Show Me The Treasure

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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