling of drained blankness like a portion of your brain has been siphoned off into art storage. Much better, for me, is the feeling of inspiration and empowerment from visiting the smaller scale of a Musuem, such as the Museum of Folk Art or the Museum of Butter, which set me off on an epic poem, lengthy discussions and an essay on Museums in general and Museums of Food in particular.

Mr Farmhand stops for coffee and a sfogliatelle

Even Mr Farmhand is susceptible to the sfogliatelle at Rose's Coffee Shop in Flemington, New Jersey.

If the Palm Fits Sennelier's Sepia Naturale

This sculpturally ecstatic wriggling pice of botanical zest is part of the fruiting body  from the Phoenix palm - Phoenix canariensis in my garden. Each one of the darker dots was the attachment point for the seeds.  Without thinking, after I had drawn this in pencil,  I had bought Sennelier's Sepia which turned out to match the stalk colour like a glove.

When the Stars are made of gelatine

 

This collage is from the Babies Series,  a set of scanned collages. Here the babies sport gumnut hats but still have their heads in the stars.  The quilted starry night effect is from leaves of titanium strength  gelatine. Why I thought to use leaf gelatine has me puzzled though the choice of the other props:  1/50 scale workers from a railway set, some dried fern, the dolls and gumnuts is obvious : these are on my desk.

Frank Confession of Colour Additives

While most things that come in a box with the idea that children might eat whatever it is for breakfast are called 'cereals' because some percentage of the content is wheat, rice or oats, here the boxed substance has cut right to the chase and declared itslelf an aggregation of food colouring.

Mr Farmhand at work in the Instant Polenta Fields

 A thoroughly modern crop farmer, Mr Farmhand hoes into the mushroom and onion instant polenta. Organic too.  The neighbouring packets of  Earthbound will, no doubt, also need to be dug in by our undaunted worker.

Keirle Park, February 2011 - First Visit for 2011

This Monday the temperature dropped to a very civil 21 C after a slathery 33C on Sunday.  While all previous drawings had been done through the lens of my car, window,  windscreen or sunroof,  I decided to get out of the car . The skate park was hectic but there were only two bikers on the half-pipe, which is impastoed with colour from a thousand graffitti hits.  The watercolours  are too washy to do it justice - must try this again with more layers.

The Secret Mini Series of Frost

I woke one morning in New Jersey to find the windows tripled glazed, twice by glass, once by frost. One was completely frosted, deceiving me that snow had fallen overnight, re-blanketing the roof adjacent white.  But no it was this fractal fellowship of frost and window pane with the outside temperature dwindling down to below zero, and some leaking leniency of the outer window's frame. Like a coast line set to madden a cartographer, the frost's edges share the practice of dividing with galaxies, so one might be looking at a miniature of starlight.

Snow, Birds of a Feather and St. Frances

Does the rooster have his own gallantries, as here, where he seems to escort the chickens for a walk in the snow? The figure a little way off, under the bird feeder ( which you can't see), is a small stone statue of  Saint Frances.  That the chickens are so blythe about the snow is a testament to feathers.

Snow, Lichen, Fossil Pear

This pair of found things,  bark patterned with lichen and a wizened leathery pear, had both fallen onto the New Jersey snow. The indent (a word so useful in editing) where the pear had landed, perhaps blown down overnight, can be seen here in the upper right.  A pear preserved in this shriven state was a perfect wintry treasure.

Vase-o Dilation

As a dilatory practice there is perhaps nothing quite so satisfyingly useless as painting a vase of flowers, the facsimile is never as attractive as the original but still anything in a vase sets up a puzzle that there is pleasure in working through. Here the question is overlaps, and one thing about drawing , as you can see here, where two stems, two leaves and a petal overlap in the sketch but the first in line gets the paint, is you can write in the back story, though this is the messy kind of mistake which no-one sensible would aspire to.  You might not be surprised to hear there is a series of flowers - though I started off spelling that flawers - in vases.  Would the collection noun for that be an in-vasion ?

Macau-Elsewhere Project - front and back

This is one of the postcards in the Macau-Elsewhere Project -  Kit Kelen and I did this one. There is a lovely contrast between the back and front, with the bottle of jasmine forming a hinge. There is a series of these collaborative art cards which you can check out at te Macau-Elsewhere blog

Mr Farmhand

I was lucky enough to be introduced to a genuine New Jersey local,  Mr Farmhand, who despite his dimunitve size is game for any job. Here we see him shovelling his way through road snow in a Flemington shopping centre car park outside of Shoprite.  It seemed to me that given the metal and particulate content of this snow it might really be mining work that Mr Farmhand is busy with. You might wonder what is that mysterious blue rock?  So did I.

More Monkey Bar business iin New York

 

This is another aspect of the Monkey Bar, where, without a doubt I was the only person sketching anything. There is a famous  mural on the opposite wall and a sign that says, "No photographs".  There is seldom a sign that says :"No Drawing" - other than at Nijo Castle in Kyoto,  famous for its nightingale floor  - there is another sketch in thus New York and New Jersey series from the mural.  Does this make too much monkey business?   

Monkey Bar, New York

I have been travelling this last week  and this was done with the Express Draw Sketchbook app on my Iphone. While I've been sketching on this holiday I dont have a scanner to upload so the Sketchbook express function can be good. This was done under the influence of Jet Lag - one of the characters which seemed both strangely familiar and unidentifiable on the mural of blues and jazz greats that takes up the back wall of the Monkey Bar restaurant. This program uses that clumsy unit the index finger. though in the scheme of things, fresh off the plane with a time shift and no sleep for 30 hours, it was the brain that was the clumsiest unit.

The Slushy Arts - aka Valentine's Day

Normally ( as if any of this can be normal) I would make collage of something oddly subversive for Valentine's Day. But as I was in New Jersey, USA with all this snow, I dug out this snow heart. Of course that word 'volenti' is not just a close approximation of 'valentine' but a warning that any hanky panky romance you get into is entirely at your own peril.

Three Cheers for the White Rabbit (Gallery that is)

Last weekend I visited the White Rabbit in Balfour Street, Chippendale, a private collection of contemporary Chinese art, installed (sounds like a washing machine but I think this might be the right lingo) in a pleasingly vertical and horizontal space in a converted knitting factory,  that is very kindly made open to the public by the largesse of Kerr and Judith Neilson.  ( long sentence hey!)  Verry Interesting , I will be going back.  I did this card a while ago as a prop for a collage with White Rabbit lollies and my visit reminded me that the rabbit in this case looks a little sinister.

PS Yesterday I was a little presumptuous and introduced myself to a person, Liz,  who was sketching fantastic things  in a cafe in Crows Nest, she has a great blog full of wonderful urban sketches which is very much worth a visit.

Mr Midas's Dream of Peanuts

For some time I've been making collages with lollies, which, as you see here, are both patently kitsch and graphic. This Mr Midas fellow is made from Chinese golden peanut chocolates. Don't get too excited about the chocolate itself, I've tasted two, the first to see what they were like and the second in the forlorn hope that they couldn't be that bad. I like the way this peanut brain man, and the Goldilocks girl as well, have a cartoon economy to them, and that even something as odd as a golden foil wrapped sweet can, when assembled, read as human.

Keirle Park, December, 2010, Bike with Basket & the First Monday of Summer

 

For a few weeks I had been watching the ostensibly mixed touch football game. While there are women and men playing, the men have the ball about 80% of the time so in some ways it's like the under sevens, where those who have the ball see it as theirs. Still, people arrive on bikes, like this sweet one with the basket and leather seat, run about waving their  arms and the grass is a dozen shades of green, so the whole thing hums summer. 6 December 2010

Keirle Park. November 2010- The is not a Half-Pipe or more correctly "cesi n'est pas une demi-pipe"

It occured to there something Magritte-ian about this temporarily vacant half-pipe at the skate park end of Keirle Park.  Is it only a half-pipe when it is working as such?  While I've never seen the main skate bowl (surely my lingo is wrong but you know what I mean)  empty in daylight hours, sometimes the half-pipe (only half-seen here so maybe that makesa quarter pipe) is idling.  The surface is an interesitng colour but the perspective is out of kilter, obviously I need more practice. 25 November 2010