Double Page Race or Balmoral Baths by Night

Yesterday was my birthday, and being a pesky restaurant closed Monday night, local options were reduced. So, twilight found us walking into Public Dining, with its charming view over Balmoral Baths. Firstly, I told myself not to make a double page sketch, they shrink too much on posting.But then beefore I know it the line of sand had make it over the page, like milk on the boil.  While I was distracted by the very good entree of grilled scallops, with crispy bacon and pureed cauliflower, night was coming on dark and fast, leaching out colour so this sketch became more race than drawing.  I had Spanish seafood stew - called something like soubriquet of Catalonia - which was good but I had some reservations about the potato in it. On consideration it seemed the stock was made with shell fish - lobster perhaps? - that were not in the soubriquet ( yes, I know, wrong but right word) . The single chocolate truffle for dessert, garnished with happy birthday was charming.

Barn Story - Owls well that ends well?

For a while Bart Brassica has considered various ways to wisdom,  and being a practical farmer, it has to combine with his agricultural pursuits. With this in mind Bart has invested in what was described in the classified column of Poultry World magazine as a genuine Milk Chocolate Barn Owl. Bart was thinking that Milk Chocolate would be decent kind of colour, and if the bird turned out to be manageable, he would buy a second and commence a sideline in farmed Barn Owls.  Mavis, who had optimistically came to visit Brassica Farm  after hearing from the postman that a large parcel  from The House of Chocolate had arrived,  has clucked at Bart, and left directly, saying he needs to get his eye checked. Come the next hot day, Bart's view of the Owl may wise up, unless the mice get in first.

A Crease in Tides? View from Bathers Cafe

Sitting at one of their crackled oval tables, looking through the louvres over Balmoral out to Clontarf, as the day fades at Bathers Cafe is like coming back to a favourite dream. While the view remains the same, the food though, was not.  The pizza seemed less generous than the last time, though the diameter was, I think, the same.  Two and half sardines on a sardine pizza seems a little on the mean side. Hot fresh pizza should be a joyful celebration of hot, full flavoured, a little on the oozy side and baked crispy  dough, that puts up the right amount of resistance. Instead there was thin topping on a thin pizza, with floury finish to it. Still there is the view.

Biological Maps - The Internal Navsat of Birds

This clever wheat paste shimmers with innuendos.  That this is a paper crane, is enough to evoke  Kawabata's novel Thousand Cranes. After rereading this in Tokyo last December I am still intrigued, the characters are cracking like old Satsuma ware in a dishwasher, their morality fragile, their will to escape fate etoiliated by melancholy that is as oprressive as it is appealing.  It seems like in the case of the young victim of the Hiroshima's atomic bomb, in the later book ,A Thousand Paper Cranes, fate is a kind of genotoxicity.
But that is too bleak, the upside here is a bird's capacity to navigate both by their own 'genetic map' and to read the landscape they fly over. Pigeons often fly along roads, turning where the road goes. Bravo I say, to them and their celebration in wheat paste.

Heart Transplant or The Siege of Saint Valentine ?

Is Bart Brassica experimenting with a new kind of heart transplant or is he a hostage to Vaelntine's Day?  Late his afternoon, Granny Egg took this photo of Farmer Brassica with her papperazzi special zoom lens.  Granny Egg's theory is that this is a Bomb and Bart has been taken hostage, and she has been on the phone to Mavis Eggwhistle. Mavis, it being Valentine's Day and all,  is knee-deep in floral traffic -though she did go out for lunch. Is this Bart's way of flirting to bind himself to what appears to be an oversized chocolate heart? The clue may be in the fine print.

Frank O'Hara and the Heroic Chin

The first thing I think of when I see Frank O'Hara is his poem 'The Day Lady Died' which walks the reader through a hamburger and a malted, a  nickel shoe-shine (the nickel is my detail), toying with the idea of buying Les Negres by Genet, Gauloise (the French thing was obviously big) and finding Billie Holiday's face on the New York Post - announcing her death. O'Hara doesn't quite take the news on the chin.  Perhaps more on the forehead.

An Amusing Swim or a Fall in Hospitality?

 An after dinner at the estimable Tanpopo in Neutral Bay, it is something of a tradition to visit  to Woolies, looking for anything ridiculous.  Success was to hand, this gem  found me wondering if we could find seven different kinds of ambiguity in their signage for Dips: an amusing swim, a fall in hospitality, telling racy tales to hummous? babaganoush telling racy tales to shoppers ,  we should have some fun and use the fridge ledge for triceps dips,  excavations are to be had here or even bizarrely, a food to be served to guests.The last, given the plastic tubs set out below this sign, is perhaps, the most sinister.

Rimbaud & The Bad Hair Days

This is another blue derivative taken from a photo of Rimbaud at 17, where he has already hit his poetic straps, twenty years before his death, and three before he abandons his vocation as a poet. Though he looks glum, even melancholic, I suspect that his work 'to systematically derange the senses' might have been more fun than doing an MA in creative writing.

Erasing Power on the 180 Bus

Whatever you're drawing on a bus, mostly  it's in the past faster than you can find your pencil case. Express Draw is both fast and forgiving, the undo Button, being the Unsung Hero. So, from QVB to Spit Junction on the 180: . The Number One Express Draw Man here was waiting at the lights to cross in Clarence St,  and when the fill went all over the place the quickest fix was the eraser. The young woman wobbling past me probably didnt have green hair but here green equals dishevelled in a good way.The two lovely young women sat mercifully still and stayed for a number of stops, so much easier to draw hair than faces.

Yeats - The Garden Guide to Intensity

Like learning to whistle, sooner or later, an interesting note occurs, and for me, this might be one of them . ( Though one note doesn't make a song, to paraphrase the swallow.) So,  here is Yeats, mis-cropped, with present ears and eyes and nose, but his mouth is out of frame, busy elsewhere with words on paper.

Frick Collection Derivatives - Or Going Blue in the Face

After I'd retired the Capa project, sworn off copying photos in Prussian Blue and was, in general, on the wagon as far as photo derivatives were concerned, a pamphlet from the more than excellent Frick Collection set me off. Mercifully the pamphlet was small, though Rembrandt, and the other two blue redoes, which you will find lurking at the Blue Ups -Forget Red, Forget Green it's Prussian Page look strangely younger for being translated badly.

A Tribute to the Wiggle Wriggle

As the classic underage dawdler on the narrow sandy path that led past the piles of scrap metal into the sour-wine, fermented yeasty space of his bottle-o yard, my grandfather would often encourage me to accelerate, with the phrase, 'Get a wriggle on.'

Surveying the bins of various lidded categories in my garden it occurred to me that the effect of dappled light and shade was excellent, and I took this photo as a homage-satire on that well-known Australian rock group to the under-fives, The Wiggles.
Since then the Yellow Wiggle has got a wriggle on and left, and the purple Wiggle has re-wriggled.

Where does this leave my bins?

Keirle Park - February 1st - Poles Apart

Back to Keirle Park for the tennis run, a quick walk to see what the surf and catch a gust off salty wind, then back around the lagoon. The half-pipe at the lagoon end of the park, has vanished ( proving Magritte-esque, really a case of  not being a pipe at all) and there is construction work afoot at the other end of the car park, with what looked like puzzle pieces of a new skate bowl stacked and then stowed away.  The sign on the oval said 'Grounds Closed'.

Scenes from the Quay -Splicing the Main Sail

To paraphase Samuel Johnson, a woman would be tired of life, if she was tired of the ferry ride into Circular Quay, the dark green water, chopped up by ships and tide, the Harbour Bridge's heroic coupling of north and south, yatch's tacking past, ferries idling for a berth at the Quay and then the Opera House, herringboned beauty of curves, spinnakers perpetually full blown.  The general business of it all is inspiring, trying to catch even a breath of it on paper impossible,  like sending a postcard to oneself, as a remembrance of holiday you never took. .

The Baby Blizzard Blues - Standing Outside of Parenthood - Episode 3 of In the Ponderings

Farmer Bart Brassica is mostly so completely subsumed in the process of agricultural reproduction that he gives scant consideration to the idea of asking anyone out on a date let alone the prospect of procreation and Little Brassicas. However, a stray comment by Mavis Eggwhistle came back to him when he had quite a bit of time under water to review the major events in his life after he fell out of the Frank Winkler's dinghy into the pond (See Episode 1 of  In the Ponderings  and Episode 2).

It may have been that the green algal quality of pond water that infiltrated into more than Barts' bucket and overalls but since then he has had recurrent visions of a green baby Brassica, the scale of which suggests that Bart is not entirely convinced parenthood would be a good thing for  him.