Colours like Compounded Evening Dust

It is not as if this swathe of  flowers, or might that collective be a swoon of roses, glimpsed through a doorway, is not enough in itself to give one pause, but there is something else here-  the grainy light, the sense of dusk and shadows merging, the setting sun’s surge of colour that this early morning tableau paradoxically evokes, but more potently, in considering this scene, it is that the temporality of lovely things that cannot last is not in any way mournful,  but that  not to notice, not to to look closely, would be.  
 

Bart Brassica’s Dualistic Identity Crisis In Mint Conditions

Taking the lazy-fair option and planting mint last summer,  Bart Brassica’s crop went way past  the Julep line into something of a jungle, or as Bart has it a Jungian crisis, the mint is now so far  above Bart’s head that his disorientation - and his sense of direction has never been good, using only North and South as cardinal points as he considers  East and West to be too political,  is such that here we see he is in two and half minds as to both where and who he is.  Granny. Eggwhistle, ever watchful, believes Bart who returned from his disappearance in mysteriously mint condition is having an double-indemnity crisis. 

Brassica Browsing or Alpine Art Raked Over

 Bart Brassica has been going through back issues of Artforum, or more precisely, the back pages where for years the Swiss gallerist Bruno Bischofberger has been running ads featuring Alpine volk at work and play. No stranger to manure management himself, he’s impressed with Frank Winkler’s recent Bovung muck raking and wonders whether Winkler might have taken up Biodynamic farming. Either that or the greener pastures of contemporary art.

Post & Photo Courtesy of Our Lambertville Correspondent , Ms I Periz. 

The Shelf-LIfe of Poets in Prussian Blue

 For quite some time I’ve been taking classic photos of classic writers, and making a study of them in Prussian Blue, and in my recent revivification of my studio walls, set some of these up on the book shelves, so instead of me reading them, they survey me, and in doing so, catch something of the outside world, as is a poem also want to do. 

On Boughs Too Light- Celebrating Capability in Small Spaces

 There is a short poem, by Victor Hugo, sung as a round,  ‘Be like the bird pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and sings, knowing she has wings.’, which is what I imagine this bird, so elegantly alight here, might do, or just as well, I might imagine her doing, which seems quite consistent with Hugo’s maxim. 

Bart Brassica’s Virtual Visit to Chateau de Muzat

While Farmer Bart Brassica, always curiously inconsistent, eschews literature per se, he says he is an ardent admirer of Rainer Rilke and the Duino Elegies, though he has not got as far as actually reading the Elegies, but has proffered this photo to Mavis Eggwhistle as evidence that his mysterious absence was due to waiting outside Chatueau de Muzat, where Rilke finished the Elegies, to see if the location would afford him a similiar ‘boundless storm and hurricane of spirit..”.   Mavis is skeptical, and has asked Bart to explain why the Chateau and surrounds are black and white. Bart’s excuse that  he is colour blind and therefore this can’t be true, leaves Mavis vexed but as Bart has googled this and found it to be true she has given up. 

Blue Brow, High Brow and Quilted Moustache

 Like a smile stitched in string on a hessian bag, there is a flocullant boil to this Prussian and cobalt mix of drops dragged and salted, puddled  and feathered into something more blue brow than high brow, more cumulously dreamy than cloudy. Why, like narrative, do faces  insinuate themselves into abstract fields? Long may the quilted moustache reign. 

Marvelling : Reduction of all that’s made to a Green Ball in a Green Glade

Dining in House- Alyurr - the Mardi Gras Grasshopper

 A photo of this picky eater, Petasida ephippigera, or Alyurr of Arnhemland, who eats and lives on one plant Pityrodia, arrived from a friend , who knew how charmed I would be with this grasshopper. To properly consider its form I drew it in ink, adding water colour and pencil but the colours are drabber than the real thing. Long may the Alyurr grasshopper dine and hop. 

A Guide to Freestyle or Things to Do in Spring

These are days of a five kilometre radius but this collage of silver fish, helichrysium setting out to bloom, moths, larks and guide to freestyle all fall within my parameters of possibilities. The Mini? Wheels within wheels. 
 

Such a Ring of Spring -A Winkler in Bovine Time

 Frank Winkler has odd times been accused of Muck Raking but categorically denies this saying a Hoe is No Rake, and declares he is an example par excellence of the Hoe’s Progress. Notwithstanding, in his latest pursuit he is in fact up to his knees in Bovung, is a dung that rings a bell in his upstairs department.  Frank believes Bovung to be the source of Botox, and if only he can get can to the bottom of the supply chain, there will be no bags under his eyes. Is he being led by the nose by an undisclosed party who has cultivated this notion?  Is  it sensible to de-wrinkle a Winkler? 

Sand-Glasses and Glacial Paste-Ups

The patent lack of travel of this last and present year, or what might be a single year that for a moment pretended to be two, mean that for new vistas, and strange perspectives of mountain passes and glacial moraines, need to be a DIY job. Voila, here I’ve made a stay-cation in the Mountains with a side of sands of time glasses. Somewhere in here there is poem lurking. 
 

Flying Saucerer - Farmhand Fables

While Bart Brassica is basically in the Sloth of Despondency, as Granny Eggwhistle has it, Frank Winkler has had Carter’s Blanch, and has taken up spruiking that he has mastered the Flying Saucer, otherwise known as the Cymling Squash, once cultivated by none other than Thomas Jefferson, a detail Frank Winkler adds to create an aura of veracity.  Mavis says Winkler has confounded levity with levitation, and Gesticulation will get him nowhere.  It must said the squash in question is as beautiful as a cloud. 
 

Postcard Landscapes’ Serendipitous Continuities

 

September has arrived in Sydney with a waft of jasmine and blue skies, I’ve  been making postcards to send out to my Loved Ones -though that evokes Evelyn Waugh’s excellent novel so the  expression is inevitably ironic.  Watercolour postcards are not in any way sensible - being prone to leaky letter boxes and rain-damp transfers but what is not ephemera?  That these two make something like a discontinuous pair, like odd socks at the back of the drawer suits the subject. 

Hill of Enzymatic Content and Parboiled Days

 Parboiled days are upon us in Lambertville, and Bart Brassica is indoors moping melancholically with Mr Elli Fun - or Elli NoFun as Mavis Eggwhistle has christened him,  and so the farm work is in a state of disarray, the beans having been picked so late they are partially cooked. The stalwart Mr Farmhand has hoed to, and having made what Granny Egg calls a Bean-Line, to salvage a mass of giant Borlotti Beans.  Mr Farmhand has been shovelling so long that the grass has grown up around his bean pile, and while he periodically shouts - Borlotti, Borlotti,  hoping to get Bart Brassica to do something, Bart has only mumbled to Mr Elli Fun, that he never buys a lot of anything, regarding the shouts as a tinker’s cusses, if that can be rightly pluralised.

Mavis Eggwhistle, mindful of an outbreak of ground gas,  has stayed put in Whistle Stoppe Florist.  

Morning light, a Vase ; Zurg looks on in wonder

Why is the play of morning light so often surprising?  A vintage vase from Lifeline, getting on in years, here shows its spheric form more particularly, the differential softened two-tone shadow, the double dose of different whites, an offset of branches from trees acting like landscape, and then Zurg, the by-stander, standing by. 

Prevailing Sands; An Escher-esque problem of ups and downs.

When the wind blows from the north east, you get an elevated start on north side of these double sided stairs, but by the law of payback, what silica can do for you, it can subtract later. Still there is a pleasing hidden symmetry and what the wind blows in will blow away.
 

Manifestly Doing the Job

 It is hard of late to get things done correctly and for them to stay done, but here this Cabinet is so Manifestly Manifested itself as to be a paragon of  Purpose and Resolve.  The letter box to the right may be for the Cabinet’s fan mail, and is, I suspect, the only Cabinet in Australia that is manifestly fulfilling its role. 

Bart Brassica and the Treacle Down Effect

For days, nay, over a week now Bart has been trying to speak to this Elefunt, Bart believes the Elefunt exists in a different time scale and due to viscose nature of time, it going so very slowly in Lockdown then suddenly being gone, which Bart calls The Treacle Down Effect, he thinks that it is only the very slow, glacially paced speech of the Elefunt that makes communication with him impractical and by dint of  patient listening Bart will overcome this. That Bart’s hearing is what  Mavis Eggwhistle calls Impartial, which he takes as a compliment is not irrelevant in this pursuit. 
 

The Sorrows of Farming and the Cultivation of Melancholy

 Farmer Bart Brassica has been keeping a vigil with this antique elephant, who, sorrowfully has not spoken to anyone since he lost his companion elephants- they were a chess team,  sometime in the 18th century.  Some of the elephant’s doleful disregard of anyone else in the room, or the farm for that matter , is famous, and Bart feels melancholy might be cultivated and sold in small doses - though as Mavis Eggwhistle wisely notes, it is an acquired taste. 

Voila! Two views with of winter light with vases, violets and violas

Should small ensembles of objects, here two make-shift vases, and one antique silver topped canister for hairpins, impractically  repurposed for cotton buds, always be in threes? The flowers in winter light seem to have greater depth of colour, but will be gone, like their predecessors in three days no doubt.

Dapper Defined : Lavender Bay’s Best Dressed Chap

 On the pleasant stroll around Lavender Bay, once you pass Luna Park’s out loud graphics, there are small sculptures of the magic pudding kind, and last Sunday I caught this fine fellow, tres chic in his plumed scarf, blithely disregarding a fan’s floral homage.  Keep your eyes out, there  are witty dressers about! 

People with Glass Horses - Bart Brassica latest Purchase

Though Bart Brassica came back from his mysterious disappearance with one more eye than he left with, Mavis  Eggwhistle has recently commented that on the memory front, something is missing as  Bart’s recall of events is limited to those parts of his life depicted in ‘Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand  Series’,  and while life in Lambertville does not rush past at a thrilling pace, continuity being what it is, it would be very strange if Bart’s entire life was limited to the Select  Episodes and these notes.  In his defence, he claims everyone forgets and Mavis, has forgotten his birthday twice in the past year,  Mavis has said, acerbically that Bart has never remembered hers, and that ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’.

As Bart Brassica’s hearing is a little inflexible, he thought Mavis said, people on glass horses. So to prove her wrong about the stones, he has bought a beautiful glass horse, but so far he has found only that one can lead a glass horse to pasture but your can’t make it canter.

 

A Case of Red Eyes Over Expressed or Eye-Contact

 Farmer Bart Brassica had claimed that during his years in the wasteland, from which he mysteriously returned with a new left eye  was not in any way a hoax or a case of stolen eye-dentity but due to his rigorous work in eye implants. To this end he claims this box of red eyes are a derivative cultured crop from his new left eye, which he hopes to wholesale to a security company in what will be a kind of eye-cam, or if they become famous, eye-con. 

Wood Ear Fungus Picnic Spot

 This mini forest-in-retrograde casual placement on the park bench, gloriously and truly decadent, shows with aplomb how hard working fungi and lichens get on with recycling.  Tree flotsam at its best. 

Rocket Science: A wrenching moment for Bart Brassica.

 Of late Bart has taken up ‘forest bathing’ in his Arugula crop, but has a feeling someone is watching. That the arugula, rocket in plain parlance, is as high as corn in July, might have something to do with some growth product which he has enlisted Mr Farmhand to apply, and yes, that is Mr Farmhand in the silver suit.   Bart thinks he can hear Mr Farmhand singing ‘ how sweet the sound that saved a wrench like mine’ - the kind of mondegreen which well be a pigmentation of Bart's imagination. 

PS What has happened to Bart’s Big Foot? That will perspire in a later episode. 

 

Bart Puts his Big Foot Forward

 With time being what is has been a viscous treacle of days, and a dizzy vortex of weeks, Bart Brassica has  decided to put his Foot down, but being reluctant to get too involved in the Mill of Time he has stepped out in his Mail Order Pro-Aesthetic WaterProof Foot.  While this appears to be the Right foot, thus partially correcting what Mavis Eggwhistle observes to be his having two left feet,  it is hard to see how Bart will go in the Dance to the Music of Time event coming up in Lambertville.