Pole Star - Knitter's Witty Art

How exciting a knitta pole piece on my own suburban street.  Of all street art forms, the knitted additions to poles and street furniture are perhaps the most endearing, taking the homely craft of knitting and subverting it into that oft threatening thing, Art-that-no-one-asked-for,  art-without-a-frame, the sinister, the oh-my-god- the-neighbourhood-is-getting-taken-over-by-hoods, and that-is-not-art Art This pole, an ugly leftover from some past council edict has, seemingly, spontaneously blossomed into what one might regard as a character, a purler with a crew neck and purple heart.

To Gild the Crumpet

 A rainy Sunday morning with the weather making a great racket on the roof and trees? Might as well stay in and gild a crumpet. This honey glazed one here did not last out the drawing.  In a mix media moment, I took up the offer of some acrylic gold to add the swirling detail to the bread and butter plate, and gave a Midas touch to the yeastie breakfast cake, or is crumpet correctly classifed as a bread?

Nested Nests & The Resting Interloper

These aggregate or nested nests, blow-ins from the bird world, went through an empty nest phase, prompting the question is a nest a nest if there is nothing in it? Is a house a house if it does not  house?
The bob-tailed snub-beaked white-breasted whistler, who wheezes something like an A, might be an interloper or a steadfast tenant, whose gravitas keeps the nests well -balanced.

Handy Hank & The Old School Skiis

While some men favour the old school tie, Hank Brassica, Bart's second cousin, has a penchant for what he calls his Old School Skiis. While it does snow quite some, and then a bit more, in Winters in Flemington and Lambertville, as there are no slopes to speak, no resorts or, well, really anything but fields and snow, most all of the Farmhand folks think Hank must have a permanent case of brain freeze. Still,  he does a reasonable job of fixing fences and repairing electric jugs, though most folks sensibly want let him into the house with that lumber glued to his shoes.

Farmer Brassica's Ethel Merman Moment

It will be a surprise to some folks but Farmer Bart's musical tastes run to musicals, albeit those with an agricultural or country flavour.  One of his favourite songs is 'Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries'. This large bowl of cherries is Bart's Spring Tribute to Ethel Merman, though he admits the grapes make it somewhat of a pastiche. Mavis  says she could swear she heard Bart whistling 'I heard it through the grapevine'  but Granny Eggwhistle declares Mavis must have tinnitus as the only thing that whistles at the Brassica Farm is the kettle. 

Green-grey leaves, white-green gumnuts - the compact architecture of vases

Mostly when I sketch a vase of something, at least a little of the vase gets in, but here the white glass wide-lipped vase is nowhere to be seen. One vase and its complex contents may demand a number of takes.

Black Board Singing in the Early Night

At our regular weekday or Sunday night dining spot, Billy Swings on Spit Road, Mosman, the blackboard is centre stage. Are blackboard menus more convivial than paper menus? Each has it's own particular pleasures and pitfalls but the idea that the whole list of foods can be dusted off may make it just that more appealing  with the get-it-while-you-can  sense of dailiness that a chalk board gives. That said I do hope they don't rub off the grilled scallops,with bouidin, pear puree and salty caramelized walnuts anytime soon, or  the silver dory, which feels nearly virtuous resting lightly on its jumble of fresh cauli florets, curls of tender squid and parsley, the lot infused with warm saffron flavours. The new thing which is not on the menu is a tiny cup of intense capsicum soup as a complimentary amuse-bouche. We are amused.

Water Under the Bridge - Keirle Park 's out and back walk.

With tennis lesson suspended this winter school term as Master T. has been skiing at Winter School, I've missed my weekly visits and subsequent postings from Keirle Park.  A reminder came in September, in the June 2011 issue of Antipodes, a USA  journal that features Australian literature, which published my poem 'Water Under the Bridge' - an observation of Manly Lagoon.

Water Under the Bridge

November, late afternoon, the lagoon

double-dinks its load of light and water

under Queenscliff Bridge, condensing

its tessellations where the current squeezes

round the pylons; it’s traveling under, out,

digging greener beds and purling

round a brown and upright stick, over

the filamental green superannuated shells.

Then radiating around the canter-

lopping, high-stepping setter that circles

in his feathered wet and prancing joy,

it slides east, past the shadow

of the bridge, nips out the inlet’s

quicker deeper breach into the surf,

laps the feet of the man who zips

himself into a Short Tom, kicks out

as salt spray across the face of waves,

it paves a gully ramp for the kite-boarder

who half sails, half flies; runs sweet

on its dispersing ways.

The Leaf Measure Axiom

 

To Observe Late Afternoon Snow

Take a pair of ski boots, skis and stocks that have been marinating, overday, two feet and two shins until they're tender. Remove skis and stocks, carefully set them aside for another use. Awkwardly measure out your ski-boot steps from the locker to the Village Bus Stop, Route 2.  Arrange that the mini-bus is late, so you have enough time to be properly waiting. Notice, a line of trees behind you, and  that each leaf of snow gum holds as much snow as physics will allow.  Pause to reflect upon the stacking ability of snow's fine crystalline matrixes, how each leaf holds its own measure. For some minutes you will be oblivious of macerated feet and lumpen shins, wind-chaffed skin, wet gloves, tiredness and waiting. You might also observe the axiom that each thing has its own measure of snow.

Three Views Towards Kosciusko

I've been away  listening to mountains, the silent fall of snow.Though it's early Spring, something like a winter front waltzed across Thredbo.  The myth that Eskimo-Aluet languages  have thirteen words for snow might be plausibly overtaken by one about an Australian Alpine dialect with fourteen words for slush. One might also coin a word, let's say snowslept, to describe a child so tired from skiing they fall asleep on the chairlift's descent, body softening so they might slip, snow coated parka and Milo bib, between the seat and bar.  Then the word for watching, brushing off the snow, an arm around them as a safety net, saying, quietly; wake up, this is not a good place to fall asleep.

Farmer Bart : Arch Fruit Arborist

While Farmer Bart Brassica's acreage is far from tropical,  leastwise not this decade, for some time he has aspired to a tropical paradise, with pineapples, bananas and papaya - papaya is something Bart declares must be the original cash crop on account of its name. By corollary Bart is adamant that growing pawpaw would be tantamount to a fiscal hex and says he would not consider planting it even if they shifted the equator line so it ran right through his farm. 

To give his place a tropical feel Bart has constructed the Fruit Arch from oversize fruit rock that was sent to him from an admirer in Brisbane. Mavis is not quite happy about this sweet art.

Two takes on The Boatman - Cave's Trip to The Lime Tree Arbour

The only connection between Nick Cave's title song from The Boatman and this reconvening take on Robert Capa's photograph of a Chinese boatman might be the word 'Boatman'.  Capa's photograph only had one tillerman but as I spent too much space on the tiller, leaving the man himself was half out of the frame, I put other some parts of him over to his left.  Not, it seems, a good idea. That aside paper and the cobalt water colour have their moments. One could nearly imagine the river water.

Conversion Factors - Shallots Whole/Shallots Sliced

The waiter at Tanpopo,  noticing this sketch of the chef, said "He is a lot scarier than that!"
What is scary for a chef? Eyes like sharp knifes, a temper that leaks like a sieve?  How scary can one get in an open plan kitchen? Setting off on this sketch, I thought I might get in the lovely purple colander ( off stage left) and the bunch of whole shallots on the counter top, the latter  vanished to reappear sliced into rounds -though mysteriously still wearing their white beards.Was this pre-prep prep? I had chai-sui ramen, which was excellent, rich stock and thick slices of well done pork belly. Sadly I over-ordered and  I could not finish my three gyoza with their nicely chilli oily dipping sauce.

Tan Popo is opposite The Oaks '[which I notices is an anagram of Ask Theo] on  Military Road, Neutral Bay, Neutral Bay.

The Use of Chrysanthemums for Button Holes in Radical Oration

Ok, so the title here is a chintzy rehash of 'The Use of Marigolds By the Man in The Moon', but perhaps the fellow, described in the Complete Photographs of Robert Capa  - from which this drawing take as its source  - as a Japanese radical leftist may agree with me.  What is starting to puzzle me more and more is the relationship between photographs, memory and drawings. If this sketch prompts me to recall,with clarity, the photo was which is was taken, why do photographs of dead friends subsume the real life images we have of them?