Tag Archives: Darwin Northern Territory

amazing people, Darwin, Australia, Inspirations, life

Two ladies who will travel in beauty

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Untitled

The last time I wrote about my remarkable friend Marita Albers, I didn’t include many pictures of her amazing, varicolored home because I was too shy to turn the visit into a photo opportunity (it was my first visit, I didn’t want to be intrusive!) But when Marita read my post, here, she laughed and invited me over a second time, this time inviting me to snap whatever I wished.

It would (should) have been a lighthearted and inspiring shoot of a fun and whimsical artist’s personal and creative space…had some sad news not surfaced in the meantime: in a month’s time, Marita and Ginger would be leaving Darwin.

The already-inflated prices of real estate in this small city have gone through the roof this past year, thanks to landlords anticipating big bucks from an influx of gas plant employees (and Darwin will be playing toady to a U.S. armed forces base here, too, WTF?!) The insane rates are driving Darwin’s long-term residents, and anyone who isn’t engaged in full-time moneygrubbing and avaricious acquisition—such as our artists, our greenies, our hands-on and quality-time parents with small children, our elderly and disabled, our young dreamers, our single mums, our FRIENDS, dammit!…and GOOD PEOPLE they are, too!—to other parts of the country. It has become nearly impossible for ordinary people to make ends meet and still have meaningful lives. It’s gut-wrenching to see the folks we love and care about tormented by fear for their futures, forced to give up the homes they love, to leave their friends, to uproot their children from the neighbourhoods they grew up in, all because a landlord has decided that he wants more than $2,000 a month for his ramshackle house of prefab and tin…there is a shortage of residences in Darwin, and even a concrete apartment box designed for The Sheeple will yield $500 a week, these days.

These two are so deeply beloved of Darwin’s art and family scene that for a few weeks after Marita told me the news I didn’t really believe it would happen. Leave this coconut town that’s crazy about you? Leave all of us? Surely something will come along…a solution, a godsend…someone will see that Darwin, more than ever, also needs its fabulous, vibrant, fun painters, its wacky single mums and precocious eight-year-old redheaded daughters? Surely someone with influence will decide that he is making enough money, as it is, and that losing one of our happiest Poets of Color and Childhood would deprive this town of so much more than the $$$ he stands to gain?

large painting of mother and child by Marita Albers

But nothing happened…mother and child were pushed out of their home, and I put my arms around Marita and Ginger for the last time today.

And what would have been a post full of wonderful stories about these photos from The Funhouse on Pandanus Street is just a rant, now, because I don’t feel like saying much else…

_DSC0127

Untitled
Untitled
_DSC0055
Ginger and her dolls
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled

canvases everywhere!

Untitled
Untitled

handpainted mobile in Ginger's room

Untitled

About these ads
Standard
aboard the M/V sonofagun, Darwin, Australia, life

Who is dreaming whom?

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7065/6837876224_65f1ffac9f_z.jpg

Something that has repeatedly happened to me since I was a child is this: Just moments before sighting a wild animal, I will think about that animal. I have encountered several snakes, an owl, a scorpion, crocodiles, rats, monkeys and something I still haven’t been able to identify (it was following the sailboat at night. It was as long as the sailboat…)

Examples? I  was sitting at a picnic table, writing, and the image of a scorpion entered my head. Idly, I’d bend over to scratch a mosquito bite on my leg and, glancing at the ground, would see the scorpion, a few inches from my feet. Several times I have thought of snakes, and looked up, or down at the path before my feet, to spot one right away (one of those times, it was a python, and not outdoors or anything…it was slithering over the top of the books on my desk, right in front of me!)

Today, as I was flipping through my library of photographs in iPhoto, I stopped to look at some (rather washed-out and over-exposed) shots of crocodiles that I have spotted near our houseboat. I reflected that I hadn’t seen a crocodile lurking around Sadgroves Creek in over 5 months, and thought it was about time one made its appearance. We have a reputation (“crocodile infested Darwin,” remember? It’s on my About page) to uphold! Because of the past occurrences, I even said to myself, “Bet it’s out  there, now…”

A bit later I got up to roll a cigarette, went to open a window, and there was the croc…right next to our boat, floating brazenly on the surface for everyone to see, and it was directly below my window. It was not such a tiny baby crocodile, either…this one was pretty darn big for Darwin Harbour (there are traps everywhere; the authorities try to keep the city’s harbour relatively croc-free.) At the sound of the window banging open it raised its head just a little, and I swear to God it looked me straight in the eye. Then it hunkered down in the water, made itself a little less obvious, turned around and made off past a neighbouring boat and off into the distance.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7197/6983998045_99c46af40d_z.jpg

I was left musing over whether my crocodilian thoughts had summoned this crocodile from somewhere? Had I perhaps conjured it out of thin air? Or whether my thoughts were simply a response to the crocodile’s thoughts about me? “Come to the window, lovey, I’m waiting just outside! Hey! Hi, there! Have you still got that fat orange cat?”

If these encounters with scorpions and large reptiles were real, was I the summoner, or the summoned? Or, if they were figments of an overactive imagination, were they my imaginings? Or was I theirs?

Standard
embroidery and textiles, stuff i've made

Enforced holiday stitching

embroidered patchwork

I took advantage of some enforced isolation over the holidays to do some stitching and a spot of machine sewing. Our broadband internet dongle (USB thumb drive) short-circuited a couple of days before Christmas; added to the internet deprivation was a cyclone that threatened to hit Darwin around Christmas Day (and was exhibiting many of the same movements and characteristics as Cyclone Tracy, which pretty much flattened Darwin in 1974)…

that meant strong winds, rough seas, staying home, tying everything down (the old “Batten down the hatches” routine), and getting the emergency anchors, heavy-duty chains, and everything ready, in case things got really bad.

All I remember of the Xmas week is that it was grey with rain, the boat pitched and rolled, we had no idea what the cyclone was doing because we had no access to the meteorology website, and I spent some solid time stitching and reading.*

I have begun another batch of crazy patchwork panels to use as journal covers…the bright colors and wiggly vines of chain stitched leaves were a nice way to evoke gardens in happier climes.

faux doily

Also started an embroidery of a faux ‘doily’…it would probably have been easier to crochet the thing (I learned crochet in 5th grade, but I cannot stand doing it, it bores me to tears) but I like the way I can replicate the ‘doily look’ without having to link the elements to each other or follow the usual rules. My rosettes will hang, frozen in a ‘space’ of blue fabric, untouching and untouched by the other elements of the doily, forever. Hello, Miss Havisham.
Salty's Bag

And I tried my hand at a canvas shopping bag, for the first time, ever!

Using remnants of the upholstery fabric that I used to make Salty’s curtains, enclosed seams, and adding a crazy patchworked pocket to one side, this bag is crazy-strong, and won’t fall apart after three uses, like those idiotic, so-called “environmentally friendly” made-in-China shopping bags that the Evil Supermarket Conglomerate, Woolworth’s, sells by the thousands for 99¢ apiece, and is trashing the planet with. Those things are no better than the crappy plastic bags they replaced; they take even longer to break down, and they are damn ugly, besides.

Get real, mate. The fact that the fucking thing is colored green does NOT constitute a valiant move on your part to help the environment. Selling millions of cheap, rubbishy bags, and then patting yourself on the back for making a donation from the proceeds, to a charity, is corporate wankery.

Anyway, I’m giving this shopping bag to Salty, to thank him for his patience and his generosity. It took me forever to finish his curtains; so much time, in fact, that I didn’t feel right asking him for any money for the job. I felt like I was ripping him off. But he paid me, anyway, and he wasn’t tight about it, either. What can I say? He’s a first-rate guy.

A pattern for the shopping bag is coming up, as soon as I do the diagrams. Because it was a slight pain in the arse to figure this bag out, from scratch and total inexperience, I may as well pass on what I managed to learn. I don’t claim product perfection, just another pattern for yet another shopping bag.

I actually own some bag and tote patterns that I purchased off the internet, but upon looking more closely at them I decided there were some specific features I wanted in a bag, that the “quick-and-easy” kinds of patterns had avoided:

I wanted a bag where the only seams were in the natural corners of the box…no seams running down the centers of the bottom or side panels, and which become weak spots in shopping bags. Also, I wanted the front, bottom and back of the bag to be made from a single, continuous piece of fabric, so that the weight of the grocery load is distributed between the reinforced hem around the bag’s opening, and the handles…not on some seam that connects the bottom to the front and back.

So that’s what I did over Christmas…a time of the year made special only by the threat of a killer cyclone, and the fact that the pub was closed. :D

*Julian Barnes‘ The Sense of An Ending, and Haruki Murakami‘s 1Q84

Related articles
Standard
Darwin, Australia, life

More than meets the eye…

mushroom cat goes camp

Och, my god, I LOVE this belt! A friend gave it to me while I was in Manila last March, but I was traveling light and so packed it into one of the boxes that Kris was going to load up and bring back to Darwin via sailboat.

Kris finally got back from his 4-and-a-half months trip on the 13th of this month. There was the big job of moving all the stuff from Kehaar onto our bigger houseboat, SonOfAGun: Three thousand books, for starters (a thousand copies, each, of the three books Kris has written and self-published), followed by 11 blocks of pristine, acid-free, creamy paper for my bookbinding, 40 square feet of calf nubuck from Pakistan, leather punches, stacks of book board, gallons of glue, boxes of embroidery thread and an assortmemnt of other tools and craft supplies. Finally, near the bottom of the mountain of stuff, a small box of presents from friends, from my mom, and a few personal belongings that I  had left behind in my parents home all these years.

Among them, this kick-ass belt from Peach. A great big clunking Transformers belt buckle, the central panel of which is a Zippo-style lighter. Everyone needs a bit of camp in their lives…I love it, it’s such a trippy thing!

Can’t wait for the next Barry Brown and The Getdown funktion…

clickity-click...

Related articles
Standard
embroidery and textiles

A dozen paintings and a playlist

Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Here are the twelve paintings I did for my show, together in one post, at long last (a week later!)

No pictures of the show itself, or the guests, because there was no photographer present. There’s no way that I could have done it, I was so busy just trying to have a word with everyone present that I unintentionally neglected my own friends (who were good enough to come and entertain themselves, and then leave without making a fuss.) David went home to his blog and wrote a post about the show on the very same night! Which puts me to shame, as I didn’t manage to do that, myself. I must say, there certainly was a good turnout, thanks to the big group show (16 artists) that opened simultaneously in the large gallery next to my ‘intimate’ little room.

Six days later, and I am deep into other things already…

(WordPress introduced their photo gallery feature just in time! Click on a thumbnail to view the whole gallery in a scrolling format)

Looking back on the paintings themselves with a calm and detached eye, I can honestly say that the process was more rewarding than the finished product. And that’s exactly as it should be, because I have never done anything like try to paint several works for a show before, and could not expect to make ‘amazing’ work just like that. Painting these, I was acutely aware of my ignorance—not just of the technical skills necessary to manipulate paint or treat a figure—but also my ignorance of what it is about painting that makes it come alive, what is that elusive kernel that drove (and still drives painters) to pursue this craft all their lives?

Like any art, you start out and it’s all about you, and all about pretty, and all about being liked, and all about trying to make things look realistic…the slavish reproduction of objects and faces around you; that’s fine, but it’s called ‘early work’ and is only valuable in a poignant way. It’s not seriously any good, but you have to go through that shit and come out the other end, and then maybe you will make something good.

I’ve recently read Annie Dillard‘s The Writing Life, and many of the things she says about a writer’s life are true about any artist’s life. Things can be split into two piles: The Good and The Bad. It is essential to a writer who wants to rise to a level of serious mastery and worth, to be able to tell one from the other. There are no greys, even though there might be small parts of really good writing in a sea of bad writing. Dillard relates a story about a photographer who worshiped the work of a certain master, and wanted to learn how to take photographs the way this master did. Every year, he took a selection of his best work to the senior photographer, and asked him to go through it. Every year, the old man divided the work into two piles: good and bad. There was a particular photograph, a landscape, that the master put into the bad pile. The next year, the same photograph appeared again; again he put it in the bad pile. This went on for a few years. Finally the master asked the young photographer, “Every year you bring this photograph, and every year I put it in the bad pile. Yet you keep bringing it back. Why do you like it so much?” To which the young man stammered, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.” Again, from Annie Dillard’s book:

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent? Is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer, personally?

The moral? Your finished work must stand alone in the world. You will not always be around to hold its hand and tell the touching story of how you made it. The process is important to you, yes, because you learn from process…but the process doesn’t matter in the least to the finished work, or to the other people who will view or experience your work. Sever the umbilical cord to your work. You may be an emotional and loving person, and may be emotionally and lovingly attached to your own life (well, I hope you are, anyway) but don’t burden your work with that. It doesn’t cross over well. Your work is either good, or bad, and if it’s bad (i.e. mediocre, self-centered, naive, empty, shallow, banal), banish it from your life (not without gratitude and a certain amount of introspection, certainly you needn’t hate it…but be firm) and go out there and do it again, and again, and again, until you get it right. Until it unmistakably, unquestionably belongs in the Good pile.

Friends have protested when I told them this. They think my work is “wonderful” (whatever that means). Okay, fine, but that doesn’t tell me anything about the work, though it tells me a lot about my friends. Do they reserve a special criterion for works by friends like me—because they want to encourage and cheer me up—as opposed to the critical appreciation they show works by Dali or Drysdale? How can someone who likes Matisse or thinks Goya is “wonderful” then turn to me and tell me they think my work is “wonderful” as well? I mean, you’re really a lovely person, but be serious, will you?

Your friendship and well-meant sentiments are cherished, but your art criticism is not. You do not care whether I fail or succeed…you will probably love me, anyway. But that doesn’t help me. Honesty helps me. It will help me to get better…or even help me to finally see that I may never be anything but a so-so painter. So that I can then decide whether to spend more years (and the years are flying by, the funnel narrows, the opportunities to do something else, and get any good at it, are dwindling) trying to get something right, or acknowledge that my paintings will never be any good and that the years might be better spent doing something else.

No, I’m not giving up just yet…stupid to stop after one’s just begun! There are bits in these paintings that have something…very small areas, here and there, something honest and raw and true. Even I see them. But that is not enough…the price tag is bigger than the gift, right now. This whole show is just that…a visual representation of what the effort cost me. I had to climb a mountain to get it. When the show ends, I won’t keep the ones that didn’t sell, to rot in the bilges of a boat, to live on singing mediocre hosannas to the novice painter that created them. I will, most likely, paint some over, and cut others up for book covers, and erase my tracks, and not look back. The only way I can possible move is forward.

The show came with a playlist on cd, because music played such an important role while I was painting. I wish I could include some sort of player on here, but my blog is limited, and I am in a hurry to post this, before even the strong emotions about the show’s aftermath fade away and I don’t feel anything but weary of the paintings:

  • Profile of The Artist:                     Do You Swear To Tell The Truth The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass     •     Amanda Palmer
  • They were an Irish bunch…         Anti-Pioneer  •     Feist     •     Metals

Dirty Old Town     •     The Pogues     •     Rum Sodomy & The Lash

  • Reading Monsoon Dervish         The Pirate’s Bride     •     Sting     •     Symphonicities
  • Lady Kitsune                                  Foxy Lady     •     The Cure     •     Three Imaginary Boys (Deluxe Edition)
  • Smoke Reality                                Smoke Reality     •     The Naysayer     •     Smoke Reality
  • Birdhouse In Your Soul              Birdhouse In Your Soul     •     They Might Be Giants     •    
  • The Sulking Chair                        The Perfect Girl     •     The Cure     •     Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
  • Crying Like A Cat                         Edna St. Vincent Millay     •     Beth Lodge-Rigal     •     Children On a Ride
  • Debussy                                           The Holy Egoism of Genius      •     Art of Noise     •     The Seduction of Claude Debussy
  • Senbazuru                                       Princess Mononoke     •     Marco and his friends     •     World of Miyazaki Hayao (Koto and Shakuhachi Duo)

Because the Origami     •     8in8     •     The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective

  • Pyromanicat                                   Stray Cat Blues      •     The Rolling Stones     •     Beggars Banquet
  • Mitzi                                                 Ragtime Cat      •     Parov Stelar     •     Coco, Pt. 2
  • Ton Katze                                        Morph the Cat     •     Donald Fagen     •     Morph the Cat
  • Afterword                                       Chromolume #7 / Putting It Together     •     Stephen Sondheim     •     Sunday In The Park With George
Standard
embroidery and textiles

At The Show

Didn’t see any cowboys, but then I was too busy giving bookbinding demonstrations in the craft pavilion. Kris and I did a quick walk around the show before my demo started…we had 20 minutes, so I mostly shot on the trot…

This is all probably very commonplace stuff for people who have been to a Royal Show (or a Country Fair), but it was my first Show, and I loved the color and busy-ness and kiddie-ness of it all…totally appealed to my inner child. I just wish I’d gone on a ride, but there was no time. There’s always next year!

P.S. There are a few more pics in my Flickr photoset for the Royal Darwin Show.

Related articles
Standard
embroidery and textiles

Sunday at The Happy Yess market

Happy Yess Craft Market

On June 3rd I had a stall of my handbound journals at the Happy Yess Market. It’s an intimate, relaxed monthly event that brings Darwin’s crafty, creative, and thrifty community members together to stroll around on the lawn (or lie on a patchwork of blankets and pillows under the shade trees).

Happy Yess Craft Market

There were kids and crazy costumes…

Happy Yess Craft Market

Happy Yess Craft Market

…pet dogs wiggling on the grass, vintage clocks, home baked goodies, tea in porcelain teapots and plunger-pots full of coffee, hand-printed fabrics and original paintings…
Kate's paintings

…chunky alien-life-form bangles, oodles of pre-loved books

Happy Yess Craft Market

You might catch up with friends, pick up a handmade treasure, or score an amazing vintage dress…

Happy Yess Craft Market
hunting for treasure

The “Market Moles,” Bry and Frances, organize the event, and invite you to bring along

…your crafty treasure, your art, your cakes and food,  your fancy (booze free) drinks, your ability to play live music, your homemade anything, your old junk, books, shoes, stuff, your cheap haircutting skills, your clothes swap corner, your bike repair skills, your dancing shoes, your face painting brushes…get creative. no stall is too small or too silly…

I spent more time wandering around looking at other people’s stuff, running into scores of folks I knew (as well as meeting lovely new people), and snapping the many ‘pockets’ of color, detail, and people coming together.

Happy Yess Craft Market

Happy Yess Craft Market

Next market day is in July…find out more from the Happy Yess facebook page.

Standard