Nourish Me

dessin

Mid-way through this blog's now 9-and-a-half-year existence we lived in a beautiful, rambling house in Elsternwick. On Saturday mornings, Peter and Anselm had a life drawing session thing going on in the loungeroom. Afterward, we would talk, nothing being off limits as artists like conversation to be, but Art was the reason for it all. I loved those lunches. I felt a part of something smart, occasionally funny and always deeply creative. Anselm spoke a lot about the French word dessin, a word that means both design and drawing, concepts the English language separates as though the two are not inextricably linked. It's an idea I've filed in a small space my brain reserves for the kind of wisdom you know that, one day, you'll want to draw on.  

There's a book called Drawing Projects that's been a constant companion in recent months. Reading an interview in the book about the process of artist Kate Atkin, a woman who was put on report at college because no-one could see what she saw in the photographs she presented one semester, I had a moment of resounding clarity. On a whim, she drew from a photograph one day:

In making the drawing the most incredible thing happened, like an epiphany. I literally felt drawn to this kind of  magic, and discovered how to express myself., it was incredible. I could barely talk about it without welling up. I still feel a bit like that, I get strangely weepy about it if people get me going, it's like a tap into all my most excited feelings.  

Well. That's exactly how I feel right now. I well up when I try to explain how happy dessin and my burgeoning understanding of it, and of the maturity making pictures again has delivered into this little life. 

 

lost

 

This little one was lost for a large part of this weekend. Foxes have been stealing local chickens and a mob of roos has been hanging around our hill at nights. When Bruce and Holly next door met a roo in 2014, the marsupial fared way better than the staffys; Holly's missing eye had me, I must admit, worried at 2 am. I cried to myself this morning. Rather a lot, I'm embarrassed to say.

But here's the good bit: I've never really been one to espouse "community", by which I mean the vague, touchy-feely version I hear all too often, and yet, today, we met some people - lovely, helpful, amazing people - in our neighbourhood who genuinely cared. Nothing like a lost dog to unite, eh? Peter talked to neighbours, we dropped off leaflets, walked and walked and called and called and, in the end, she was brought back to us by a woman I hugged twice, and maybe a bit too tightly. 

Get active, stay calm and ask people for help. That, right there, is the opposite of lost. 

Puss licked Poppy's ear as they lay together on the doormat in the sun on her return. We all missed her.

 

isolated

We talked about isolation this long weekend. Peter thinks it's good, sees it as a strength rather than the weakness The Secret Language of Birthdays would have me believe the stars bestowed upon this little Leo. Me? Not so sure. I spent my 20's miserably isolated, exhausted from long days in bookshops and too slow at making plans for weekends to be socially connected. I saw it then as a weakness, one I couldn't claw my way up from. These days I find isolation absolutely necessary for clear creative thinking, and I also have a much richer social life, not full, but balanced, I would say, with the kind of good people I wanted so much twenty years ago. Isn't life interesting?

A few days on my own this week, alone (of human company) in the lush cool of my high-up-on-a-hill garden, an unexpected holiday offered by my boss in December. Frankly, it will do me the world of good right now to spend a few days alone. A friend and I spoke last year about how important it is to get away - from one's spouse, one's friends, the distractions we throw in our paths - and get things done. There are undoubtedly benefits to isolation, but here's what I decided in the car coming back to town this afternoon: I prefer the word solitude. It sits more comfortably, more creatively, and the ability to gain wonder from solitude, that's a true strength.  

 

you know, went there

An odd thing happened last year, a thing held close to my chest for fear it wasn't quite real: a new friend inspired me to pick up a brush and just get on with the business of seeing once again. Always knew someday it'd return, longed for it if I am honest, and 2014 was a year full of lessons and troubles and deep creative conversations. Had I been warned early on, I would most definitely have ducked some of those, an old, old strategy I've long outgrown, but I faced stuff, explored things I'd ordinarily be afraid of. You know, went there. And yet here I stand, alive and well in 2015, with an engagement ring of sorts on my left hand, a slew of wisdom gained from a series of vexing sleep problems (some actual sleep, finally, as well) and an appreciation of the true value that werking offers. Happy. Disciplined. Relaxed. Those are my resolves for 2015. You?  

 

slightly worse

Matt came by on Saturday morning, pulled up in his hulking truck to show us how to properly use a chainsaw. He's one of those people it's hard not to really like and as he was trying to avoid going car shopping (groan), we ended up chatting at length. Being both an arborist and a CFA volunteer, he had some interesting, nay terrifying, things to say about how trees are falling over as they halve their root systems due to drought and (the CFA bit) about the run up to fire season. An old bloke he knows who keeps reams of weather records told him that conditions, this year, are slightly worse than they were back in '82. Yep, that'd be Ash Wednesday, people.  

So, this is a little ritualistic sort of reminder to myself, and maybe you, to give thanks to the CFA for the skilled work they do.     

feral

11am. Changing trains at Richmond, heading down the tunnel that links platforms underground – built on a visually distracting angle, tiles an unnaturally lit shade of blue – I think about how out of place I feel in the urban world most days. Am reading Feral: Rewilding The Land, Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot. It seeps into my thinking and it is extraordinary. This mind feels very, very open. 

The past 18 months have taught me much. Old connections have been reforged through werk, all the better for my absence, to be sure. I needed to go away and grow up. Genuine new friendships as an adult are hard to come by, but I have been offered 2 in the past 6 months. The first a fellow cook, a beautiful and very female soul, the other a fledgling connection, an artist described by a critic in a catalogue of a recent-ish solo show of his as a poet of nature. A poet of nature. My heart feels full.   

The city's not so bad afterall, but I still long, most days, for the feral, for the wild places of my childhood. 

 

8th of july

Two birthdays ago, Peter presented me with a sewing machine. The way it made me feel was wonderful; a mixture of excitement (at last, a sewing machine!), surprise (wow! a SEWing machine!) and the tiniest knot of dread (what if I turn out to be truly as bad at sewing as I was told I was in year 8 at school?). For as long as I've been blogging I've admired, from afar, Jude's Spirit Cloth, loved Shula's way of speaking about cloth and thread in the same way that I did about food. Without a proper space in which to stretch out, it would be some time before this beautiful, shiny beast got a proper workout, but a few attempts at fixing things up proved I'd retained enough knowledge to get by. This year, I've gone nuts for it. Even the ironing part. 

Twenty years ago I found myself freshly graduated from art school, living back with my family (never a good idea, no matter how much we love them) and was spending a year, unemployed, trying to work out how to make Art. I'd become lost along the way, somehow, found myself hating every artistic attempt made. Most days, I felt physically sick with worry about the fact that I just couldn't bring myself to draw. I had this friend at the time - let's just call her A - whose drawing skills were extraordinary. I mean, mind-blowing extraordinary. Like no-one else alive. She was astoundingly talented. I'd managed to get all the way through my education up until the point of university thinking my skills were pretty good (they were) but A's were on another plane entirely. I still have the tarot cards she made me all these years later and, still, flicking through them, I wish I had her skill set. 

A was full of all sorts of classic comments and jokes I find pop into my mind from time to time. We had a lot of fun for a while. The Hitler Youth flag that hung above her bed (her father's) disturbed me each time I passed it going to the loo NO END, but for the most part, she was funny and wise. Once, when asked why she made art, she responded thus; "Making art is like taking a dump. I have to do it lest I get backed up." 

Classy though that sounds (and my older, wiser, kinder self now thinks of it as a rehearsed, deliberately-provocative answer, the sort of comment young artists like to throw around) it remains the most accurate reason to be creative. People give all sorts of wishy-washy answers to that question, but in the end (pardon the pun) it's about the act of creative expression. One is either wired this way or one is not. I am, but it's taken a bloody aeon to get it stuck solidily in this brain 'o mine. Expressing myself creatively, or more importantly, denying myself the relief it can offer, has exhausted me for years. YEARS! What the hell have I been thinking?  

What I didn't realise until (embarrassingly) recently is that the act of expressing myself need not take the form I believed it should when I set out upon The Rest of My Life as a young adult, indeed, change, some new shape, some other forms in which to flourish would be helpful. 

Sewing is teaching me is to be patient. To practise mindfulness. To be accurate. To go back and Do It Again if it's wrong. To enjoy the the process, no matter how repetitive, of every single stitch. Any tendency toward slapdashery is impossible. What it's really doing though is freeing up my left shoulder, a problem I've had for about two years now, making my right brain happy again through the act of creative expression.       

  

old

Blissfully rainy. Spending the day attending to the washing and drying.

Thinking of the grief a friend is experiencing. She feels a very long way away.

Nostalgic (normally I am not) about the house we lived in four years ago, one I think of as the rain and sky place. Old photos, these; things not shared here before. 

 

april the first

Two older men - the word elderly confers a status neither deserves - in as many weeks have expressed appalling, bigoted attitudes toward powerful women while browsing in the shop, in conversation you see, and both times I have pulled them up and told them - calmly - that I will not tolerate those ideas. The first subsequently stole the book he was so proud of being a hateful part of, the other, just yesterday, backed right down and spent a good sum of money. Sensed he'd gone too far. The real shame, of course, is that neither of these men are likely to change their thinking any time soon. I tell the story to illustrate this simple point: the less we tolerate ideas so abhorent to our own, the more we open our hearts. Twenty years ago I'd've been too scared to say anything in response. These days? No fear. 

The equinox now behind us, my gaze shifts internally with the season. This new moon - the beginning of the astrological calender - has me thinking hard about some of the things unlocked of late. Truth be told, my gaze has been inward for some time; I will be 43 fairly soon and time feels precious in a way that it has not before. In dreams I search for keys to unlock some long held stuff, stuff that, annoyingly, is just as elusive in waking hours, but that's not stopping me. I'll get to the bottom of my creative-spiritual-sleeping isss-ewes when the time is right.

Sounds a bit heavy, but honestly, it's just the normal internal dialogue written out loud.

 

We've been renovating on the hill. That's contributing to bad sleep, I am sure, as well as a lack of rhythm. I had an hilarious conversation with another male customer, one who is delightful and au fait with the female of the species, who makes his living as an artist. Chatting at the back counter about Goya and other important things, I told him at one stage that I am embarrassed to be having middle class conversations about renovating. John kindly reminded me it's my sacred space up there, where creative work gets done and that it should be made into a bigger space - however modestly one is doing so. Letting Go is turning out to be the theme for this year. 

 

 

Wish I had some food to share, but apart from vats of hummus (beetroot hummus is the current fave) and 101 ways with zucchini and tomatoes, we're eating super simple food. Here's something interesting, though. I used to be addicted to potato chips (what the Brits call 'crisps') but of late, no longer desire them. At all. I do not know what happened, but I'll take it.      

 

A HUGE thank you to all involved in the International Court's decision on whaling. Made me cry with joy this morning. Hooray!  

 

holga stuff

Clearly my smartphone has got the better of me. Many, many, weeks later I've still got no bloody idea how to download instagram. Hopeless? A-hem. But, thinking about instagram this afternoon got me thinking about squares and what a nice format they are for photographs. Much of instagram's charm, I'm sure, is the square orientation of images. The Holga makes dreamy squares.